Smaugust 2020: my first fully completed drawing challenge
Tags: Art, Drawing, Fantasy, Illustration, Improvement

I knew I had to participate in the Smaugust challenge when I read about it in July. Not only am I a specialist in dragons since I did design a whole family of them in my second semester of communication design, I also wanted to prove myself that I am capable of finishing a whole month of daily drawing. As with all challenges like that, I keep them closely social media related, posting all work on my Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/umbromini/

Preparation

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I started with the mother of all preparation strategies: list(s).

The list items are still unchecked :)

One item is in German, which is my mother language, so I’ll replicate the list here:

Check Sketchbooks (I meant to see which one was best fit)

Check Pens & Inks (When I started thinking about Smaugust, I wanted to work with pen & ink first)

Draw a bit

Look at pictures (Meaning to get my inspiration framework fixed)

Make Room for Drawings (I don’t remember what that meant)

Abgabgen abgeben bis August (Meaning I had to finish my university closures to have more room for drawing — which didn’t work out :)

Everything else I did was either drawing a bit, because I was not used to pencil anymore, or sifting through my empty sketchbooks to find the one I wanted to spend the next 31 days with. Sketchbooks would be great to keep everything in order, which might ease comparing drawings over the drawing challenge time span.

I also made my own prompt list! A random word generator was my crystal ball and a Libre Office Calc (LOC) sheet my spell book. I started rolling words, until I had a list I was happy with, filled with very vaguely (non) dragon related things. Just what I wanted. Obscurity.

g e t i t h e r e

As a cartomancer in training I did some cartomancy to get my brain into a state of full understanding. What the cards told me was to let go and start working, keep rolling — but take a look at your previous steps to reach the state that I wanted to reach.

Execution

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The only item from my unchecked list that stayed with me hard was using thumbnails. When I was working on my first drawing, I started with the thumb nailing process and the first lines in the morning. I used those to communicate my productivity on my Instagram stories and then do some work on other projects. Later in the day, sometimes in the evening, I finished it in a relaxed manner. That daily productivity template kept me through the first phase (01.08.-21.08) pretty well.

My prompt list was helping me greatly in that regard, since it gave me more room to let my mind wander around the themes it presented. Since they were very concrete words like grandfather, nose, visitor I had more motivation to interpret them freely and build world fragments through little stories or meditations around those words.

It was fairly clear to me which artists would be an inspiration for the next weeks. But it wasn’t clear from whom I would borrow what. I wanted the mythic energies of Ernst Fuchs’ work and its silhouettes, the details and geometric pattern chaining of Ian Millers dragons and buildings, and to some extent the agile pencil movements of Paul Bonner’s drawings. Each drawing had this to some extent, but it was all pretty scattered based on the subject of the drawing. Some portraits made it easier to implement the easy going pencil sketch style, some were more intricate and reminiscing of Miller in my imagination, some had to have the mysticism of Ernst Fuchs. I also realized that full body pictures also brought in another change of style in comparison to portraits. I was working incremental — always looking back to earlier drawings — and improving (choosing artists’ aspects I wanted to more strongly) based on them.

Well check out some examples of the artists I’m talking about:

Ian Miller’s intricacy

Paul Bonner’s dynamic pencil work

Erns Fuchs’ mysthic paintings

Also, tools where a big influence as well. I used all kinds of pencils in the beginning, but in the second half of August, I was mainly using my mechanical pencil with an HB mine. That helped to hold everything together more tightly. Doesn’t make me worry about sharpening it or using another hardness, thus limiting my grayscale values.

TBH photos in that phase where bad. You can check for yourself. Although I used natural lighting, I couldn’t catch all those important details and contrast values of my drawings got all messed up.

The second phase started when one of my main projects was finished, accidentally killing my daily productivity template. Every day was filled with combating my lacking motivation.

In that time I mostly started late with the thumb nailing process, and had to force myself to finish it later. That was also the time I shifted to HDR photography my smartphone offers, which was a perfect step in catching detail in a way that fits pencil drawings. I also felt like I had more power in combining the artists’ aspects in my drawings from then on.

Conclusion (The juicy bits)

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D variables are numbered based on the day of the drawing.

The part I struggled with most — which didn’t hinder my productivity though — was to get the aspects together into a coherent picture. Every dragon is depicted based on the materials, feelings and mystic energies they are living in. That custom-made environment made it hard to give them exactly one distinct look. For example D26 vs D30: The drawing style of D26 is highly influenced by Millers’ more mechanical looking monsters, while D30 is based on the metal zinc, which has a lot of ways it can look based on its elemental state.