Queen Padme Amidala pencil drawing

I haven't been slacking on my Draw Every Day 2016 project, I promise! I've just been spending the last five days working on one drawing. As I said in my previous blog post, I recently re-watched the Star Wars Prequels, so I drew Queen Amidala in graphite and a bit of colored pencil.

This started out as a simple quick sketch, and quickly grew into something more detailed and complex than I'd initially planned. I'm mostly happy with how it turned out, though I didn't notice that the eyes weren't quite lined up until it was too late to fix it. I'm just taking it as a lesson learned: Even if you think your sketch is lined up correctly, quadruple check before you start drawing dark lines!

If you want to see the progress photos, they're in my Work-In-Progress gallery.

Draw Every Day project for 2016

So, I've been really inconsistent in how often I draw lately. Some days I'm just not feeling it, so I don't draw anything, which makes me feel bad, which makes me not want to draw the next day, which makes me feel bad again, etc. It's a brutal cycle that's holding me back as an artist. I have been doing a lot of practice drawing that I haven't been uploading, but even so, I haven't been doing as much as I'd like.

One of the artists I follow just successfully completed a "draw every day" project last year, and it's inspired me to try the same thing this year. So, here's what's going to happen: I am going to put pen/pencil to paper, or stylus to tablet, or whatever, and draw something at least once per day, every day during 2016. No exceptions, no excuses. Even if I'm super busy, or tired, or not feeling well, I can find the time and strength to at least draw a little doodle. There's no rule about what I have to draw, or how complex it has to be, I just have to draw something.

To kick this off, I drew a silly colored pencil doodle of Pepe wearing a BB-8 hat.

Sketches of Daisy Ridley as Rey

I'm trying to re-teach myself how to draw real people again, so I drew some sketches of Daisy Ridley's character Rey from the Force Awakens trailers. They're pretty quick sketches and a bit rough, but I feel like I've made some progress and learned some things while drawing these three sketches, which is the important thing.