150 Steps Outside My Comfort Zone

This quarter I am lucky enough to be taking a class on storyboarding. Even though this course is about my ideal profession, I know it will be challenging for me. But that's good. The only way to grow is to work on things I know little about, to step outside my comfort zone. This weekend was a lengthy battle against one of my major weaknesses: perspective and layout design.

I won't spoil the whole five-part project for you---
Let me just explain what I had to tackle this week. Our class was asked to draw 150 perspective thumbnails of any architecture of our choosing. These experimental doodles will help us with our upcoming illustrations of scenes from three story options.

I chose to draw something a little Atlantian.... I drew ancient ruins underwater. Originally I had Greek architecture in mind, but my drawings quickly became tiny illustrations of India. Something about their buildings and statues seemed really interesting. I think out of the 150, my favorite concepts I toyed with were whale graveyards with Indian monuments.

This assignment was extremely challenging at first. Through out my life, I've avoided drawing layouts at all costs. Over time, I realized it wasn't as complex as I thought---I was able to wrap my mind around it fairly quickly. After a couple days, it felt pretty robotic; therapeutic, in a way. I don't think my thumbnails are stellar, but I'm very happy I made it through. This was very good practice.

Critique tomorrow night. We'll see where this goes.