Inktober Day 25: Buddy

When I was little, my mom used to buy me lots of coloring books and crayons because I loved coloring so much she said it was pretty much a no stop activity for me.  I especially liked how the outside lines of a picture were always fatter than the inside lines that were skinner.

So today when the Inktober prompt was BUDDY, I already had a great idea of what I wanted to do.  I wanted to make something that had to do with Hallowe’en but also friendly, not scary.  But how do you make Hallowe’en friendly, not scary?  Well, for one thing, you make sure if there’s faces in your Hallowe’en picture, those faces are going to be happy faces, not grinning scary faces.

Then you have to figure out who would be buddies and for me that was easy.  A Jack O’Lantern that was happy (not a bad one like in the Irish myths) and friendly would probably be friends with a happy skeleton head, right?  That’s what I thought, so I made sure this afternoon that I made a nice picture of a Jack O’Lantern and a skeleton head with happy smiles.  Then I added a candle because candles are part of Hallowe’en, too.

So if you want to download this ink drawing I made so you can color it in or so you and your friends can color it in, you can do that.  Maybe someday I’ll do a whole bunch of coloring pages and put them in a book, but right now, it’s just this ink drawing so I hope you have fun coloring it and then putting it up on your refrigerator or in a window or someplace like that. Have boatlods of fun with this!

Word prompt: BUDDY

Inktober Day 24: Dig

Over on the Inktober website, I looked at the rules again because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t breaking the rules by doing my Inktober drawing this way today.  What way?  I co-drew it with my big brother, Josh.

Here’s the thing.  Sometimes I want to draw something but I’m no good at drawing it yet even with boatloads and boatloads of trying.  Even Josh says he has trouble drawing hands and he’s a superly amazing artist.  I guess that means hands are the most hardest things on a person to draw (except for faces because if it’s faces, then noses are the most hardest thing to draw).

Anyway, I wanted to do a picture from way back when I was a little kid and sometimes my Grandpa Barrett, he was a fooler boy, and he would make me think something was real when it wasn’t like this one time when we had a archeology dig in his backyard and we found this prehistoric dinosaur chicken.  At least that’s what I thought we found, and my grandpa never said it wasn’t so I just kept on thinking it for sure was.

What happened is that he told me he heard sometimes people find arrowheads in their backyard gardens, so he wanted me to help him look for arrowheads.  He already had stuff put together to help dig up any arrowheads if we found them, but he said we had to be superly careful in case we found some important historical items while we were looking for arrowheads.

He had this wood tray with a handle on it and in the tray there was a wrecked paint brush (that’s in the picture in case you’re wondering) and a digging thing for planting flowers and a old toothbrush (for brushing dirt off any maybe artifacts if we found some) and string and busted chopsticks (in case we had to make a research grid if we found a crazy big artifact.  My grandpa even had a clipboard and paper and a pen on a string (so we wouldn’t accidentally lose the pen while we were arrowhead hunting).

Where I was digging, I found some bones and when I showed them to my grandpa, he said we had to be very careful getting the dirt off it.  I said, “I think this is a prehistoric dinosaur,” and he said back, “Could be.”   The more we cleared the dirt off it, the more I was pretty sure it was for sure a prehistoric dinosaur.  Then my grandpa said, “This looks like a chicken skeleton” and I was really excited because finding a prehistoric chicken dinosaur in a backyard was something I never heard of happening before otherwise it would be on the night time news!

Now you know the story of the picture Josh and me drew.

Like I was saying, I still don’t know how to draw hands so I asked Josh if he would draw a arm and hand for me.  The first thing he said was, “No” and it was because he always wants me to try things on my own first.  He helps me sometimes, but he never before this time draws something for me to have in my pictures.  So I said, “It’s going to be a co-drawing picture, not just a Missy Barrett picture, Josh.”  That’s when he said okay but only if I listened to him about how to draw hands.

He drew the arm and the hand for me, and he showed me how he used his own hand for a reference.  That was helpful but I still don’t think if I did the hand it would have looked any good.  Then he told me I had to do the shading of the hand and that’s how come the hand got messed up especially on the thumb because it didn’t look flat when Josh drew it, but it sure looks flat after I shaded on it.  Also, Josh reminded me that I had to put the shadow on the ground if I wanted the arm and hand to look right, and I kind of did that wrong because the shadow looks all wonky to me.  Josh says it looks okay to him.

I used this picture I found on the Internet of a chicken skeleton and then I did the easiest part of it and that’s the wing part.  I love eating chicken wings so I know a lot about the bones of a chicken wing.  I don’t know so much about chicken ribs or the chicken neck or anything like that.  That’s how come I made a chicken wing in the picture.  And plus, it’s way easy to do when you have a reference picture to help not make any mistakes.

Word prompt: DIG.

TAKE AWAY LESSON #1 FROM TODAY:  Reference pictures is one of the best ways to get a drawing right because you can see how what you’re drawing is supposed to look like in real life.  Okay, so Josh used his real life hand so that wasn’t a picture, but it could’ve been if I took a picture of it, and he called it a reference, so it counts like using a reference picture which is what I had for the chicken wing.

SPECIAL THANK YOU:  I want to thank my big brother, Josh, for co-drawing this with me which he never did before this drawing.  It’s not going to be a habit for me to ask him to co-draw with me.  It’s just that today I had to have a hand in my drawing and all my hand drawings were so bad you probably would never have guessed it was a real hand holding the used up paint brush, so thanks Josh!