Art Post - PenUp Challenge 30 Sep 2026

 

Theme: Gummy (as in the style of sweet/confectionary)

I would like to be able to say that I was able to make and enter my picture into the challenge on the app, and I know this post is a bit late as I was planning on making it yesterday evening, but "finishing" off my picture to as much as I could do took me until 4 am this morning.

Without any further explanation, here is what I was able to create on the theme of Gummy.

The idea for this was picture came from a desire to want to extend the theme to include drawing a person, and aiming for the anime style.  On the one hand I think it works for the most part, on the other, I still feel it looks novice.  From drawing this I learned several areas that definitely need to be improved.  As for the idea and framing, I think it mostly works, but shading, body proportions, perspective and lighting all need some work.

Working on this picture over the last 2 weeks has also taught me how long it can take to really create the kind of art I want to be able to make.  This piece has taken about 20 to 30 hours of work to create, and it could take me another 30 just to try and improve the bits I think aren't right.

To start with, the initial idea came from thinking abstractly what gummy sweets mean to me.  As with most people, gummy sweets were often enjoyed as a child.  They are sweets that are designed to be cute and sweet.  So my mind jumped to the idea of having a character being fed a gummy sweet by a tower of gummy bears.

It took a bit of time to settle on a pose, scale and framing, and the background was mostly an afterthought, but eventually, the piece began to feel like it was coming together.  One of the biggest challenges was trying to draw the character, and I still don't think it's really that good, but with the deadline passed and my having a limited current skill for drawing, this is as far as I got.

If I was to review my piece, here is what I think I did pretty well:

• The Shape and style of the hair is OK
• The Character probably has the best pair of hands I've ever drawn in my life
• The shape of the leg and foot are pretty well balanced
• The stack of Gummy Bears are fairly well presented
• The Character's expression came out OK, and the focus of their vision is also OK

For what needs work, or that I think I didn't get quite right:

• The shading and colouring, while I don't think there is anything overly bad about the colours I've used, I feel that the shading is a little bit off or inconsistent with what I think would be good or appropriate for the picture.  For now this is likely an experience issue rather than a case of not knowing how to do it.
• The character proportions feel off, while the various parts of the character are, I think, fairly well drawn, together as a whole body, I think I don't quite understand the proportions well enough yet to be able to draw a body effectively.  Either the body overall is too long for the character's look, or the limbs are not matching the scale of the torso and head.  To me the arms and hands are too small in relation to the rest of the body.
• The bears and background, need improvement.  The stack of bears needs a bit more attention to detail to refine the shapes of a couple of the bears, and the background was more an afterthought that had very little effort in drawing and shaping it.  This happened due to the remaining time I gave myself to be able to create the picture.
• The final composition of the picture also needs more time and effort.  This morning when I was doing the "finishing" touches I tried to desaturate the background and add a fade to white to better ensure the character and the gummy bears were the visual focus.  While I think this kind of worked, I need to better understand how to refine and finish a picture.

Overall, I don't think this picture is a bad picture, but it almost certainly isn't good enough to fit the standard I would like to get to.  I also hope that the 20-30 hours I spent on this piece will also become easier, and less, as I become more practiced at doing drawings like this.

It's a shame I wasn't able to get it done in time to submit it to the PenUp challenge, because I think it might have got some kind of response.  Looking at some of the challenge posts, a lot of them were specific drawings of gummy bears, so I think my slightly different spin on the idea would have made it stand out a bit, regardless of the limited quality because of my skill and experience.

Feel free to leave feedback.