This doesn’t count as painting, right? Right.

http://www.deviantart.com/view/21830416/

This was just random practice at somewhat more cartoony faces, which we’ve established, I’m pretty bad at. You don’t want to know how many crappy malformed heads preceded these. Couldn’t duplicate any of ’em to save my soul, which may defeat the whole purpose. I dunno. And then there’s the matter of style, which seems really important to cartooning, and which I am totally ignorant of–so far as I can tell, I’m proceeding in the vague fashion of a illustrator who watched Disney movies as a child, mostly Americanized anime as an adult, and learned to draw from classic shlock fantasy and “How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way.” There is probably a name for this sort of unimpressive pedigree.* As when, in the past, I’ve doodled an anime head or two, I begin to feel as if I’m swimming in a vast sea of already established conventions and aesthetic shortcuts that almost everybody else already knows, which would make my jaunt much easier if I also knew them, or at least understood them well enough to know what pitfalls to avoid. I suppose I could unbend and pick up a book on the topic, but every work on the subject at the local Barnes & Noble appears to be a variation on “How to Draw Totally Really Amazing Manga That’s Better Than All The Other Identical Books On The Subject, We Swear To God,” a claim that I would be significantly more impressed by if the cover art didn’t always look like rather lackluster Teen Titans fan art. Not that I can talk, mind you.

Anyway, thoroughly random heads.

*Other than “Stick to realism, you poor misguided sod.”