7 Day Challenge

7 Dogs in 7 Days: Day 4

My 7 day chal­lenge: to draw 7 dogs in 7 days. I am exact­ly halfway through the chal­lenge. Sur­pris­ing­ly, the les­son I learned is dif­fer­ent than what I was expect­ing. Of course, I was­n’t sur­prised by the over­whelm­ing desire to quit on Day 2, but I mus­cled through. It was back again on Day 4, but my for­ward momen­tum car­ried me through this resistance.

*At the bot­tom of this post is a link to some free pup­py images you can use to par­tic­i­pate in this draw­ing challenge!

This image is 9x12, graphite on water­col­or paper, tak­en from friend’s pho­to. I am exhaust­ed. Three more days to go, then a break. Being under the weath­er does­n’t help either. Nei­ther does com­bin­ing this chal­lenge with a blog writ­ing chal­lenge (1000 words a day for 7 days).

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

My epiphany from this chal­lenge is you can accom­plish much more than you’d imag­ine by set­ting small goals and a def­i­nite time lim­it. Are there aspects of the draw­ings I can fix? Sure, but know­ing I can’t touch it after one day is the free­ing part of this chal­lenge. You make deci­sions and imple­ment them. There’s no time for fence-sit­ting, even in pick­ing the next image to draw. And from start to fin­ish, the tran­si­tion is amazing!

Before and After

I have includ­ed all of my before and after pho­tos so you can see the dra­mat­ic dif­fer­ence from start to fin­ish. More than any­thing else, view­ing each tran­si­tion, one after anoth­er, is most impact­ful for me.

Each con­sec­u­tive image has been more chal­leng­ing than the one before it. The first image was basi­cal­ly the face of a short-haired dog, sim­i­lar to dogs we have had in the past (so there was back­ground infor­ma­tion to draw from).

The second image was long-haired and mostly just the face. Plus, it was a puppy, so there was less detail.

The third image was a shih-tzu, so I contended with lots of tonal value. Still, it’s basically just a face.

This last image was drawn from a small, washed out, entire body photo of a long-haired dog.

The final draw­ing is work­able, def­i­nite­ly not my best, but I am work­ing on my craft. The flow (men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous arti­cle in this series) is back. When I place the images side by side, I can tell they are from the same artist. This is growth for me because I am usu­al­ly all over the place with medi­um and sub­ject matter.

My Take-Away

Most impor­tant­ly, my style is devel­op­ing. When I com­pare my images to oth­ers, mine feel dif­fer­ent but also more like mov­ing toward my artis­tic roots. Before I start­ed exper­i­ment­ing with style, I was an impres­sion­ist. I was so affect­ed by this style of art, and artists like Mon­et and Renoir, that I went to school for a Mas­ters degree in a field that would allow me to trav­el to Europe for work. Even in high school, I took four years of French in prepa­ra­tion for my artis­tic trav­els. I dreamed of en plein aire paint­ing by the Seine.

If I extend­ed this chal­lenge, my draw­ings would prob­a­bly become very impres­sion­is­tic. I missed that part of me. Or, rather, I had for­got­ten that part of me. So, I cred­it this 7 Day Chal­lenge with allow­ing me to recon­nect with myself.

On to Day 5!

Here is the link I promised you!

Please share your cre­ations. I’d love to see them.