8 Maids a-milking

Last year, I had begun to illustrate this song and had a lot of fun doing it mostly because I like to draw birds. Then I came to this one - 8 maids a-milking. I had not had much (any) experience drawing people, I had never taken a life drawing course. And so I was somewhat overwhelmed at the thought of drawing 8 or more people doing anything. While I dithered over that, the entire season came and went and the moment was lost. I decided that perhaps I would postpone the project and spend the next few months practicing my figure drawing skills. While I dithered over that too, the entire season came around again! On one of my previous posts, a lovely supportive commenter suggested that when in doubt it helped to cartoon or do simple line drawings and have some fun with it. That seemed to be excellent advice in this case, and I also decided to just draw one figure doing the action and try to use symbols to represent the rest. It took quite a long time, this poor little maid was drawn and erased in her entirety four times. Trying to draw from my imagination also proved to be quite a challenge, I found. It's much more difficult than following the lines of solid object in front of you. So here is the first of the latter part of the song. And the lovely, supportive commenter was right, drawing that little cartoonish cow was a lot of fun!