Daily Doodle Diary #13

Hi everyone, 

Here's another batch of my Daily Doodle Diary!

This batch is absolute chaos, hahaha.
I've been up and down in motivation and productivity the last few days, and this batch is a perfect illustration of this. 

Because I have been finding it hard to be inspired lately, I decided the last couple of days to only use pen and work from reference. I find that to be a great exercise to teach my eye to see shapes and volumes and proportions properly, and I have always seen a sharp increase in my skill level every time I have practiced that technique. Basically, when no inspiration is to be found, I go back to pure practice and learning. 

⇧ I was so STRESSED on that day that I just felt like doodling and letting my hand to its thing, which resulted in this mess of a spread, but honestly, it was all about automatic drawing, and it felt wonderful.
I used to draw lots of zentangles, and this brought back that pleasure to me. 

⇧ This is when I decided to just use pen with references for a few days. My references didn't look like this, they were simple photographs of people, but oftentimes when I use a reference, my brain will then extrapolate and find ways to make the drawing more my own, which, in this case, resulted in these drawings. 

Working in pen forces me to really look at my references and understand what I am seeing, and pairing this exercise with my daily doodling process, during which I try to be fast and concise, has helped me improve my drawing speed and my ability to reduce what I am seeing to its bare bones. 

I plan on keeping to this path for the month and see where it takes me. Since I am going on holiday soon, I want to try and make this process as streamlined as possible so I can make sure I keep drawing in the diary while on my break.
I would really like to be able to doodle some scenes from my holiday, and this technique is ideal for on the fly, quick sketching. 

We'll see how it all goes. 

In the meantime, I hope you are all well lovely people,

Do you have a favourite from this batch?
I'd say mine is 29. :)

<3