I had another sketchy day today. It was another one of those days when I seriously had to consider whether I wanted to keep up with all of the various challenges or drop at least one of them. It’s a Thursday, which means that it’s my self-imposed figure drawing practice day. It’s the 8th of the month which means that it’s Draw a Bird Day. It also means that it’s the 8th day of the #Inktober and #Drawlloween challenges and the #drawlloween prompt for today was “zombie”.

I suppose I could have tried combining some of those. As long as I drew the full body of a zombie I could have just called that my figure drawing for this week. I think I would have missed my mannequin though. Mr. Mannequin might have been sad if I went a week without asking him to pose for me. I couldn’t have that. Alternatively I suppose I could have drawn a zombie bird. That would have made for a fairly Halloweeny Draw a Bird Day. In the end I didn’t do either of those things though.

Coincidentally, my new brush pen just so happened to arrive in the mail today. That was a pretty nice stroke of luck for me. Obviously the first thing I wanted to do was test out the new pen. How convenient that I felt obligated to draw three sketches today. It gave me some quality time with my new pen.

I drew the mannequin first, then the bird and last was the zombie. The new brush pen is definitely going to take some getting used to. It’s very different from the felt tip pen I had been drawing with so far. I was having some trouble with it for these three sketches. I’ll have to learn how to control it a bit better but I’m still pretty excited about it.

The mannequin sketch was a life drawing. I’m going to blame the terrible proportions on how weirded out I was with the pen at first. The bird sketch was based on a photo from Something To Draw submitted by Bram van Broekhoven. I’m afraid it doesn’t look much like the photo though. After that I spent a long time looking for a zombie photo I liked. Surprisingly I couldn’t find anything on Google images that I was happy with. I also didn’t find any pictures of people I felt like zombieifying. In the end I decided that I’d still get good pen practice if nothing else just trying to draw my own zombie. So the zombie sketch is my first sketch in quite a while drawn without a reference photo. My husband informs me that it’s pretty bad, I suppose it’s at least better than my last zombie sketch though. That’s something, right?