Inspiration can come from the oddest places
As some of you know, I used to paint and draw a lot, and with fairly good results (some of which can be seen here). I pretty much stopped when I left highschool. I'd been following courses there with some regularity, and after I graduated, I simply didn't get around to it anymore. I occasionally thought I should start again, make an attempt or two, get frustrated because I'd gotten rusty and didn't get things right easily enough, and give up again.
A while ago I dropped by at my old highschool, and one of the teachers there asked whether I still painted. I told him not really, and he told me it's a shame, and I should pick it up again. I fully agreed, but didn't do anything about it.
Now the new bf is an avid Magic: the Gathering player, and owns all the related novels. He knows I'm a fantasy fan, and brought me some of them to read ("You don't *have* to, of course! But if you want to, you can! Don't HAVE to though!"). I'm running out of things to read anyways, so I picked the first of them up, and started reading. It is, in fact, better than I'd expected. Not brilliant, but quite readable, and I suspect that if I were any good at the kind of thing, I would even find meaningful symbolism and such.
Somewhere halfway through, there's a panther, whose body gets taken over by another being. Somewhat nasty scene, since it first involves killing said panther in a somewhat painful manner. Somehow I got images of a stylistic drawing of a panther, and just HAD to get up and draw it. The stylistic thing wasn't working though, and I soon decided to go for something more realistic - which has always been more my style. So I googled for images. My first google was "walking lion" which didn't quite get me what I wanted. "walking panther", however, got me an image of what I think is a mountain lion that I thought would work. A good half hour later, I've got a drawing of a mountain lion, that isn't quite the one on the picture, since I made some minor adaptations in the pose, and started drawing from a seperate mental image after some time. It's not perfectly realistic. It is, however, pretty much at the same level I used to work on.
I keep staring at the drawing going "where in the worlds did THAT come from?" and wishing I had paper for water painting, since I could probably make an even better *painting* of this.
A while ago I dropped by at my old highschool, and one of the teachers there asked whether I still painted. I told him not really, and he told me it's a shame, and I should pick it up again. I fully agreed, but didn't do anything about it.
Now the new bf is an avid Magic: the Gathering player, and owns all the related novels. He knows I'm a fantasy fan, and brought me some of them to read ("You don't *have* to, of course! But if you want to, you can! Don't HAVE to though!"). I'm running out of things to read anyways, so I picked the first of them up, and started reading. It is, in fact, better than I'd expected. Not brilliant, but quite readable, and I suspect that if I were any good at the kind of thing, I would even find meaningful symbolism and such.
Somewhere halfway through, there's a panther, whose body gets taken over by another being. Somewhat nasty scene, since it first involves killing said panther in a somewhat painful manner. Somehow I got images of a stylistic drawing of a panther, and just HAD to get up and draw it. The stylistic thing wasn't working though, and I soon decided to go for something more realistic - which has always been more my style. So I googled for images. My first google was "walking lion" which didn't quite get me what I wanted. "walking panther", however, got me an image of what I think is a mountain lion that I thought would work. A good half hour later, I've got a drawing of a mountain lion, that isn't quite the one on the picture, since I made some minor adaptations in the pose, and started drawing from a seperate mental image after some time. It's not perfectly realistic. It is, however, pretty much at the same level I used to work on.
I keep staring at the drawing going "where in the worlds did THAT come from?" and wishing I had paper for water painting, since I could probably make an even better *painting* of this.