The truth is I never really thought much about "learning" art from instructors. Even as a child it never seemed like something I was learning...it was just something I did to finally have fun, like recess. It was never work for me and I always knew I was good. If anything it was a source of comfort for me during my moderately turbulent childhood. I could make things pretty and it wasn't even remotely difficult, and most importantly made me obliviously happy.
As far as mediums go, I have dabbled a bit in painting with acrylics and guache and feel pretty good about my color blending, but lack the refinement for finer details as of yet. In sculpture, I prefer modeling or some kind of clay, and even in just screwing around I have seen that my most natural talents lend to a 3 dimensional medium. But my go-to art drug of choice has always been plain old sketching- pencil and paper. It's by far my most developed skill-set, so I decided that it was the place to really start getting serious.
I purchased a hard cover sketch book, bought some cheap colored pencils and .5 mm lead pencils and decided I needed homework. I asked a friend to give me an animal and a fictional creature. So, without further ado, I give you my work...
Why eyes? What happened was part of the artistic process. While trying to figure out the eye color of the "Tiny Panther", I drew a few different eyeballs on the opposite page. When it was time to start the hydra, I was looking at all the eyeballs staring at me and thought 'why does it need to be a traditional hydra? It's fictional to begin with.' So....I just started drawing and doing the most difficult thing that an artist has to learn to do- let it be what it is.
The actual drawing only took about 45 minutes to and hour. It was the coloring that took some time...like 4 hours. I rarely work with color, and even then it's with paints and making changes to color blending is fairly simple. There was definitely a learning curve with colored pencils, and I know that cheap won't work for the long haul. The whole experience really pointed out that I needed to do some research on better tools and figure out what worked best for me. After 3 hours and $30 on an art supply website, I obtained 3 different types of erasers, 3 brands of black and white colored pencils, and 5 drafting pencils with varying hardness of leads. We shall see.
Subsequently, Any other homework suggestions? I have tattoo sketch requests piling up, but I'm always game for more ideas!