I’m excited for the next Fandom Fitness drawing. We are back to a fictional character, Storm from Marvel Comics. But I pull from real life sources.
I did a whole bunch of research for this character, I read her whole back story and it’s changes over the years. Then I looked at all her 20 or so costume changes through the comics. She was introduced in 1975, the year I was born, so there is a ton of data to understand.
The challenge here is that I didn’t want to pull from the recent movies where Halle Berry plaid storm. Plus I didn’t want to draw a comic book version of this character, I want to do a realistic rendering. Lastly I don’t like that her character, born from a Kenyan princess and an African-american journalist, looks more like a white woman in the comic books.
So I pulled from many sources and came up with my own interpretation of Storm. I was heavily influenced by the current racial tensions in America, the speeches of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, especially this one, and this awesome post about the inconsiderate portrayal of storm in comics.
My Storm will have nappy hair, Kenyan features and an inner strength her character deserves.
I’m pulling the face from the actress Lupita Nyong’o, who had a role in the Black Panther movie and because she is absolutely gorgeous.
The costume will be the older white costume she wore back when I collected comics. The Jim Lee Storm costume.
I could have continued all night on this drawing that is how motivated I am to do it. But I have to eat and exercise and spend time with my family, they are the most important.
You can check out all my previous fandom fitness drawing on my drawings page. I’m proud of, almost, all of them.
I don’t do these so often so my progress in getting better on them is super slow. I constantly question their purpose until I try to draw something from memory then I understand why I really need to focus on memory work.
You would think that a simple box like this battery charger I drew would be easy but I’m sad to say that it was more challenging that it should have been. This is why I do daily sketches of simple object. I’m trying to hone my skills in all different artistic modalities.
The daily composition from memory is from a Daily Burn. Pattie and I live Greg Cook’s mobility workouts and we do them at least once a week so I tried to draw him doing a movement from my memory.
It didn’t go so well…
I couldn’t let the daily composition stand at that. I needed to draw Greg Cook from the video and see what I missed. Turns out I missed a whole lot.
I drew him in simple shapes like I’m learning from Steve Huston’s book.
I went back to the beginning of part 2 in Steve Huston’s book where he begins to break down the figure into its parts. The purpose of this is to read the material and actually put it into practice using my bank of model images. Just reading the book and doing some drawing is not enough I need to convert all that he is saying into my visual memory and the only way to do that is copious amounts of practice.
I’m so passionate about my interpretation of Storm and my motivation for practice is higher than it has ever been in my life!
Recommitting and remembering why I’m working on the exercises in Nicolaide’s book, why I’m working on the exercises from Steve Hustons book and not get too distracted by other ideas. Stay committed!
I’m learning so much from watching artists like Jeff Watts on YouTube just draw and answer questions.
