Lately I’ve been asking myself whether it is worth it to take some time off to do drawing and illustrations each day (amateurish ones of course). Shouldn’t I be focusing on some other priorities such as trying to make more income for my upcoming graduate studies, or spend more time studying and understanding the professional field I’m heading into.

However, browsing through the various artistic community and seeing everyone constantly producing such beautiful artwork has definitely spark my envy at this craft. I realised that if I ever want to achieve that level of consistency and dedication to this hobby, I need to practice, and practice, and practice, and practice. I justified that this time for drawing is time well spent, because I feel relaxed and happy when colouring and building pictures with simple lines.

Starting with the basics again, I refer to the second lesson from the doodle book that teaches how to draw human portraits – Shapes and faces. Emotion and facial features can be a daunting thing to capture when drawing portraits. So the book starts on a easy-going level of simply creating comic-like expressions on different shapes.

It asks me to fill up the page with bold drawings, so I decided to go one step further and practice more than it instructed.

In this practice, I definitely drew some expressions that I’ve never tried before. The main lesson here is that the position of eyes, nose, and mouth can make a huge difference on expressiveness.   Plus, I snuck a few of my penguins into the array of faces.

What do you think? Try this exercise out in your own sketchbook!