Niemann’s sketches caught my attention instantly, and this is easily the sketch I’ve been most excited about. That is, until I sat at my desk and tried to make a Sunday Sketch of my own.
I had nothing.
It was unbelievable to me! There are so many possibilities that come with this prompt! You can take just about any object and incorporate it into an illustration if you have a little imagination! Yet not one thing that I tried seemed good enough. I didn’t want to be a copy-cat (that’s the last pun, I promise), nor try the first thing that came to mind if I didn’t find it clever. I must have tried every single object on my desk, ranging from a star made out of highlighters (which was too big for my piece of paper) to a movie theater made out of my phone (Which had angles that were too complicated to conceptualize). At long last, I grabbed my computer mouse and thought it would be funny to turn that into its animal counterpart.
When I was a kid, I’d always draw what I call a “teardrop mouse” with big Dumbo-like ears (I only found out years later, much to my chagrin, that this isn’t what mice actually look like), so my computer mouse fit perfectly into the scheme. Because I’d already done graphite and digital art, I opted for charcoal despite the simplicity of the sketch. There were two motivations behind this:
First, I thought that it’d be interesting visually to make the background grey, the cat black, and the mouse white, each stretching to one end of the grayscale, while my computer mouse would add that burst of color… purr-ple (okay, I lied. That was the last pun.).
Also, one of the things that stood out to me about Niemann’s Sunday Sketches was the fact that they were in several different mediums, everything from oil pastels to a simple marker, so I figured experimenting a little with charcoal wouldn’t be amiss.
Overall, I had a lot of fun with this, and was constantly surprised by the difficulty at each step. Even writing this blogpost took me several attempts, but I’m glad I was able to get past the block and create something that I’m proud of.
FUN FACT: If you look closely, you can see my signature on the top of the drawing, backwards, which is how I originally made the drawing. However, the picture flipped when I took it, and I was surprised to see how much better it looked with the cat paw on top!
The Secret Language of Sabrina 