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Sketchbooks: September 2020 (Part 2)
Happy Saturday! Posting one day after I last posted, ::gasp:: how is it even possible within this space-time continuum?! Anyway, here is part 2 of my sketchbook pages from September – right before moving to my house! <3 The wooden manikin hand I bought from Dick Blick was cool to study. It cause a light bulb moment: the pads of fingers are actually slanting 45 degree(ish) planes in space -not just like ending in round sphere sausages or something. I didn’t even realize I had been thinking of them as spherical until that moment of studying the manikin! I used more of SenshiStock’s hand reference photo pack, as well as…
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Mark Making Part 13: Charcoal Pencils
How can time both seem stuck in amber while also moving at warp speed? Most days, it feels like the evening passes before I can motivate myself to draw or paint. Yet every day feel so similar, it’s hard to believe the seasons are still changing, fall to winter. I worked through using almost all my charcoal pencils back at the end of September, before moving. Then finished out the rest at the end of October. So now it’s nearing the end of November that I’m sharing them! At this rate, I’ll probably finish my haphazard mark-making “use all my art supplies” project in *checks calendar* meh. Spring? So here…
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Sketchbook Pages from September
Long time no blog; I’ve been quite busy… ::drum roll please:: …moving! After a long search, Ricky and I bought a house and are all moved in. I knew just the two of us moving all our stuff would be a challenge, but we managed. We did get help from Ricky’s dad, which was necessary for the really heavy stuff, even with a hand cart/dolly to help. I was beyond exhausted and sore and bruised after the solid week it took us to move all our stuff. But I’ve also felt surprised, grateful, and curious for this new adventure. I wasn’t really letting myself believe it was real until after…
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Mark Making Part 12: Soft Pastels
Now we’ve come to the dry mediums that I rarely use, such as pastel – and next after this, charcoal. Ever since moving to my own apartment (eek, 10 years ago ::stares into the far distance over the insistent passage of time::), I just prefer to avoid potential mess. I miss having studio space – or at the very least space in my parents’ house where I was less worried about losing a security deposit if I spilled a bunch of charcoal dust into the carpet. I’ve been looking at photos and videos of art studios recently, pining over creating an improved setup. Most of the studio tour videos I…
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Mark Making Part 11: Col-Erase and Other Pencils
Yay, more gesture drawings! Col-erase and gesture drawings go so well together. The lead is just soft enough to flow easily on the page without too much smudging. Once again, I used Line of Action, Quick Poses, and Pexels for reference photos. I’m feeling more comfortable with the overall figure, compared to face drawings. I’ve been defaulting to cartoon-ish or stylized manga looking faces, rather than looking at sweeping lines or form. Which was okay for this, as the purpose was to use each pencil for any kind of mark. Yet, I feel drawn to practicing realism and grounding my art more in fundamentals. Learning the “right” fundamentals is an…
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Mark Making Part 10: Prismacolor Pencils
Prismacolor colored pencils are one of my favorite mediums; I find them relaxing, perhaps in part because they are a medium with relatively minimal setup and cleanup. They also blend well over other mediums, like markers or watercolor, making it tempting to include them in other traditional art illustrations. I keep mine organized by color in a large pencil case, which is a much better set up then my Copic marker situation of having all of them jumbled together in a photo keepsake box from Michaels (though at $3, the photo boxes work well enough for many of my art supplies. Plus you can label them within the pretty front…
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Mark Making Part 9: Various Colored Pencils
Continuing the mark making project, these drawings are from the end of April. The delay was in the scanning and cropping, ugh. Oh well! These were fun – I did one intuitive drawing piece first, which was a sort of surreal landscape. For the rest, I decided to follow the same path from my graphite pencils post and create gesture drawings with some stylized faces thrown in the mix as well. It was a lot of fun and quite relaxing. The light pencils on dark paper was a nice challenge. It provides an opportunity for the pencil to add light to the forms, rather than the normal shadows created with…
Keep your muse happy
