The challenge of creation

Well, I´m really a novice for creating new illustrations. When I was a teenager, I liked to draw superheroes from the comics, some characters of manga and later portraits of my highschool colleagues. But just copying what I could see next to me, I had never tried to create something new in that time. I thought that I couldn´t do that and visual art for me could be just a hobby to do sometimes.

Many years later, I became a journalist working at the national leading newspaper here in Sao Paulo, Brazil. But last year I decided that I really wanted to be an artist. I wanted to seriouly improve my drawing abilities, and even learn how to paint, doesn´t matter what I needed to overcome and endure. So, I enrolled on drawing (March 2011) and illustration (December 2011) courses at Quanta Academia de Artes and now I´m practicing watercolour, since last December. Ah, and I quit my job as full-time journalist in last October.

Contests

Then I began to participate in contests, as I thought they could be good exercises for my improvement, and also something amusing at the same time.

Maybe one of my first reasonable creations was the scene I submitted for my first contest here at deviantart, in December. It was "Alphonse and Edward play basketball", submitted for a contest about the manga/anime Full Metal Alchemist. Many mistakes still there, but wow! I won the contest with that! Maybe it was the lack of participants and at least a good idea for the concept of the drawing, that is actually more like a sketch I couldn´t clean or improve more in that time.

Then, I decided to participate in a illustration contest held by the same newspaper I was working in. The challenge was huge for me! Nine illustrations: three cartoons and six comic strips! I was not seriously thinking that I had any chance. But I thought that it could be at least a good exercise for me. (And, busy like that, it´s the reason why I couldn´t submit almost nothing new at dA in the last month. The illustrations for the newspaper must be kept secret!)

I´ve spent almost all my time since about the first day of 2012 working on this project. I even didn´t sleep in the last 2 nights before the deadline (January 25th), to have time to finish the work, redrawing, inking and painting it. Well, actually I slept 3 hours in one afternoon through these 3 days. Yes, it was really hard! But I´m so happy to know that I could finish the project and submit it to the  newspaper contest.

A one-week course about illustration for children´s books at Quanta (in January too) also challenged me with the target of creating a nymph. It´s been prepared, and I will soon show it here. [Update: Now it´s published, since January 31st!]

Using sketches and references

Something very important that I learned with my drawing teacher Carlos Luzzi is that we need to use references. Well, a very experienced artist may not use them every time, but if you don´t know how to draw something, and you want do make it professionally, you need to search about it first. Betty Edwards, in her book "The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" also states that no one knows how to draw everything. That´s just a myth some people imagine. So the artist needs to be always searching, if he or she wants to work with new things.

So, before I tried my drawing for Full Metal Alchemist contest, I first drew a lot of times, in different positions, the characters I wanted to draw, using different scenes of the anime. And kept an eye to them, while I was trying to create my own scene with them.

And for the cartoons and comic strips, I searched a huge amount of references for everything related to the ideas I sketched (very poorly drawn, but what matters is that these sketches helped me a lot to know what my idea really was in the paper). So, I got pictures of people running, children, bridges, sky, beer, vulcans, and so on.

Well, that´s it for now. I just wanted to share with you something of my history as student of art and my happiness as I´m improving and accomplishing some new challenges. Now, let´s "keep walking"!