• A featured image collage, showing various looping marks and drawing drills to practice line work. The background is digital, and on top are three photos of copy paper sheets with various drawing drill marks. Text top top states: Chaotic Drawing Drills.
    Digital Painting,  Drawing

    Chaotic Drawing Drills

    I’d paused posting in here for the later half of January 2024, as some very serious health issues have been happening to a close family member. That’s as much detail as I want to give here on my blog for now. How does one stay creative in times of extreme stress? Drawing drills have always been my go to, but even those have felt like a challenge. There are so many variations on drills, and they’re all meant to be very simple: draw ovals, practice line confidence, etc. Recently, I stumbled on a practice of outlining looping marks. The approach is very chaotic looking, but overall I’ve found it’s a…

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  • A photo collage of simplified line drawings, of a snail, boots, and a skeleton wearing a hat. Text on top states: Drawing Basics line work practice.
    Drawing

    Drawing Basics – Line work practice

    Happy new year! Kicking it off with posting to my blog, yay! ^_^ These drawings are from working through the Proko Drawing Basics Course, specifically the CSI Lines exercise. Even though I’m going through the course much slower than I’d hoped, I can’t recommend it enough – Proko courses really feel similar to college level or atelier style workshops, compared to other online tutorials. Not to say I don’t also love and appreciate other courses and tutorials, I just think Proko courses are worth the cost, 10/10 would recommend. My photo game was very off with these – it was late at night, no natural sun unfortunately. Just sad desk…

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  • The bottom of a sketchbook page, with a sketch of two women drawn in pen and marker.
    Digital Painting,  Drawing,  Sketchbooks

    Marker practice and some quick digital drawing drills

    Followed through and finished adding marker to yesterday’s line art. I wasn’t sure how well the Ohuhu markers would blend, but I’ve been pleasantly suprised by how nice they work. They bleed all the way through the mixed media paper, though, which is a shame. Similar to Copics, I think they’re better suited to Bristol, marker paper, or even printer paper in a pinch. Mixed media paper is usually closer to a toothy watercolor type paper and absorbs more marker than necessary. At least, that’s what I’ve observed.

  • Three sheets of drawings of boxes. Ontop rest a pencil, pen, markers, a craft knife, and a three dimensional paper box.
    Drawing

    Drawing Drills Arts and Crafts

    After yesterday’s harried drawing drills, tonight I decided to make time for a different approach, to see how they would turn out. This was much more relaxed. I crafted a little paper box to study as I drew boxes rotated in space. Though after a while I switched to just drawing imagined boxes.

  • A close up of box drawings, with a pen and marker next to the drawing.
    Drawing

    Begrudging Box Drawing Drills

    Grrr. Tonight was a night where being responsible took time away from making any art. I didn’t sit down to sketch these until 10:20pm. So that was….um…25 minutes between drawing, snapping a photo, and creating this post. But you know what, it counts! Perfection isn’t what I’m looking for, it’s consistency. So there, universe.

  • Two sheets of drawing drills, one of gesture drawings and the other cylinders, with two pencils next to the paper
    Drawing

    Drawing drills for a chaotic day

    When I signed off my blog post last night, looking forward to relaxing and being refreshed for tomorrow, I jumped in the shower and got ready for bed, knowing I had taken today off. I had visions of how productive I would be, both with housework and art. And then, 12:30am, we wake up – “What’s that dripping noise?” Oh, its water, dripping in from under the top window trim. Joy. That set the tone for today!

  • Digital painting of various cylinder shapes rotated in space with shading
    Digital Painting,  Drawing

    Cylinders!

    Hah, no energy to think of a catchy title. More digital rendering/form study practice. This time, after I finished the contour lines of the shapes, I blocked in a solid flat color into the shapes and then used a clipping layer so that I didn’t have to worry about staying in the lines. I started the background as a midtone, so that the highlights would be extra satisfying.