Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Back to the Drawing Board... Or Sketch Book in this Case


Since I began getting back into art in June of 2012 thanks to the ICAD blog challange, my rusty skills have sped forward by leaps and bounds.  I went from being thrilled that I could paint a flat looking pansy on an index card to painting quite realistic looking animals, fruits, and flowers.  However, I still have a lot of room for improvement.  


For example, most of the animals I draw and taken from a single reference photo, and thus are basically copies of a photograph, though I do usually change up the background.  Now, they are, in my opinion, good, hand drawn copies, but they are still copies.  I have to always be sure to get royalty free, creative commons licensed photos so that I'm not violating someone's copyright.  



What I'd like to do is to be able to look at several different photos of, say a wolf, and using them as reference ONLY draw my own wolf that is not an exact copy of any of the photos.  So, I've decided to make myself start keeping a sketch book again.  In this I will study whatever it is I plan to paint next.  Right now I already have two drawings of eagles on my stretched canvas, both of which are the aforementioned "copy-type" drawings.  I will finish these, but in the mean time I think I will also begin really STUDYING eagles so that maybe I can do a third painting after that is truly, completely,  my own creation.  



I began my sketch book today, but today I didn't study any particular thing for a painting, rather, I studied the hardness scale of my graphite drawing pencils.  In the large squares, I first took the pencil and drew its number, then I began scribbling very lightly and pressed harder as I scribbled to the right, I did this with each of my pencils from 4H to 8B.

Then along the bottom of the page I alternated each pencil, but kept the pressure that I applied to it the same, I also labeled the scribble line on the bottom of the page to show what kind of pencil.  On the bottom of the page, I pushed down at a normal "writing" pressure for me all way across  so any change in darkness is from the pencils themselves.




God bless you!

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Lots of New Art, Nicer Images, Prints Available!

Since the last time I wrote on this blog I've created a lot of new art.  I've also gotten better digital images of my work, images that are print-worthy.  You can check it all out and purchase art prints here:

Some samples can be seen in this slide show:

  
Art Prints