Y U SO MAD?

After having a bit of artist's block for about 2 days I decided to follow my own advice and took my notebook in my purse to work. Now, since this is the holiday season my workplace is covered in snowflakes and Christmas trees and all that office decoration. So when I arrived early and finished my class prep with 20 minutes to class to spare I decided to take out my notebook and do some random doodling. I looked around, stared off into space for a while and then decided, well, let's go with cartoon Santa.
 
    I started with the hat first and it came out pretty good, I then drew the face. This is the part where I hit a wall, though. See, Santa has a very big, very specific looking beard, that I have no idea how to draw. So without thinking much about it I decided to switch from bearded Santa to a beardless someone else. I made the coat and then the pants and somewhere along the way the idea of a young boy formed in my head. So I changed the Santa hat to a winter one and called it a day.

    I knew ,though, that I didn't really want a happy looking kid but I didn't want a sad, mopey one either, unfortunately that's what I ended up with. I erased his face and decided to just go with the flow. So far this drawing was something that simply came to my mind. So after working on the coat and pants some more I just decided that this looked like a very bored young boy and drew him some droopy, cynical eyes.

   After finishing him up, doing the shading and going over some of the lines to define them better I looked at the finished picture and noticed that it was just a boy - no background, no composition, nothing to balance him out. So I looked a bit closer at him and wondered, doesn't this boy look like he's missing his teddy bear. His rough, scarred, angry, mad looking gangsta teddy is the perfect addition. For the drawing of the bear I looked at drawings on the net and two pictures caught my attention. One is a simple outline drawing of a teddy and the other a digital guide to drawing a busted, badly beaten teddy.  So after some trial and error to get the size and proportion right I did some shading and finished him up.

And here he is, my mad as can be teddy, fresh from the last fight where he beat the crap out of that stupid b%&# Barbie.

Teddy Out!