Drawing is Hard :/ (Patreon)

I pushed the cartoon look on my Heathers poster and got it as far as preliminary colors (known as flats) before I needed a break from it.

It's not terrible but it's not great.

I haven't really mastered drawing with my tablet, partly because my computer doesn't have quite enough memory for my tablet to reliably work without delay. I'm working on it.

So I took a break to just work on some cartoony character practice. Of course I did this by making cartoon versions of characters from The Magicians.


Olympic level sadboy Quentin Coldwater was the easiest. I'm not sure how much it looks like Jason Ralph, but this does look like what would happen if Quentin was a guest star on Kim Possible.


I'm also happy with how Eliot came out.
I did more but wasn't as happy with them.


Figuring I should try my hand at bodies, I figured I'd give a try at actually illustrating Quentin Coldwater and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad, Day. 

This is based on a heist episode where the big score mostly depends on luck magic where they channel all the bad luck of the people on the inside, into a teddy bear, which has to be held by someone on the outside. Quentin has to hold the bear (mostly because he's the funniest character to watch suffer from epic bad luck.)  He gets a cut from a paper towel, drops his spoon into his soup, trips over nothing, gets attacked by a boa constrictor that came out of the toilet, and almost has a chandelier fall on him.
Because nothing can be easy I decided I wanted to draw him mid-trip, with the snake wrapped around him. Getting a good trip pose is really hard so I took some time doing fast copies of Jhonen Vasquez's work. His action drawings are fantastic and some of the poses I copied are from panels that ALWAYS make me laugh.

Eventually I got a stick figure I was happy with, which wasn't a copy of Vasquez's work. I moved that stick figure over to my smaller sketch pad and fleshed it out.






I feel like I lost a lot of movement when I inked it but thought that I could maybe get it back in the coloring stage.

But that didn't really happen.

Again, it's not *terrible* but it's not what I'd call good. What's frustrating is that I can't really pinpoint *why* it's not good.
That's not true. I can say why it's not good: It's stiff, it lacks depth, life, weight, and feels trapped between realism and stylization. I can forgive the baby's-first-digital-paint-job look because, well, it's *this* baby's first digital paint job but I don't know how to make it better. And I don't know how to make the drawing better, which is the real problem.

The answer is probably just "keep practicing" but feh. That doesn't make me feel much better.