Drawing Stick People Pictures

I have been drawing these little pictures for about a year now, in order to accompany my writing and brighten up pages.

The purpose was to quickly illustrate an article with an appropriate picture, without trying to find copyright free material or spending hours trying to take my own pictures.

The benefit, to me, of doing this is that I am creating my own unique collection of pictures which I can recycle with a variety of captions to accompany whatever I am writing about.

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A year is always a good time to look back and reflect, and hopefully see any achievements over that period.

This is my journey of drawing as a very amateur artist - from hesitating stumbling beginnings to a more confident approach.

It's how I discovered what worked for me and where I think I got to.

The downside is that I have to put in some real rough stuff, which is where I started, before I can get to where I am at now. Yes, you may say "but that's still rubbish". However that's the price an artist pays, even when you are not a real one.

Anyway, even if my drawing hasn't improved, my confidence or bravery has.

I was not an artist.

I am still not an artist.

I never will be an artist.

To me, an artist is someone who can really draw. Proper figures, landscapes - anything that looks pretty much like the thing that they were supposed to be drawing.

Although...

Arguably anything can be art. So even a blob on a piece of paper - if it's the right blob by a recognised 'artist' - can be art.

Hmmm. Enough excuses already.

When I put my badly drawn profile picture up it was intended to say "I don't give a hoot for fancy pictures".

My writing was so fabulous what did I need a picture for?

Well. I am a little wiser now re the writing thing. Sure, it's still fabulous in my mind, but it ain't that good.

The funny thing is that as I announced myself to the HubPage world a few people said "love your profile pic". I hadn't expected that. I allowed for the fact they might be being sarcastic.

After a number of these I thought that strangely, they do like it.

Weird. That gave me an idea...

So I did the trash can above.

A lot of painstaking effort for me to get something that resembled a trash can.

I spent a lot of time on it, and it still didn't really look right to me. Drawing, when you haven't any talent, haven't learnt, and haven't practiced - is hard work.

So, I got it to a point where I thought "sod this" and put it on an article.

It's purpose was mainly to separate the text.

To the right is another hard work early effort. It's rubbish and I have never liked it. It combines the inability to draw, with a too small original picture, drawn in Biro.

But I have to show the early stuff to show how I developed.

Despite the awfulness of Pen and Ink above, no one rubbished me for it.

That's not because it's not awful, but because people are generally fairly kind. No one complimented me on it either.

At this stage I'm still thinking I need pictures to space out text. I'm not really thinking of pictures as a selling point in themselves.

Just as well.

So I tried doing better drawings, with some colour, to see if that would help.

The MLM pyramid is a low point in my journey, both as an artist and a writer. I was thinking I could put any old crap on the internet and make some money.

Some people can. It didn't work for me though.

At this stage in my 'artistic' development I'm finding it fairly hard.

I figured I needed to draw realistic pictures that were as lifelike as possible.

That is a considerable ask for anybody, let alone someone who had done no drawing ever, apart from the odd doodle.

I think the London picture to the right represents the pinnacle of that stupidity on my part.

I'll tell you what's wrong with it, in my opinion.

It looks amateur and childish. It is not any good. It took way too long and it doesn't convey enough, considering the amount of effort.

I got fed up with trying to draw properly.

It wasn't going to happen.

Although I had invested in some crayons, the addition of colour did not suddenly propel me into the canon of great artists as I had hoped it would.

So I went back to stick.

My stick profile had been well received. Could I get away with drawing stick figures instead?

Stick figures are easy and quick.

I dashed these up and put witty captions underneath.

It was 'good enough' or so I thought.

Knocking these out enabled me to carry on with my true love, writing, while spending as little time as possible on drawing anything.

At this point in my 'career' I thought that the numbers game was the most important thing. Lots of writing, lots of pages and hopefully, lots of income.

Oh, and lots of poor quality stickmen of course.

While I was in my 'shoddy' period I accidentally produced something that I thought was quite neat.

A simple image that meant more than the few lines on the page.

A proper graphic perhaps.

It was something that I was actually proud of. Something that if I saw on someone else's page I might think "cool", rather than ignore.

It gave me pause for thought. If I could simply create a picture that worked then maybe that was the right direction for my pig headed efforts at making my own illustrations.

Remember that I am looking for the easy route here. I don't want to spend hours on drawing. I just want to accompany my words with pictures that are my own.

I stopped using Biro for my drawings and bought some proper felt pens.

This gave me a stronger image to scan and made a bolder statement on the page.

I thought about reduction in drawing. This may be obvious to graphic artists, but I am not an artist. Instead of trying to draw lots, my aim became to draw little. The fewer the lines required, the better the image would be.

Compare the two giraffe pictures.

The first is my old child style drawing, the second is my new 'graphic' style.

It still doesn't quite work, and I am not that keen on it - but it demonstrates my thinking.

Less is more.

On reflection, I quite like the 'Child' giraffe. But to admit that would spoil my argument.

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After the Picasso style stickman I had a new confidence.

For me it worked.

So I deliberately set out on my stickman course.

The stickman is a recognised form of 'art' anyway, so my excuse would be that I was doing them from choice rather than neccessity.

What I found was that using the simplest drawing possible I could start to represent pretty much anything I needed to.

The effort came from thinking rather than drawing, and the page impact was as good (in my opinion) as if I had spent hours trying to draw something properly.

And so to the point of this page.

The reason I felt like writing it.

I did a drawing today that ticked all my boxes. It's 'only' a stickman but it could mean a whole load of different things.

IF, and I suppose the jury is still out... IF a stickman can be moving then there is no limit to what can be done with a few simple lines on a page.

Anyway. I guess there's no stopping me now.

By accident, I have stumbled into something I can do, which I think adds to my articles.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for viewing.

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