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

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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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

Propel water sketch

People sketching

These aren't as loose as I was striving for, but I think that's a work in process. I'm so detail oriented that I really have to consciously force myself to draw looser.

Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils
Micron pens

Rainbow quilt

I like how the side of the quilt hanging off the bed came out. I paid more attention to the details in this drawing more than the others I've been doing lately. In otherwords, it was a drawing, not a sketch. I'm not sure what I could improve about the top of the quilt, but the perspective is a bit off. I think it'll just take more practice. Surprisingly, it was the perspective in the headboard and footboard that gave me the most trouble, as you can probably see. The quilt actually has a lot more color in it than is indicated here, but I only have 8 Albrecht Durer pencils, and there's only so many combinations one can do in a reasonable amount of time. When I add to my collection, I am definitely picking up a purple. The quilt has lots of red purple, pink, red, normal purple, and bluish purple that I wasn't quite able to pull off with my limited expertise and palette.

Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils
Moleskine sketchbook

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

Parched - 1/18/08

My first watercolor since... I don't know, probably third grade. For Christmas I picked up some very cheap watercolor pencils by Staedler. When I say cheap, I mean cheap. I got 12 pencils for $3; these are definitely student quality, or a quality worse than student quality. Anyways, I bought these pencils simply because I had never heard of water color pencils and because I had started messing around with pen and ink and had seen the gorgeous pen and watercolor combos. This painting is horrible, one that I would be embarrassed to show anyone in person, but the internet lends me that lovely bit of anonymity. I'm proud to show off my horrible work, as long as I don't have to see people's reactions.

Doing this painting (is it a painting or is watercolor still referred to as a drawing? I'm going with painting, after all, I used a brush.) brought home to me that:
1) I don't like the pencils, but I really like the medium
2) I remember now why I never drew in pencil during high school

Frankly, my pencil drawing abilities are horrible. I like charcoal for it's smudginess, it's messiness, and above all, the ability to blend with my fingers. Colored pencils are so refined, so non-blendable with hands. Don't get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for those who can draw well in pencil, probably because I can't at all. I ooh and ahh over the pretty drawings. With watercolor, I think I'm going to have to force myself to get over my aversion to pencils. I love seeing the crisp lines blur and transform into rivets of color.

To this end, yesterday I went to ArtMedia and purchased 8 of the Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils. I've heard great things about these pencils on the EDM boards, so I thought I'd give them a try. I was thinking about buying the 12 pack, but I didn't want to spend $18 and bought separately they're nearly the exact same price as the kit. I did pick my 8 colors from those offered in the 12-pack, and the next 4 will be the colors offered there as well. I'll just add 2 - 6 pencils every time I get paid, which works out to once a month.

I do like how the sand dunes/hills in this drawing have a good color variation in them. The sky was good until it went to white rather than lighter blue. That's just a matter of putting more color in that area. The one thing I really don't like is how the tree turned out, or more specifically the tree's shadow I tried to do. It just made it look like the tree had black tree branch like smoke rising from it's topmost branches.

Materials
Canson Watercolor 140lb CP
Staedtler Watercolor pencils