amateur hour

I needed a hobby.

Writing, unfortunately, doesn’t really count, at least not any more. I don’t want to be a full-time writer (it sounds like a horrid lifestyle), but I do want to write well enough to get paid when I do it. So while I enjoy writing, it tends to be Serious Business, which doesn’t lend itself well to unwinding.

So about six weeks ago, I took up sketching, instead. It’s actually rather relaxing, at least in comparison to the kind of things I usually do. I never realized this, but to draw, you have to wrench your mind into an entirely different mode of consciousness. It’s almost like a drug; the only comparable mental states I’ve had involve alcohol and long-distance running, and drawing isn’t nearly as hard on you as either of those (admittedly, sketching doesn’t burn nearly as many calories).

Tonight I finally felt up to tackling a human head.

(Well, strictly speaking, it was an elf’s head. More on that later.)

I…don’t completely hate it. The proportions of the eyes and the nose are just off, somehow. But it turned out reasonably well.

By comparison, here is the original:

In case you were wondering, yes, that is a character from “Dragon Age Origins”. I wanted to draw a profile, and “Dragon Age” has this habit of taking screenshots of the game and stashing them in your saved game directory. I saw it, thought “ah-ha!”, and off I went.

-JM