Sketchbooks
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Apples and Butterflies and Beloved Playlists
I’m glad I filled a sketchbook page, even if at first it felt like my heart wasn’t in it tonight. Pushing past the “I don’t feel like this/I don’t know what to draw that’s good enough” thoughts and into painting and drawing as an act of love for the practice itself: is that the secret to maintaining a regular art practice?
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Sketchbook Randomness
Holds up spork! (kidding!*) Well after yesterday’s lengthy post, tonight’s will be very short. I gathered a bunch of markers in fineliners in a gray/pink/purple/gold color scheme and sketched what was nearby on my desk. Hooray for being productive in kind of laid back way.
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Finished Painting: Chemise Study
I was thinking I’d title this painting “A Soft Chemise” or something, but it was meant to be a study of cloth folds, so maybe just keeping “study” in the title works. I don’t want to have to title every sketch and drawing in my sketchbook. That would be rough, giving things titles is just ugh. Yesterday’s experiments were useful, though I ended up using a lot less of the iridescent paint – just on the gold slippers.
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Sketchbook experiments: watercolor, colored pencil, and metallic paint
Well, of all the days I was sure I might skip out on painting or posting to my blog, today was it. I almost skipped online dance class — just feeling tired and anxious. I’m also stressed about the weather disasters happening around the country (and hoping things get better for so many people suffering this week). I decided that I wouldn’t try to make progress on my painting from yesterday, but instead would experiment and try stuff out to better prepare for working on it tomorrow.
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Watercolor Skin Tone Practice
I swatched several different skin tone blends before painting in the figure of my current work in progress, hoping I wouldn’t make the skin too blotchy, as seems the case with most of my watercolor skin tone efforts. Alas… I still overworked the paint and it’s still blotchy. I think I keep trying to treat watercolor like digital painting, and then I push too far and overwork it. Blah. More blending practice is necessary!
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Adding a Background (at the last minute)
Well, I was hoping I’d be further along with this painting, but I became quite distracted with painting a soothing pattern in the background. I didn’t originally plan this sketch/painting to have a background – it was more about studying cloth folds – but I decided to go for it. In my mind, the character was standing in the palace of Versailles in a chemise*. So it wasn’t so much picking a background at random, in as much as it was trying to feel what would be around the character I had in mind. I also decided to make her expression a bit less melancholy.
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Sunday Sketches
Today I made vegetarian lasagna for dinner – and while it was in the oven I sketched my dishes pile. It made for a fun contour line study, with lots of overlapping forms. I’ve been reading An Illustrated Life, hoping to inspire myself to let go more in my sketchbooks and draw whatever might spark my interest, no matter how banal or humble. So dishes pile it is!
