Pictures that festered part #3

I took a bit of time to trawl through my Procreate files of old and found a few more gems of pure illustrated hatred to share with you.

Today I’m taking you back to the pond in my garden as a child. My pond was only 4ft square, but to me it was the most amazing thing we had and every weekend I’d pray for rain so the frogs came back.

I’d sit under my mums pergola, on a bench made by my father, looking in the murky water, completely thrilled every time I saw a flash of gold passing close to the surface.

This picture also reminds me of the horrendous pain I felt at the tiny age of 8, to see one of my treasured goldfish lying dead at the side of the pond thanks to our neighbours evil cat.

As you can tell, this picture is quite provocative for me. I miss that simpler time when the school holidays were spent enjoying hours of sunshine with a choc ice and spraying my friends with mums hosepipe. I have a daughter myself now and fully intend to live my childhood of fun again through her.

I know soon all she’s going to care about it WiFi, iPhones and gossip, but until that day I’m going to try and show her how much fun the old days WITHOUT connectivity were.

Back to the drawing. It’s another one I hate. I’m smiling as I type this because I’m a bit scared to post it, but hey, if I don’t put it out there for constructive criticism how will I ever learn or get better?

Let’s go straight in with the (few) pros;

The lily pad shading colours make me happy. As does the colour of the lilies themselves

That’s it. Yep. That’s all I can find to like. Here we go with the cons (the “how much time have you got?” section).

The water colour is terrible

The fish is so washed out it may as well be blended in to the water to look more like one of those orange flashes I saw in my childhood

The markings on the leaves are scruffy and haphazard

I have no idea why, but I made zero effort to finish off the edges of the flowers and it pisses me off. Why didn’t I blend them?

Look, overall there was promise for this idea. It’s a happy childhood memory that I was actually quite excited to try and draw.

I’ve failed miserably and created something that looks like my daughter drew it.

It is safe to say, for now at least, that I will not be revisiting this inspiration. I hate the original so much that I expect I won’t be able to bring myself to try again for some time.

If you have anything you’d like to say about it, I’d be grateful for any positivity, The negatives are already clear in my mind and don’t need to be hammered home at all.

Have a great day. Don’t draw things that are outside of your skill set!