Horse profile WIP

Still working on this one, so it's a little rough.

Cat eyes sketch

Ignore the spot on the drawing - I was drawing this while I ate mexican food.

Adventures in Graphite

I've never been a great pencil artist. When I first started drawing, I had this great animal drawing pencil book my parents bought me for christmas. I used it quite a bit and had a lot of fun, but was never very good. As a kid, I was more into drawing animals (horses) and doing other arts and crafts than specifically trying to tackle the pencil medium. In high school I discovered the greatness that is charcoal, and did that exclusively whenever I drew. This year, I have decided to put my best foot forward in tackling pencil drawing. So here it goes.
Quick sketches of cats. I purchased several drawing books for my birthday, and of course most of them were about drawing animals! Pencil is a lot harder than it seems.

Parrot

Owl

Bar Sketch

Low lighting + good booze = this drawing.

Purple Mountains

Ocean Cliffs

Ireland

This is a quick scene I did from my Ireland book. I buy those great photo guides to countries or areas at Goodwill and then use them as reference photos. Here's a quick pen and watercolor pencil one I did real quickly. I still suck at taking art photos. I'm not sure why.

Beach scene

Figure drawing - pen and pencil

Tried my hand at figure drawing. Now I remember why I hardly ever do it. :D I definitely need more practice, but I think for now I'll stick to birds and landscapes. I do really need to work on my pen technique though.

Raptor - Dry and Wet

I've done a lot of art in the last few months (mostly during breaks at work) and I haven't posted any of it. So I'm going to work on catching this blog up. My recent thing is to draw birds, mostly birds of prey. I'm not sure why I like drawing them that much, but I do. Here's a before and after of a raptor. The first photo is just the pencil, no water added. The last is after water has been added and has been layered.



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Great Blue Heron

Some Landscapes

This first landscape is nearly monochromatic. I'm trying to develop a looser style, or any style at all really. I think switching to traditional brushes with help me in that. It also might help when I start experimenting with actual watercolors in a tube rather than watercolor pencils. My sister gave me a couple of m. grahams watercolors for christmas, and I have an old reeves student set.

Speaking of traditional brushes, this watercolor I started using a traditional 1/2" flat in the endstages, for the wash of the sky and a few details. Mostly however, I used my waterbrush.


This second painting was done purely with traditional brushes. Actually, it was all done with my 1/2" flat. I really liked working with a flat, but it didn't hold water very well. It's a cheapie brush meant to be used for all mediums such as acrylic and oils. It came in one of those packs of four to five brushes you can get for about $5 - 10. I haven't worked with one of the larger rounds or puffs before, so I'm not sure if I'd like that more than a flat, but for now I like the idea of using a flat. Even if mine doesn't work so well.


I'm hoping to upgrade my brushes when I get my student loan money return. I won't be buying any 1" Kolinsky sables ($55! Kill me now, please), but for some of the smaller rounds the sable is only a few dollars more expensive than the synthetics. It might be reasonable to purchase those KS. I'm a bit torn between synthetic, synthetic blend, and Kolinsky sable (KS). I know watercolor brushes are supposed to be soft, but the one time I used a sable it was so soft I felt I couldn't control it. It just flopped around. I've never been a painter, but I'm more used to stiffer acrylic and oil brushes. On the other hand, I'm a bit leery about a synthetic. I've used the cheapie 1/2" flat synthetic I have right now for all of an hour and already want to replace it. Its water retention is decidedly lacking. However, this was also a very cheap brush that's meant for all mediums, so I'm not sure how much to attribute to the quality of the brush and how much to attribute to the type of fiber. But it does make be reconsider using a synthetic. I've heard their water retention is decidedly less than natural, that's why KS is considered by most watercolorists to be the "premium" fiber. It is also why it hasa premium price.

Right now I'm leaning towards a synthetic blend. It has better water retention than a purely synthetic brush yet has the body of an acrylic brush.

Macaw

Well, the good news is I found out the Derwent black actually isn't a double. It's a much bluer shade of black than the AD black, which is great addition to my pencils. The bad news is I have misplaced the reference photo for my oceanscape. So in light of working on that, I started and finished this one. I am in a strange bird drawing kick lately. This is the third one in two days. It is also the biggest and most developed. I could probably refine it a bit, but I'm trying to not obsess over the details, so I got it to a point that I liked it and then I stopped. It took about an hour and a half.

An oceanscape I'm working on

From Art Randomness

Small drawings

I loved drawing these birds. I'm definitely going to draw some more.

From Art Randomness

First painting in a long time

From Art Randomness

An updated palette

I received a 24 pack of Derwents for Christmas, which I love. Albrecht Durer is still my favorite, but Derwents come in a very very close second. They are deliciously smooth and vibrant. Amazingly, out of the pack of 24 I only had 3 doubles. Black and white, of which you can always use extras, and of yellow. This is my updated palette. I bought a few extra colors yesterday at ArtMedia (oh I just can't resist), so this palette needs to be updated again. However, I'm not sure when I'll get to that.

From Art Randomness