Sketchbook: hyenas, cats and old people

I've been wanting to keep myself busy over the break and had hoped to be able to get a head start on the next project. I've been drawing somewhat irregularly — my aim is to make a habit of it. I'm building up slowly — trying to do at least one drawing (or page of drawings) per day, which of course in the long run is nowhere near enough, but I want to get to the stage where it becomes second nature, where I don't even have to think about pulling my sketchbook out.

I had intended to start generating ideas for the next project already, before I learned that we would probably be given a list of words or themes to work from. Still, it's probably good practice to keep the ideas ticking over.

That being said, here are some doofy pages from my sketchbook from the past few days:

Nothing really behind these... just some doodles of hyenas. Top page was an actual exercise in observation, on the bottom is a page of doodles done whilst trying to sleep!

One of the books I got from the library gave some great suggestions on generating ideas; one was to take classic scenarios or stories and reverse character roles or insert new ones. I was just kind of messing around and turned Snow White into a disgruntled housewife who has to 'rescue' (or wake up) her oafish, sleeping husband.

I didn't really take it much beyond imagining some scenarios in my head before I got distracted and started drawing cats instead.

I looked at how some other artists and animators have simplified cats for use in comic strips or animation, to better understand how the relatively complex physiology can be broken down.

Understanding how something is built is crucial before you can start breaking it down and making it move, so I tried to get to grips with the basic anatomy of cats. They have really weird legs! 

I found a great little handout online discussing the anatomy of a cat for use in animation which I found really helpful, so I did some simplified drawings based on some of the examples there.

And then some more attempts to understand how the hell their hind legs work.

I don't really know if this was headed in the right direction but it's gotten me drawing again, which is always valuable practice. I think I'm rushing myself to try and get all the stuff in my head down on paper. I need to stop that, stop the panicking and just focus on a few little things at a time.

Andy suggested that I work on keeping the energy and quality of rough drawings through to the cleaned and refined version, which is something that I'd notably struggled with in the last few projects. I'm thinking of doing some more comic strips for general drawing/ideas/storytelling practice, so it might be good to try and combine the two. The last set of comics I did suffered a lot from the 'stiff artwork' problem (and just generally looking bad) so I need to get used to being less precious and working more loosely.