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.

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.

The Nameless Cheetah - 2/27/08

I bought this cute stuffed animal at the Vienna Zoo. I like how his spots came out noncircular, and instead are more realistic looking. I'm happy with his muzzle even though the brown shading is a bit drastic and his head is a bit messed up. His right (the closest one) ear gave me incredible difficulty. Do you see the white that outlines the black on the left? That's not supposed to be there. That resulted from be drawing and redrawing his ear over and over in pen. I'm trying to not be as obsessive about perfect positioning and proportion, which is why I started in pen. Pen is permanent; I will not be obsessively erasing over and over in order to get the perfect line. I need to have better results on the first try, and look for the whole general shape rather than get nitpicky, and pen is the perfect medium to force me to do this. When I want to do a more serious drawing/painting, the kind that takes you more than an hour, I will sketch it out in pencil first.

His right front paw appears to be incredibly big and out of proportion. The problem was that it was laying on it's side, and what needed to be drawn was the entire bottom, where the other paws got a bit obscured by the surface they were resting on. It's actually the right size, it just doesn't look like it. It's a bit like drawing a person's hands in front of their face; they always look very large.

Materials
moleskine sketchbook
Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils

EDM Challenge 37: Keys

I couldn't get the ink to scan dark enough, so I ended up turning up the shading which made the paper appear a bit more yellow than it is.

January 6, 2007

I couldn't sleep, so I sketched this little thing. I'm not quite happy with the way it scanned, so I may rescan it. I was going to add watercolor to it, but it was 4 in the morning and by the time I finished this I just wanted to sleep.

Work sketches (prt 2)

Another chair, this time in ink. This was the first drawing I did using Micron pens, or any pens at all. It definitely illustrated how different pens were in comparison to pencils and charcoal, which I'm a bit more comfortable using. However, I love the end effect that pens have, especially in combination with watercolor, so my sketchbook will have lots of pen and ink drawings. My crosshatching and everything definitely has room for improvement, but I think I captured the essence of the chair nonetheless. With many of my drawings, especially ones I struggled with, I often write a bit of commentary about what I learned to do/not to do. It may be a bit cheesy, but I figure that my sketchbook is for me and is for me to learn so it doesn't have to all be archival quality. I really agree with the idea that your sketchbook should be somewhere you feel safe to experiment, to go crazy, and try and fail without feelings of shame.

High school art (prt 2)

More art I did a few years ago during high school. This was my first stippling project, something I'd like to do more of.