Ah, I've still got "it." (Joke.)

No, I am clearly hell of out of practice. I haven't seriously tried to draw something since early high school, and I've never had good drawing "habits" of the sort I could fall back on in the first place (like reducing things to basic shapes and all that sort of nonsense... I'm a lousy drawer of action, baby).

Okay, so, as my first violently-shuddering baby steps back into the terrifying world of drawing, I've decided to try to do a little cartoon self-portrait of myself (just in case "self-portrait" didn't convey the subject). Now, I do understand that this could be interpreted as a rather self-aggrandizing move, but hear me out: I know what my face looks like, so I can actually focus on cartoonifying it rather than suffer the constant derailment I'd be subjected to by every little crag and jagged protrusion an unfamiliar face would present. So, my face it was.

That said, I found out I actually have no idea what I look like. Like, none. See, at best, I'm used to what I look like backwards, thanks to those lying bastard mirrors. Fixing this pretty much just involved flipping the hair and usually-cocked eyebrow, but a surprise it was nonetheless. And no sooner did I run headlong into clear that hurdle than I went about giving myself a Mexi-stache, a button nose, game-show-host hair, and a chin far too assertive to be realistic. Good thing I only use pen! (har) Finally, once I thought I got one at least halfway passable and decided to compare it to a photo, I couldn't tell if they were even remotely similar. It's like I'm blind (except that I can see).

So consider yourself warned: I may well have just drawn Jay Leno with a soul patch a hundred times and I would not know it.

Hopefully I'll be able to do a full cartoony body at some point, but that water's still well beyond my clearance level. For the time being, I'll stick to misrepresenting just my head.