Sketchbooks
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Practicing in Between (Ep. 1 & 2)
Winter’s begun and the longest night is here. I’m ready for fresh starts, a new year, and lengthening daylight slowly inching back towards spring. I’ve been practicing art quite a bit, and am so close to filling two sketchbooks: a multimedia one and a smaller drawing one (hopefully a sketchbook share video is coming in the near future 🤞). Today I have 25 sketchbook pages to share in this post (!!!). And I came up with the idea for an ongoing series that I’ve just begun, with a new original character!
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Weekend Wanderings
Oh my goodness, posting to my blog again?! It’s that Imbolc energy. ^_^ I’ve been making art over the last year, but haven’t had the energy or focus to blog about it. Definitely suffering from an all-or-nothing mind set, when it comes to what I think I should be doing regarding my blog. It’s annoying to keep relearning the whole “imperfection is okay” lesson. T_T And I keep thinking I’ll scan/photograph my work from 2021 that didn’t make it into here yet, but why not start with a little drawing I finished today?
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Sketchbook Eye Interlude
Today felt like a busy day but also a very draining day. Here in the Midwest it’s one of those cold, icy, end-of-winter days, when we just had a little taste of spring weather only a week ago, but now there’s snow on the ground again. And the tension of the weather change has been putting me on the edge of a migraine for the past two days (that fortunately hasn’t seemed to hit full force, yay?). Thus, tonight is a “gentle as possible” art practice: opening my sketchbook and drawing simple, easy doodles.
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More Gestural Sketches
I suppose I apply a wide definition of what a gesture drawing is – if the spirit of the drawing is meant to be gestural, even if the end result becomes too detailed or tight, I think it still counts. While drawing these pages, I was thinking of the “not this / this” photo that is on Proko’s How to Draw Gesture guide. I agree that the action lines are the quintessential nature of a gesture drawing. I just don’t always accomplish them, hah.
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Gesture Drawings to the Rescue
I was really struggling to get started drawing tonight. I opened my sketchbook, sketching and erasing the same figure like 10 times before just sketching and inking a couple of face studies. Those also felt sloppy and forced. Fortunately, given I didn’t want to stay up too late tonight, the time crunch pushed me towards some quick gestures instead. And I really like how they turned out!
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Refilling the Well
Taking the time yesterday to just relax and have a nice date night was much needed. I’ve been pushing myself to post here every day, and while I want to post as often as possible, there is a balance in creating and then resting to refill the well of inspiration. And coming back into the practice, I sunk into a nice intuitive painting: free from any plans or expectations. Leaf shapes are still my current artistic comfort-food of choice.
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Embracing Sketchbook Messiness
If I want to finish my current sketchbook before the end of spring, I calculated (a couple of days ago) that I need to finish an average of 1.5 pages a day. Is doing that calculation a sign that my need to control chaos is creeping into my art practice again?
