Vicious Cookie Sketch

Thinking back, when was the last time I had actually drawn something?

Ah, probably a casual drawing I made for an online game event six years earlier. After some digging, I still could not find the original. Fortunately, I had taken a proper photograph so I could upload it for the event, and that photo survived. Thank goodness it did... otherwise, my last reasonably serious drawing would have been from about ten years earlier. Orz.

The event asked us to choose any monster from the game and draw it. At the time, I was farming for a highly refined Celine’s Ribbon and its enchantments in Ragnarok Online. I ran the same instance over and over and over, seeing this monster every day until I was honestly sick of looking at it.

I really do love gaming. Besides single-player RPGs, MMORPGs are another favorite. But sometimes I feel that being a “teacher” makes it awkward to show just how absorbed I can get in games, so I do not talk about it much.

Oh, but this was not an official event. As for which Ragnarok Online server it was... let’s just say that is a little awkward to explain. Orz.

Even in the Vicious Cookie drawing that I thought looked fairly good, the nose is not quite in the right place, and I did not capture the roundness of the face very well.

Around the beginning of March, I officially started learning traditional drawing. Yes, it was partly for work too.

Why not start directly with digital illustration?

Because I felt that good digital illustration required a foundation in traditional drawing. Drawing is not only about making something “look good”; it is also about getting it “right.”

When had I last taken drawing lessons? I think it was in elementary school.

Back then, I could stay near the top of the class without studying much. I happened to be interested in art, so I took ordinary children’s drawing classes, mostly focused on creative drawing.

After a year or two, I moved into an advanced class for still-life sketching, with occasional colored-pencil, ballpoint-pen, and ink-painting sessions. There was even some wheel-thrown pottery, which was not particularly related to drawing.

Once junior high and high school became busy, though, I more or less stopped drawing altogether. I occasionally drew something here and there, but mostly for a bit of entertainment while teaching or to enter some odd event.

“Now that you’re taking drawing lessons and can draw like this, what was your level before?” More than one friend asked me that.

I thought that once the course reached a stopping point, I should make time to practice. To force myself to keep practicing and posting regularly, I might as well create a drawing-practice journal on my personal website. Yet another person turning a hobby into work to make herself stick with it...

You might ask: isn’t all this early learning just an embarrassing chapter of your past? Why record it?

Even the incredibly skilled animator who taught me drawing said, “All those old drawings are just embarrassing history. I don’t want to look at them at all.” Cue the eye roll.

But that embarrassing past helps shape who you become. Keeping a record is how you can tell whether you have improved. It also gives you a reason to push yourself forward!

If I was going to keep a record, I needed to begin with what I could do before returning to drawing lessons.

Most of my other chances to draw came from doodling on the whiteboard before class or during breaks.

To save time and give the class something entertaining to look at, most of those drawings were rough. As long as the idea came across, that was enough.

These two drawings show up in centripetal-force and rotational-motion problems in the first semester of eleventh-grade physics, although the little car appears in plenty of other chapters too.

Naturally, I was not going to spend too much time perfecting details. A quick doodle was perfectly fine... right?

This comes from a physics joke about how physicists can oversimplify models when discussing problems and end up with all kinds of unreasonable conclusions and situations.

A very capable friend who actually majored in physics saw this drawing and exclaimed, “Wow, you’re already starting with a chicken that has a boundary!”

All right, my friend, but I do not think drawing a chicken without a boundary on the classroom board would work any better. XDDDD.

Many of the drawings I use in class were originally inspired by the physics teacher I admired so much in high school. A cram-school teacher, obviously—not one of my school teachers. XD.

BTW, those little dots are leg hair. Just kidding.

And of course, we cannot forget the hot-air balloons that occasionally appear in gas-law problems.

Wait, actually I do! XD. I suddenly remembered making a bear-shaped hot-air balloon for a recent online lesson. This was not really drawn by hand; I just combined built-in shapes. Does that count as digital illustration? If the definition is simply drawing on a computer, I suppose it does... maybe?

You think built-in shapes are too limiting? Not necessarily! XD. The image below was made entirely with Word’s built-in shapes too!

Of course, if we are talking specifically about traditional drawing, the bear balloon and the image above fall outside that discussion. As digital illustration in the broadest sense, though, I think they just about count.

I have wandered off topic. Later, I gathered this series of whiteboard illustrations and drew them all together one day.

There is very little drawing time during a lesson. Rather than trying to prove how well I can draw, I would rather make something entertaining that softens the shock and frustration a complicated problem can cause.

Without a strict time limit, I can draw something a little more elaborate on the whiteboard. Drawing on a board feels different from drawing on paper, but these examples are closer to the style and level I can manage by hand.

Students used to do their homework. For a while, they loved staying after class to ask questions until they understood everything. I was often kept there until around six, so I drew the picture below to express my determination not to work overtime.

Thinking back, I miss the days when students reliably did their homework. By the time I wrote this, I had mostly stopped chasing them about it. XD. Especially after online classes, I felt that expecting them both to attend lessons and complete homework was asking too much, so I stopped insisting.

These older drawings make it clear that I rarely draw human figures, whether anime-style characters or figurines. Natural scenery, settings, and composition are even further outside my experience. My artistic diet is very obviously unbalanced.

The main reason is that I do not understand human anatomy very well. My grasp of perspective barely extends beyond the interior-design scenes I learned earlier. Applying perspective to a person and getting it right is extremely difficult for me.

In other words, anything involving a human being looks strange no matter how I draw it.

Even when I draw a creature with facial features, the proportions look a little unnatural on closer inspection because I am not used to breaking an image down into its underlying forms.

I did study sketching for a while, but I was young and did not realize that it was meant to train observation and visual judgment. I missed a lot and never really developed those skills. So when I started learning traditional and digital drawing, I treated myself as a complete beginner.