Back on the Paper iPad app, a quick representation of how I’ve felt for the past few days amongst the clouds of pollen. (My face isn’t actually that white, but the app comes with a very limited color palette!)

Sorry for dragging this out. I put in about three hours today before finding something else to distract me! So, more to come.

As I expected, the class got the joke and laughed politely, and then we discussed the drawing as if it were any other serious homework assignment. If only my harridan elementary school art teacher had allowed cartoons in art class, I’d probably have gotten all this schooling out of the way 30 years earlier!

Anyway, the teacher noticed something I already realized, which was that my character was way too stiff. Even after umpteen weeks of this class, and dozens of animation books imploring me to draw everything with a “line of action” in mind, I still have a tendency to want to turn every figure into a right angle. It’s a really hard habit to break.

So, I adjusted my figure a little, and re-inked it, digitally. Do you notice the improvement? Because there’s a smooth, imaginary arc from my back leg to my hand, it does a better job at implying movment, and the direction of that movement.

Really, I should be even more bent, but I didn’t want to reinvent the whole composition of the picture.

Of course, digital inking always looks a little flat compared to real ink, but I can always play with that in Photoshop:

Speaking of which, looks like a rainy day tomorrow, so I’ll sit in and finally finish Bob Hope!

This week’s homework assignment was kind of a throwaway; another student suggested “let’s draw what we did with our time off,” and the teacher shrugged OK.

So for the purposes of this cartoon, I stood on a curb treating old ladies like figure models, even measuring with the bamboo skewer my teacher gives all her students as a tool.

This will either get big laughs, or the sound of intense, judgmental crickets. I’ll let you know!

Laziness before work, plus spur-of-the-moment socializing after work=I didn’t draw a GD thing today! Didn’t help that I left my sketchbook at home. Here’s a page from earlier this week in Washington Square Park.

Drawing class starts back up on Saturday; our very loose homework assignment is “what I did on my Spring Break.” So maybe I’ll finish up Bob and turn that in, or postpone Bob until Saturday, and do a self-portrait of me moping around at work.