I'm tired of just being able to draw felines! I'm through with having to "lionize" my favorite human characters so I can draw fan art of them or always having to choose feline subjects for my final projects at school. Srsly, it's gotten so bad that I drew only felines in my Drawing 2 class, which was suppose to be "figure drawing." I reffed from the model once, decided I wasn't as good compared to the others, and went back to drawing my cats. :P I really want to have the freedom to be able to draw anything I want without telling others "Nope. All I can draw for you is Simba." I guess I'm just feeling...trapped? After only drawing cats for more than 3 years now, I feel the need to move on to other things so I can expand my artistic skills more, but I'm not sure how to start.
One of the methods I think I may use is just finding a lot of screen shots from my favorite shows and redrawing them over and over for awhile. I know many people will disagree with me and say I should start working from real life first, but that's how I learned to draw my lions and I think it worked out for me okay. I even had a few of my teachers tell me I should stick with cartooning. To be honest, I really don't care if I end up with a style that looks like someone else's just as long as I can draw a person! That'll be enough for me! :D
I also want to be able to draw backgrounds that actually look believable too instead of the standard like ones I always draw. :P For this, I'll be reffing backgrounds from screen shots as well as sketching from outside...at least that much I can do from real life.
I think Tsukasa from .hack//sign will be my main reference for awhile. I love the dot hack style since it's simple yet really expressive and I think it would be easy for me to get a grasp on at first. It reminds me a lot of my style in it's simplicity too. The backgrounds in that anime are also really well done and I'd love to be able to ref some of those as well.
I'm not sure how much I'll be able to upload to my art sites in the next week or so because of this. I'm not the kind of person that will upload every little scrap I draw, but I'm also not the type of person to leave a site idle either. If I like a background or something, I'll upload it, but I know without a doubt that my upload rate will drop. I may loose fans over my inactivity or from drawing more anime fan art than I do my cute TLK-style cats, but who cares. I need to do this.
I have one last lionized picture I have planned out as a sort of "transition" picture as a way of announcing my decision stop drawing lionized versions of my favorite characters and actually draw them like they were suppose to look. :P
