It’s hump day today and I needed to procrastinate important work so I decided to draw a camel in honour of this lovely weekday. The only problem is I haven’t drawn anything since 2008 and I mostly got C’s in Art class in school. I really think the way art class is graded needs to be changed. You should be graded on effort rather than the final product. So what if my self-portrait looks like something from Beavis and Butthead? At least it looks human-ish and I deserve an A for that! But regardless, there’s a hack to producing somewhat decent drawings and that involves a ton of geometric shapes and lines as I will show below:

First, find a picture you want to replicate as closely as possible. Then identify and draw the most prominent geometric shape you can see from the picture. This is the picture I used:

The most evident shape is the circle in the camel’s torso.

From then on, just keep extending your drawing with more lines and shapes. It doesn’t have to be exact or symmetrical. I used a roll of tape to draw the circle but free handed all the lines and squares.

Drawing lines across the drawing help with placement, shape and size of features. In this case, I used the lines to determine placement and shape of my camel’s legs.

Then I added the camel’s neck and face. Here’s a warning – I am absolutely TERRIBLE at smaller features and details like faces, fingers, shadows, etc. So feel free to laugh at what follows.

Continue reading →