Birthday Card Fail! Drawing #7, #8, #9, #10

For my last birthday, my girlfriend's 8 year old daughter, Mika, gave me a birthday card she put a lot of work into. I felt I needed to do the same for her, and gave her the biggest fail card ever.

I had a vision for this card. She loves the Zelda games on her Nintendo DS, so I figured I would draw her as Link in my favorite style:


I would even draw our dog, Hurley, flying above her as a fairy.


This should have been pretty easy. I got out my sketchbook, and started trying to draw her in some sort of action pose.

First I thought her swinging down on a rope would be cool...


It never looked right to me. So I thought I would try just using an action pose I found of a knight wielding a sword, and translate it.


Okay that looks even more fucked, and I couldn't figure what to do with the arm NOT wielding the sword.

Fuck it. I'll just draw her standing and smilling. Yeah.



So there I had my rough pose. Now I could redraw it, tighter, on the card stock I had. Face was a little wonky, but I was pretty sure I could fix it. I only had ONE piece of card stock, so it had to be perfect the first try.

So I redrew the drawing and I liked it. I fixed the parts I didn't like in the rough, and it just had an over all stronger pose. (sorry no pic for this)

I now had to color it in. I borrowed some crayons, and looking at the assorted colors, figured this could look really cool.



I hadn't used crayons since I was 6. Holy fuck they suck. The Crayons smeared the pencil. When I tried to fix the pencil by erasing it, it smeared black. I tried to cover the black with more crayon - press harder with the crayon... it just looked awful.

So I figured I would just take my pen I use to doodle with, and black ink it... try to save it with a good outline. Well that didn't work either. The wax from the crayon gimped up the pen.

So I grabbed a sharpie! That will fix it!

The sharpie looked like ass.

I looked at it finished and was sad. the original, decent sketch was gone. I didn't even bother adding in Hurley.



I was thinking of throwing it out, but then realized I wouldn't have a chance to make another. I decided to give it to her anyways, and wrote "Happy Birthday" on it... but I didn't plan ahead and had to cram the "day" of "Birthday" tight together in the end.

The face looks flat and wonky! Sure, part of this was having to use a sharpie, thus giving her wonky eyes, but still...

And is that a shadow, or is she hovering over a hole and about to fall?

Maybe!

Oh well.

I filled in the rest of the card...



Yeah... Sorry about the CAR Mika... I even SPELLED "Card" wrong. Oh, I also missed the "n" in "would't"

Nice.

Ah well, she loved it anyways.