Elephants and Colors

Elephant Fact # 28: Elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror.

So, I think it was last year, three of my friends gave me this set of soft pastels as a present. And even though I went completely nuts over them, I never tried them because I was more accustomed to pencil/pen, etc. and also because you needed a certain type of paper to use them on-- something textured and preferably colored, so that the pigment can cling to the sheet.

But a few days ago, I went to heaven Daiso in the city (by myself, shocker), this ridiculously pink place where motherflipping everything is $2.80 and where there really seems to be no order in their aisles (I went right from stationery to crockery, go figure) and bought a notebook of brown paper. Then I went home and tried out the pastels for the first time.

Good Lord.

At the moment, they are literally the best things I own. I-- I just-- I can't-- I love-- holy cow---

Anyway, in an earlier post I said that I wished I could go to a figure drawing class but couldn't due to money/time. Well, I managed to get over this problem thanks to the magic of Tumblr and found this site called Quickposes.com, where it basically gives you a time limit and bunch of pictures of models to draw. It is fantastic.

So I broke in my pastels by drawing a bunch of the poses. The results are below but I gotta warn you, this blog is rapidly becoming a little NSFW (if you're uncomfortable with this sort of thing). I mean, I just really like drawing people. Naked. woooot

No, but in all honesty (and I'm really trying not to sound like too much of a pretentious sap/loser) but there really is something beautiful about um, human figures. It's flawed, stuff jiggles, stuff stretches and flops but all of these things make up something that is so much more than its parts; something that can think and feel and create and just be. It's fantastic.

So even though the anatomy's a bit off and the colors are meh (this is the first time I've ever tried pastel, so I'm still experimenting with warm/cool color schemes and so forth), here is a bunch of the stuff I did:

And because I really love progress pics:

...and so on. At the moment, I've found that I'm completely fine with drawing women, no weirdness at all (hey, they're just tits, right?), but I haven't yet gathered the courage to draw men, at least without leaving this gaping white space where their peepee would be. I mean, come on. Omegle ruined me for life on that one. 

But urgh, I love these pastels.

More to come (probably),

The Unlucky Elephant