-
Mark Making Part 16: Fountain Pens
Yay, the mark making project continues! Fountain pens are a medium I used to think was more for literary types rather than visual artists. I’m not sure where I picked up that idea, but after reading different artist’s sketch journals and following various urban sketchers, I’ve found they are a popular sketching tool. The lines have a unique quality, compared to felt tip fineliners and other pens. And the fact that the ink blends with water can be an asset!
-
Sunday Sketches
Yesterday was fairly relaxed, but I was feeling restless. And I woke up with a headache, so that’s never fun. I played D&D for a good chunk of the afternoon and sketched a bit, before starting to re-read Starhawk’s Dreaming the Dark, which I haven’t read since borrowing it from my university library back in 2005-ish. I’m excited to dig back into it and see how I’ve changed in how I react to/absorb it. Even if I felt quite “blah” and mopey, I’m proud that I finally did a simple “draw your day” sketch journal page. Earl Grey Tea! Pop-tarts! Reading! D&D!
-
Sketchbook Update
How is there only one week left in January!? I really wanted to finish filling Sketchbook No. 4 before the end of the month, but I still have 10 pages to go. The balance of wanting to both practice digital painting regularly and keep a traditional sketchbook practice is enough to make my head spin.
-
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 caused 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…
-
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…
-
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…
Art with a dash of old school blog rambling
