Al Fresco Art Day, Jan 12, 2020 -- Doing Drills and Buying My Book

Today I ordered a copy of my book from Amazon. Here’s a screenshot of my cart. It feels great to be ordering my own book. I’m really curious to see what kind of quality Ingramspark is giving to self-published authors. The eBook isn’t available on Amazon, but you can buy it through Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo.

The Al Fresco Art Club challenge of the day was to do some old-fashioned sketching drills. I chose to do some of the cartooning exercises in Jack Hamm’s Cartooning the Head and Figure. It’s an amazing book with 1,000+ examples. Jack had a fertile mind and a quick hand.

I skethed ears, heads, and babies. You gotta keep the ears and heads simple, and the babies cute. You keep a baby cute by drawing the head big and the body and limbs chubby. I chose this drill because I want to amplify my characters’ cuteness factor in the next book. Too often I stretched out Jimmy’s body and changed him for an eight-year-old to a teenager. To make sure that doesn’t happen in the future, I’ll be drawing plenty of big heads and little bodies over the next three months. That’s right, I said three months. I’m giving myself 90 days to complete the second book.