December | 2013 | Grace Makley

This is a drawing of Floor Jansen, the new lead singer for the symphonic metal band Nightwish. Brother and I used to listen to listen to a lot of Nightwish back in high school. Lately I haven’t been listening to as much metal as I used to, but Brother sent me a video of Jansen performing live with the band from the 2013 Imaginaerum tour. He told me she has really good stage presence and is a lot of fun to watch, and I completely agree! I also can’t stop listening to Storytime from Imaginaerum (the song in the video), and the entire Imaginaerum album. To create the above image, I took some screencaps from the concert video and then chose the one with the coolest lighting to use as reference. This was sketch #3 for my December Sketch a Day program, and it went a little bit beyond a sketch; I spent at least two or three hours on the image above (while listening to Imaginaerum on repeat). I tried to focus on brightness and proportions. It isn’t perfect, but in the spirit of the sketch-a-day thing, I’m going to share it anyway. Oh, and here’s the concert video:

Thanks for all your support on my December project! I’m going to share the sketches in two or three updates a week, in whatever order makes the most sense to me. I may also collect them chronologically on a separate page, in case the updates get too hard to sort through by the end of the month. Also, it’s catching on! Here’s the rule for joining in: start from where you are, and do a sketch for every subsequent day of December. I’m doing 31 sketches because I started on the first, but if you start today (the 4th) your goal should be 28, and et cetera. If you want to join in and you’re publishing sketches on the internet anywhere, let me know and I will link to you.

I’m going to go draw something now.

Okay, scratch that, I’m going to the pub with Mr. Huntington.

But THEN I’m going to draw something. Promise. 🙂

So I won NaNoWriMo. Here’s the proof:

Screen Shot 2013-11-30 at 6.44.32 PM

So, yay me?

It was a pretty cool thing to do. I wrote 50,000 words, and I’m glad I did it, but I don’t feel satisfied by this victory. I’m still hungry. It was fun to work on a different project for a while, but finishing NaNoWriMo doesn’t mark any progress on any of the other goals (writing and art) that I’ve been trying to achieve for the last couple years. I proved I have enough time to 50,000 words in a month. This month, I need to use that time to get stuff done.

I liked having a monthly project, though. That’s a nice, solid amount of time to focus on something. In December, instead of having a word goal for each day, I’d like to make some art each day. Therefore, I’m challenging myself to make 31 sketches during the month of December. My idea is that these can be warm-up sketches, twenty-minute sketches. A short exercise that won’t necessarily use up my entire creative output for the day (I’m hoping I’ll be able to sketch and then write, or sketch and then work on a more complicated artwork), but that will at least ensure SOME amount of creative output.

What do you think? I’d like to post sketches on the blog; do you want to see them? And would you prefer daily sketch updates, or a dump of several sketches every few days or week?

Here’s today’s sketch. I call it Grumpy Self Portrait. I tried to capture that back-to-work-the-Monday-after-Thanksgiving feeling, and I really focused on the expression and the asymmetry of my face. (And yes, I did a sketch yesterday for Dec 1, so this is sketch #2. I’ll share #1 later this week.)

Please tell me what you think about the new project, and how often you’d like to see updates on the blog. Also, if any art folks are interested in joining me for this December Sketch-A-Day adventure, please let me know; it would be great to have some company. 🙂

Grace Makley

Month: December 2013

Sketch #3: Floor Jansen from Nightwish

A New Challenge for December