Biker Sketch #1: Candida Louis

When I was a kid, I used to be fairly good at art, made a lot of flowers and Gods and other cute stuff and people seemed to like it.

In 10th class, our Biology teacher gave us an assignment during the summer vacation to draw a few animals. I took it a bit too seriously and spent hours perfecting my work. Back in school after the vacation, I couldn’t wait for everyone to see what I had made.

The teacher came in and started checking people’s stuff. Soon my number came in. When she opened the book, her first expression was that of shock. It slowly changed to a careless smile and she said “Why did you waste so much time on these?”.

At that time I did not have the vocabulary to express the feelings inside me, but now I can tell you with surety the words inside my head, if I had known these words back then.

“What the fuck dude?”

I more or less gave up on drawing after that.

Some 12 years on, something went wrong somewhere today and I thought of doing something again. Lately I’ve been facing major problems with my eyes for a number of reasons, one of which seems to be the amount of time I spend looking at screens. The idea today was to stay away from the phone, laptop and TV as much as possible. It was raining outside, and I watched the drops bunch together and fall off the railing in slow motion for a while, and then decided it was time to sketch.

The first thing that came to my mind was a bike, any bike. The major inspiration here was from this guy called Prankur Rana, who I’ve never met and never spoken to. I follow his work on Instagram, and I like it. However, I had just some paper and a pencil to work with, so decided to stay away from anything too colorful.

It’s not a bad thing to look up to skilled people, but it’s far too easy to try and follow them, do something, realize it’s shit, and then lose all confidence in yourself.

And then I remembered.

Last time when Candida was here, I had taken some photos of her. The idea was to try and make a photo album of her trip, but it somehow never came through. I think the reason for that is fairly basic, I find myself incapable of doing anything for someone else. This is one of the reasons why I left IT, there was no selfish interest in there to satisfy.

So I pushed through the photos and found one that looked easy.

As you might have noticed by now, the final sketch didn’t exactly went with the photo as far as realism goes, but I like where it ended up. Realism is easy, being able to see beyond the photo and try to express it in 2D is not.

It took me about 2 hours to make this, but it’s 2 hours that I didn’t spend in a staring match with some screen, and I am happy for that. I enjoyed it, and maybe I’d make more in the future.