illustration wars commence

I am an art student, but because I have never done any formal art training before starting my degree there are a lot of things that I don't know about, not how to use watercolours, or that if you colour wash your sketchbook pages they are instantly less scary and much more interesting, and a million other things everyone else in my class takes for granted. I spent a lot of last year bemoaning my lack of knowledge and feeling very out of my depth, this year I am embracing it.

Inspired by Kim of art equals happy post BordelineStraggler and I sat down on Sunday night to illustrate a film. We picked a film, got a pile of art supplies, our kitchen timer and began.

The rules were simple, at any point in the film either of us could pause the film and we would have two minutes to draw the image on the screen. As you can see there had been a glass of wine before which meant we started of very giggly and I think this lack of seriousness really helped me relax enough to get into this task.

And by the end of it I was in heaven! This was so much fun. And a great exercise for drawing things I would never get to in real life - how often am I going to sit down and draw a car flying into a helicopter? well before last night never, since last night the chances have certainly improved.

Here are a selection of our drawings - we ended up doing 11 each before it got too late to carry on: