Eat your feelings… or some dryer lint. Drawing Challenge, Part II.

This week’s blog post is about the completion of a 30 day drawing challenge that I started last month.  If you missed the first post “That’s not my husband. Drawing Challenge, Part 1”, you’ll want to go back and catch up (or not, depending on your tolerance for really bad art).

I know you can’t handle the suspense much longer so let’s get right into it:

Day16, Scenery– I decided to draw something in New Hampshire (don’t worry it’s not the nudist colony or zombie santa… though he is looking more festive this holiday season) so I drew an ocean scene.  My husband, who really rather enjoys the ocean, was very supportive of the idea… and only told me 10 minutes into my drawing when I was complaining about not being able to get the perspective right that “Waves are REALLY hard to draw”.

Day17, Something Orange– When you meet some people they like to ask you- what you do for a living, where you live, do you have kids, etc.  I like to ask people ‘If you were a monkey/ape what kind would you be and why?’ (i.e. Chimpanzee, Ring-tailed lemur, Proboscis monkey).  I find that someone’s answer to that question usually tells me a lot more about them than the answers to all of those other ‘socially acceptable’ inquiries.

My answer to that question is Orangutan.  So when Orange came up I was excited to draw a beautiful baby orangutan.  Turns out that humans aren’t the only Primates that I can’t draw.  It didn’t take very long to realize that my orangutan was not going to look like an orangutan.  I thought about trying to start the drawing over or fix it but it was getting late, there were snacks to be eaten, and I thought you would all get a pretty good laugh at this:

It kind of looks like Steve Buscemi, if Steve Buscemi stuck his finger in an electrical socket and his greasy hair stood on end (is that even possible?) OR a junkie with an extremely small body doing a pole dance strip tease with his head on fire.  Either way, it’s not good.

Day18, Favorite Animated Character– Scooby Doo.  Scooby and I are kindred spirits.  We’re always hungry, we’re always afraid, while trying to run our legs and arms windmill around and we don’t actually go anywhere…

Day19, A Place you Want to Go– I would like to get some authentic Rice-a-Roni® (you totally just heard the little trolley bell ‘ding-ding’ in your mind when you read Rice-a-Roni® didn’t you?        Sucker!).

Day20, A Bad Habit– I tend to eat my feelings. They usually take the form of something sweet (cake, ice cream, cookies) followed immediately by something salty (popcorn, potato chips, french fries) followed by something sweet, followed by something salty… and so on until I become physically too tired to eat.

Day21, Something Pink– When I was a kid my favorite My Little Pony was the pink pegasus pony with the blue lightning bolts on it’s butt.  I did a google search and found out that the actual name of the pony was ‘Firefly’ and also that she was voiced by Sandy Duncan in the My Little Pony animated films.

Ummm… didn’t Sandy Duncan have a glass eye?  Seems like that would kind of pigeon-hole you for voice work only.   Early 90’s Hollywood must have been feeling kind of forgiving when they gave her that gig on the Hogan Family.

Day22, Childhood Memory– Obviously every child wants to be a super-hero.  Some of us have not outgrown this dream…. however, we have outgrown our capes.

My mom made superhero capes for my brother and I out of old sheets that she dyed in the bathtub with RIT dye.  My brother’s cape was black because he was Batman and my cape was yellow because I was Robin (I used the non-gender specific title ‘kid wonder!’).  We wore those capes every single day.

Since we wore our capes so much my mom decided to upgrade them.  She sewed capes out of appropriately colored fabrics with hand stitched superhero logos (Batman again for my brother but by this time I was done being his sidekick so it was Wonder Woman for me).

Alas, the new capes were stuffy and fancy and the heavyweight fabric pulled at the ties around our necks (which, thinking back, was probably some kind of choking hazard).  We were back in our old sheet capes within days… sorry Mom.

Day23, Eyes-I only drew one eye, is that cheating? I used an elephant picture for a model but it could also be a bird or a dragon, or a close up of a someone’s grandmother that needs moisturizer and Visine really bad…

Day24, Faceless Self Portrait & Day25, Black and White- I decided to combine these two subjects into one drawing so I could put my feet up and take off from drawing on Christmas.

Day26, Hands– I was going to draw the hands of Patrick Swayze and 1989 Demi Moore (who was actually a real person as compared to current day Demi Moore who is a cyborg composed of Botox, implants, and hair extensions)  from that pottery scene in the movie Ghost.  But then the whole thing seemed too complicated so I went for my second (and clearly better) idea- duck shadow-puppet hand… huh, huh?

Day27, Silhouette– I love how the ocean looks when the moonlight hits all the little ripples in the water.  This drawing does the moment absolutely no justice but since I’m going on vacation somewhere tropical and coastal next week I’ll have the opportunity to see the real thing.  For the rest of you, this is all you get… I apologize.

Day28, Favorite Song– Shockingly, my fave is not a Taylor Swift song.  Though it may be next week… this subject is constantly evolving for me.  I don’t have one, favorite song that is my favorite song forever (because who could possibly choose between all of the songs on the ABBA Gold and Queen Platinum collections?).

My current favorite is On Top of the World by Imagine Dragons.  So I drew myself on top of the world (I know- stick figure, totally cheated).  I also drew in a slice of pepperoni pizza because if I’m going to really feel like I’m on top of the world there is going to be food involved.  Imagine the actual size of that piece of pizza if this drawing was done to scale?

Excuse me… I need a snack.

Day29, Mythical Creature– I used to think I had some kind of gnome in my laundry room.  He would randomly steal socks, throw a tie-dyed t-shirt into a load of laundry running on hot, turn the dryer up to ‘Cottons- High Heat’ after I put all of my gym clothes in and set it to ‘Delicates- Low Heat’ to avoid muffin-topping (Yes I just made muffin-top into a verb).  Well, it turns out he’s not a gnome at all.

Remember Snuggle Bear?  The one from those commercials for Snuggle fabric softener… he was always giggling and bouncing on the giant piles of towels and sheets, then he’d smell the clean laundry and rub it all over his cute little bear face? If you don’t- did you grow up in a hole in the ground? Educate yourself!

Well, Snuggle’s had a hard road since those commercials stopped airing.  They put a lot of chemicals in that fabric softener and he huffed too many fresh loads and dryer fumes back in the day.  10 years later Snuggle’s gone rogue and lives in the filthy space between my dryer and the wall (you know the space I’m talking about… if you drop something down there you might as well have dropped it to the bottom of the ocean like that necklace from Titanic, cause you’re not getting it back).

Snuggle Bear a.k.a. Franklin Klonoski (His given name as revealed on America’s Most Wanted) hides behind my dryer waiting for his next hit.  Will it be Whites? Colors? Or his old favorite… Towels?  Every once in a while he creeps around the side of the dryer to pilfer items.  Most times he takes dryer lint or a running sock, which he ingests through his makeshift zipper mouth (hastily implanted at a dental clinic with poor cleanliness standards after he lost all his teeth to the fumes), to maintain a healthy weight and squishy loft.  Other times he steals items to repair his deteriorating visage.

Though his right eye and ear (which have been completely missing since his 2004 run in with Jabber Jaws the loan shark) were unrepairable, he’s patched up his other wounds with ‘lost’ articles of clothing.  His left ear is made out of a Victoria’s Secret bra (the one my husband accidentally put in the dryer 4 years ago that came out as half a bra… now we know what happened to the other half).  His left eye is made out of ALL of the buttons that disappeared from every button up shirt I’ve ever owned.  His arms are made out of old tube socks- the ones my husband threw away when they became yellowed with age and sweat when he turned 14 (I didn’t even know my husband when he was 14… where did Franklin get those socks?!).  And to cover the condition of his hideously scarred and balding body he wears a Purple Rain t-shirt (my favorite Purple Rain t-shirt that I’ve been looking for since I moved to Montana 10 years ago).

Sometimes I despise Franklin (especially when I think about my Purple Rain t-shirt*) but most times I feel bad for him.  He’s like a child star that Hollywood forgot about (Just like Sandy Duncan.  Only I guess she wasn’t a child on the Hogan Family AND she had that glass eye instead of the buttons eye.  So maybe the only similarities are that they both have fake eyes and nobody cares about them anymore… meh, close enough).  Sometimes when I’m feeling particularly sympathetic I’ll  throw an extra ball of cat hair blanket lint (his favorite flavor) down behind the dryer for him.

Day30, Inspiration– I didn’t want to bore you all with another drawing of food that I loved so I went for another motivational phrase that I really like.  This phrase carried me through an entire half marathon (the energy gels probably helped too).

There’s something to be said for believing in yourself.

Well, that’s the end of the 30 day drawing challenge.  I feel like I learned some things about technique, my personal drawing style, and where all of my missing running socks ended up.  Though I’m not sure that I learned much that will help me to draw people better.  I’ll let you know how it goes when I attempt to draw my husband again…  it really can’t get any worse than Picasso Fred from November, right???

*If you’re reading this and you actually know what happened to my Purple Rain t-shirt- please send me a message.  Even if it’s gone I still want to know.  I just need closure…