Author Archives: Dragon Co. (Austin Smith)

On Drawing Every Day

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I’ve been drawing every day for a while now. And I’ve got to say that it’s still pretty fun. I haven’t been going nearly as long as some people, though. I just find it exciting to come up with something different to draw every day. Something to freshen my mind. Every day I get to draw something new and exciting. And if I can’t think of anything, I can always do better at something I tried before, or look at it from a different angle.

My Notebooks almost used up.
My Notebooks almost used up.

Some people would say that it improves your drawing skill to draw all the time. It does to a point, but it depends on how you work it. I, being a cartoonist, prefer simple lines and shapes, so my drawing skill in the detail department hasn’t improved much. But in the time department I’m very much ahead. It takes me less than half an hour to do any given page a day, which is a major improvement over the hour it took before. And even a half hour is still the max: usually it takes ten to twenty minutes.

I started just to keep drawing things. I do cartoons every day and sometimes that gets boring, and sometimes I can forget how to draw some things. This helps with both. Though some days I don’t want to do it, like I don’t want to do everything else, but doing it feels so nice after the fact. Looking back over my sketchbook and being able to see a drawing for every single day is great. Seeing how I’ve progressed, or how much detail I put into one drawing, or the lack of detail that is left for the viewer to fill in, creating a personal emotional attachment.

Though it hasn’t helped me very much in the realm of my drawing skill, it has been a very rewarding experience, and I’m going to continue doing it. It is my hope to at some point amass a library of sketchbooks that I can thumb through. I hope that I do continue and I hope that you reading this will consider doing something similar. Whether it is to improve your drawing skill, just for the  love of drawing, or to get the satisfaction of doing something similar. I will continue to do so and I would love to see other people do so.

Speak Your Mind 92 #456-460

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QUESTIONS

1. Do you have an oily scalp?

2. What is one thing you could do to get along better with your friends?

3. have you ever seen a sunflower with the seeds still in it?

4. What are some things your family does together?

5. How tall is your father?

ANSWERS By: Austin Smith

1. Not really, my skin is very dry.

2. Not makes jokes about not caring about what they say.

3. No, I never have strangely enough.

4. Play games, eat, watch TV.

5. About 5′ 6″

Review – X-ACTO 3-hole binder Punch

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Sometimes you need to do stuff with your art that isn’t art stuff. Sometimes you need to file it away, or keep it safe in a cover, or organize it in a binder. If you’re looking to do the last one, then you might need the X-ACTO 3-hole binder punch.

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This semi-sturdy piece of transparent plastic is designed to fit in a binder and easily punch holes through a few sheets of paper. I stress a few because on the box it says the limit is three. And yes, even three sheets is very stressful to this thing, and after that it just starts tearing the paper.

I said it was plastic earlier, but the punching apparatus is actually a nice metal piece on a hinge. It is easily as sturdy as any other hole punch I’ve used. The hinge, though, is so close to the paper that it is what you have to use to get a nice clean straight punch line and because it is a hinge this is very difficult.

Off to the bottom there is a guide that you can place your paper on and it works well. There is also a flimsy piece of loose-fitting plastic that I assume is supposed to act as a guide so the paper stays down, though it will hardly do this job well and seems as if it will snap at any moment. It also jiggles unnecessarily. On the front is a 10-inch ruler, which would be nicer if it was ruled correctly, as it is, it is about a quarter of an inch short.

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And finally on the back are a pair of fold-out binder loops that will allow you to stick this thing in any 3-hole binder you desire, though they will make a horrible grating sound and the plastic they’re screwed into looks like it can break in a hurry. They will never break off the binder rings on their own though.

Really this is just a cheap hole punch. The actual punch is quite nice, but its housing is lacking. If you only need to punch a few sheets every once in a while this is alright. Any more hole punching and this thing will be useless. It will certainly break within a year or two but it is quite cheap. So if that is what you want or need from your hole punch, go right ahead, otherwise try something further up the ladder.