DoodlePlanet Christmas Special

DoodlePlanet has become a regular haunt for me now, and I certainly didn’t want to miss the Christmas Special. Nine local artists contributed some fantastic works of art and raised over £200 for charity. The idea of using art to raise awareness and money for worthy causes is so inspiring and I hope to be asked to contribute someday.

For the first time I was lucky enough to arrive at DoodlePlanet with my lovely boyfriend, Dan, who had already planned his drawing for the evening.

I myself had decided on either “a sexy Christmas pin-up girl” or “some Christmas chibis”. My first DoodlePlanet event saw me bombing as I tried to draw a Halloween themed scene, and ended up cramming as many stupid little drawings onto the canvas as possible. My second outing, and I came home with a relatively satisfying Little Mermaid watercolour.

This time I drew four pictures and came home with two.

At first I made an attempt to create my chibi Christmas scene, but lack of interest and a nasty ink spill caused me to abandon it. However, it turned out to be popular with a lot of female students.

My second drawing was worse than the first, a charcoal scribble that I later used as a palette for my marker pens. I deliberately avoided taking a photograph of it.

For the third drawing I took inspiration from my twin sketchbook and tried to replicate/improve on a design for Taste the Blood’s EP cover. However, I became frustrated and angry when things didn’t go to plan; I lowered the girl’s arms too much and so ended up having to draw her breasts, which I had been intent on covering up. Also her face looked ridiculous. I grabbed a pile of charcoal and smeared the drawing with it, added some handprints and wrote the word “SEX” as the title.

At the time this had all been a big joke, and Dan and I had a laugh about it. But as it turns out it was quite a popular drawing that night. During the auction a group of men stated that they wanted to bid for it. Whether they were intoxicated or not didn’t matter to me, I was pleased as punch. Unfortunately, my work wasn’t in the auction.

So perhaps I had drawn this out of annoyance, or perhaps I had drawn it in order to provoke or offend. Either way people seemed interested by it. What irritates me the most about it though is how out-of-proportion the girl looks. Oh well, there’s always next time.

Finally, I found a seat on the floor, a small blank canvas and just relaxed, and came up with my best piece. Both an excuse to practice drawing girls and an excuse to practice tattoo placement, I wound up with this image of one of my original characters, who I like to refer to as Bluey, due to her blue dreadlocks. She’s sitting, being her usual cheeky self, showing off her body art, piercings, funky hair and tie-dyed t-shirt, and telling the world to flaunt it if you’ve got it, whatever “it” may be.

I’m pretty proud of this drawing (not the colouring however), and I’m confident that I will improve with each DoodlePlanet. I’m looking forward to the next one.

As for Dan he produced this amazing replica of the Afro Samurai. He really put every effort into it and it came out great considering the image was tiny on his iPhone! I’m so proud of him, and we both know he will get better and better the more he draws!

Until next time, Happy Holidays!