Life Musings
-
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…
-
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…
-
Grounding and Centering
Lately, as this new routine of isolation and extra caution settles in, I’ve been turning to nature and spirituality for comfort and guidance. I wish it hadn’t taken a crisis to help nudge me into this direction, as I’m realizing just how much I was missing having spirituality in my life as a primary part of every day. Spending more time in nature, reading books I’ve been meaning to get around to, journaling more (in my private, personal journal), tending to my altar: it’s all been helping me to feel more grounded and centered. I’m feeling more motivated, knowing I’m trying to align many parts of my soul, including my…
-
Mark Making Part 7: Crayons and Other Nostalgia
So this one was on the principle that if I’m using all my art supplies, the little kid ones count too! I bought these crayons and markers way back when I was first working through The Artists Way. I thought making art with them would be a fun “artist date”. I can confirm, drawing with crayons is a) fun b) satisfying to my “inner child” and c) like sooo easy to relax, because who cares what it looks like, it’s just for enjoying the moment of creating stuff! Little kids get this stuff right off the bat, but we can remember that carefree creativity through some repetitive effort *grin*. I…
-
Mark Making Part 5: Prismacolor Markers and Little Loose Ends
Tonight was photo session night: taking the photo for this post’s title card, as well as a couple more. It was too overcast today to use the sun for good photo lighting. Then it became so late in the evening that I had to use the LED lights, which are suuuuch a pain to set up. They are Ricky’s photography lights, so he was helping me at least. Tonight is also a night where I feel tired and worn out from stress, reading too much news, and feeling uncertain about the future. Still, it’s a blessing to have art to focus on. I am just ready to go make chamomile…
-
Mark Making Part 3: Calligraphy Pens, Random Felt Tip Markers, and Other Such Things
Calligraphy pens are one of those things I buy, thinking I’ll practice fancy hand lettering techniques, and yet I never really get around to it. I have this vague notion that, as someone who majored in graphic design, I should be obsessed with lettering and typography, but my interests have always focused on web design† and illustration. Typography is intriguing to me, but that isn’t a very high bar to jump: my curiosity can be peaked by pretty much any article on Wikipedia. It’s no wonder my calligraphy pens don’t see much mileage, if it was general curiosity that spurred me to buy them, rather than passion. I do like…
-
Try, try, try again
Title to the tune of row, row, row your boat. So. I had written most of the post below (and the title and sentence above) at the end of February, when I was feeling like I had more energy to finally restart blogging and commit to making more art. But I didn’t want to post it until I finished creating a light theme for my blog (and let us leave aside this tried-and-true procrastination method for now); this retro-terminal-dark-mode one had been bothering me lately, though I couldn’t put my finger on why exactly it felt constraining. So the post waited a bit while I thought about a new layout…
