romance tropes IRL
15 Jul 2018 06:26 pmI was reading yet another one of those romance plots where A finds out that B has been in love with them for a long time by unexpectedly getting to flip through B's sketchbook and discovering that most (or all) of the pictures are of A. It had a bit more detail than that, described a bunch of poses and how some of them were amazingly realistic and some of them were just sketches and a lot of them were studies of A's hands etc etc etc and I was thinking that sounded fake, and that what you draw studies of in your sketchbook by no means necessarily represents what you hold dear.
It didn't even occur to me until a full day later that the one thing I doodle the most often is my wife. I don't often properly draw her, like a life study or a serious attempt at realism or a portrait, but I prefer to sketch and doodle in a more cartoony style most of the time and she has been my default subject for ten years.
I mean, she's still less than half of the drawings and there are still a lot of spots where you'll find twenty pages in a row of, like, fantasy armor or Hungarian and Czech embroidery, but those are because of projects I was thinking about at the time. There are probably three cartoons of her on scraps of paper just on the fridge, and all of these doodles were saved from the drawing app I keep on my phone:

But then I made the mental leap back to romance tropes and I thought: what if the love interest found an artist's sketchbook full of the kind of pictures I draw of Wax - quick doodles of them making funny faces and capturing ridiculous poses, and little comics of them looking silly?
It doesn't seem nearly as romantic, granted, but it could be great.
It didn't even occur to me until a full day later that the one thing I doodle the most often is my wife. I don't often properly draw her, like a life study or a serious attempt at realism or a portrait, but I prefer to sketch and doodle in a more cartoony style most of the time and she has been my default subject for ten years.
I mean, she's still less than half of the drawings and there are still a lot of spots where you'll find twenty pages in a row of, like, fantasy armor or Hungarian and Czech embroidery, but those are because of projects I was thinking about at the time. There are probably three cartoons of her on scraps of paper just on the fridge, and all of these doodles were saved from the drawing app I keep on my phone:

But then I made the mental leap back to romance tropes and I thought: what if the love interest found an artist's sketchbook full of the kind of pictures I draw of Wax - quick doodles of them making funny faces and capturing ridiculous poses, and little comics of them looking silly?
It doesn't seem nearly as romantic, granted, but it could be great.