Drawing One
Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Character
Every Day for a Month Challenge
I used to draw a lot, especially when I was a kid and all through my high school years. But then during college, working, then family, and “life” it just became rarer and rarer for me to sit down and draw. I went for probably 15 years with nothing more than a few Boba Fett helmets scribbled on napkins with crayons at restaurants! Then I started to dip my feet (or fingers?) back into art around 2018 - just before tragedy struck and we lost our home in a freak storm! During the next two years of rebuilding, then selling, then building our dream home I had a lot of time on my hands as all of my other hobbies were packed away in storage. Pencils, pens, markers, and paper were cheap and took up very little room, plus I had the spare time while we lived with my in-laws. So I got somewhat prolific then, but once we moved into our new place in 2020 (literally a week before the Covid 19 shutdowns) I started drawing less and less, to almost nothing.
I missed it. And often in my mind I would think of something I’d want to put to paper so I’d make a note on my phone. That list got longer and longer, but still “I just didn’t have the time”. Near the end of this past August I was standing in the checkout of Hobby Lobby with a picture frame in my hand and looked down and saw a small 4” x 6” sketch pad for $1.99. What the heck. I bought it with no plans on what exactly to do with it. The next few days I thought about these small sheets of paper back home on my desk, smaller than I’d ever used before, and what I should do with them. I decided that I wanted to go back to my roots, so to say, to draw some of the cartoon characters that I loved as a kid the most – classic cartoon characters from Hanna-Barbera studios! And I needed to challenge myself to keep me drawing! The challenge was sketching a different Hanna-Barbera character every day for one month. These would not be perfect drawings… just quick 15-25 minute pencil sketches that I would do each morning around 4:30 to 5:30am before any internet, emails, breakfast, or work!
Each morning after waking up I’d go to my desk, put on some glasses, turn on the lights, and tear a sheet of paper out of the small paper pad. I would randomly choose a character then look up animation model sheets that I had collected. Sometimes I’d just draw what one of the model sheet poses, and then sometimes I’d do a combination of poses or change things up a bit. The idea was do something quick and fun. I tried to mix up the characters on random days, as well, but I did take the time to do Batman on September 19th (Batman Day) – after all he was an H-B character on “The Superfriends”!
Click the video below to see the results of my month long art challenge:
Final thoughts… This was a fun project and also it was interesting to see how “some days you have it and some days you don’t”! The first few days at starting I was questioning doing this because some of them really sucked and I struggled with my lines. But about the fifth day I started getting more confident with the pencil. But I’d still have some bad days that I just wasn’t happy with what went down to paper. I kept going. And out of 32 drawings (Ok, a little over a month from August 24th to September 24th) there are a few that I really do like! It seems like the ones that I liked the most also went to paper the easiest… confident lines, quick decisions, and less erasing. That character was meant to be sketched THAT morning by ME. It was very fulfilling in a small way on a very early morning. And probably one of the best things about this project was realizing how therapeutic the exercise was. There was no music playing, no videos going on my computer. Just complete concentration with my pencil lead dragging across the white paper. Everything ongoing in my mind in those brief early morning sessions disappeared while I was drawing. Good things going on, bad things happening, whether I was hungry, sad, or happy – all gone. It was just me studying the model sheets and trying to recreate these classic cartoon characters that made me so happy while growing up. It was time well spent and it needs to continue.
The Hanna-Barbera characters that I chose to randomly sketch were:
1. Yogi Bear
2. Boo Boo Bear
3. Huckleberry Hound
4. Quick Draw McGraw
5. Captain Caveman
6. Wally Gator
7. Frankenstein Jr.
8. Fred Flintstone
9. Baba Looey
10. Snagglepuss
11. Dino
12. Scooby Doo
13. Hong King Phooey
14. Barney Rubble
15. Top Cat
16. Reddy
17. Atom Ant
18. Ruff
19. Jabberjaw
20. Mr. Spacely
21. Inch High Private Eye
22. Astro
23. Betty Rubble
24. Yakky Doodle
25. Doggie Daddy and Augie Doggie
26. Mr. Jinks
27. Batman (for Batman Day)
28. Wilma Flintstone
29. Muttley
30. Allstar Seaworthy
31. Rosie
32. Papa Smurf