My Art Workshop

A lady sitting opposite me at the Croquis Class. She did not move much, so I had plenty of time to draw her.

I had left my coal at home, so I was experimenting with color pencils and crayons for this session.

Today was a wonderful sunny day. Since it is February, nice weather is usually a rare thing and next week we shall be looking at Siberian winter. I went to photograph these drawings outside in the bright sunshine. Because I had had time to study this model’s face a bit closer I really like a few of my portraits of her. So I polished the drawings a bit and here they are.

Now I find it fairly easy to draw organic living forms. There are of course still proportions to learn and all, but if a line is a bit off, I can always compensate on the pose or the shading. I want to practice another aspect of art: Buildings, cars and other technical drawings where hard precise lines HAVE to be correct. So a while ago, when I was walking in the city I took photos of buildings intended for later sketches. Yesterday I found those photos and ended up with a drawing of Voldbrohus in Randers. I used the last paint left overs from the guinea fowl to give the drawing a bit of color too using the gouache more as a water color really.

I think I did pretty good – I like the result 🙂 Now what to draw today? It has to be fairly quick and fun, since its evening by now. It’s Friday so I might end up following Oabnormal’s draw along stream.

I have for a while wanted to dip my feet into painting – real painting. I know watercolors fairly well by now, but I had watched a few people working with gouache in Youtube and it looked really interesting. So this is my first attempt doing gouache: A helmeted guineafowl that I saw during our trip to South Africa almost a year ago now.

I learned that gouache is insanely hard to control! It is supposed to be possible to paint in layers, so that you can paint light over dark. Well…it is possible, but watch out! Water reactivates the layers underneath. If you do more than a couple of brush strokes, you will end up with a muddy grey cake paint. I fought this piece every step on the way. The super cheap paper in my sketchbook definitely buckled up noticeably, so next time I need better paper. In spite of that I very much like the result 🙂

A few weeks back we had this really fun model…

I very much enjoyed creating all these fast sketches of him. I think they turned out pretty good too. I did not have enough time to color them all during class, so I continued working back home.