My Art Workshop

This is a tiny thing meant as an ATC (Artist Trading Card). It’s only 8,9×6,4 cm so its a real challenge getting anything detailed enough to call it an artistic creation in that small a space. I had a plan of entering an artist trading initiative for February with the theme “dynamic duos”.

I was supposed to make three cards so I settled on my own little sub theme: “Royals and their weird pets” and thought the ancient Egyptian princess Isiemkheb and her pet gazelle would be a good start.

I had a plan of creating one of Queen Victoria and a pet donkey too – who knows perhaps I will some day – but when I had finished the first card I did not think the card fitted a “dynamic duo” that well after all.

But then something wonderful happened. When I put the card on my Tumblr account one of my friends there loved it and we ended up swapping cards. So Isiemkheb and her gazelle was shipped to USA to live happily ever after, and I recieved the most amazing tiny work of art from my friend, that I now have at my workspace to enjoy daily <3

I saw this tiny little interesting house on our way to Italy for summer holiday two years back. I went for a drive by shooting and was lucky to actually catch it through the car window. I did add a bit of extra details in my drawing, mostly a bit of flowers and foliage, but most of the house truly was a tiny fairy-tale.

A few weeks back I went to a Danish clay museum with my good friend. This is a quick sketch of one of the typical famous royal Danish mussel painted porcelain pieces we saw there.

Time to study anatomy. Today I chose feet. I found a challenge to draw 50 feet. I am not quite there yet but four feet is on the right track.

Continuing the people theme. I went to the mall again today to draw another 20 completely innocent people. And again it was great fun!

I think this might be the right (and fun) thing to do to push myself to get better. It’s not exactly practicing realism. With people not standing still but walking around this is not life drawing like if I went to a croquis event. This is more like a mixture of that and my own cartoonish style that I have to use when I need to “fill in the gaps” when the person has long left and the drawing is only half way done. As I get better at anatomy and proportions the filling in gaps part will get better and better.

Today I was more loose and less concerned with realism and more with capturing what I had seen – colors, clothes and accessories and more importantly: Gesture and personality. In some of the drawings I think I somewhat succeeded in that while others developed far from the original person.

That is not necessarily bad though as long as the result still looks somewhat believable and still captured a moment I wanted to express. I have worked with strict realism and gesture drawings for so long that this experiment is really fun and so very different to do.

So today I did it. For the first time ever!

When I had to go for a drive anyway, I brought a bag with my cheapest sketchbook with sketch paper, my new awesome water refill brush, my water color travel set and a regular black felt pen. I found a spot at the cafe and started drawing people. No time to be perfectionist, no eraser, no regrets! Nobody stayed in place for longer than a second. Man was that scary! But I had set out to do it and I had bought a drink to sit in the cafe for a while so damn me if I would walk away from there with no drawings, so on I went. The results are colorful. But I had so much FUN. I might go do this again another day. Perhaps I will even do the 100 people challenge I just stumbled on here.

Another Ctrl+Paint drawing excercise. This time focusing on proportions and outlines. The assignment said “draw ten objects only tracing their outlines” so thats what I tried to do, though paying attention to line weight too.

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Inbetween drawings I put a lot of effort in, I need to practise simple things – line weight, line confidence, forms, shading, and proportions. Some days I have filled 5 sheets of papers with ellipses or boxes. It sounds mindnumbingly boring right? And it is. But each time I have done it I find my other drawings benefit from lines that seems so much more confident. I haven’t put them on the blog since they are a tad bit repetitive, but they help with the hand-eye coordination since drawing is also a basic motoric skill like riding a bike. Yesterday I went for drawing 20 spoons. Today I might be working on outlines and stilllife.

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Yesterday I went for drawing something simple that would still be a challenge since it’s curvy, but still has very strict symmetry. I did not get it entirely finished as I liked – reflections in the water are missing and I did not entirely nail the symmetry, but I can see progress. Things are gradually getting better. I think this project is as done as it gets now – on to new challenges 🙂

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And on a whole other note, since this now happened to me again for the millionth time or so. This will be technical and probably not make much sense to others but me, but I am tired of having to sieve through the internet each and every time I face this problem so I am going to put the fix on my blog now.

The problem is that my Wacom Intuos 4 seems to keep losing the keys I bind to the touch ring on it. So when I think I can zoom or change brush size nothing suddenly works. This happens out of the blue, and apparently on a regular basis. I can draw happily one evening and when I start my computer next morning everything is a mess. The problem arises because I have a Danish keyboard and Photoshop, Windows and the Wacom drivers have apparently not entirely come to terms on how to handle non English keybords with this. There is a fix, I just keep forgetting, so here we go:

Touch ring:
————–
Touch ring Zoom : Ctrl+ and Ctrl-
Touch ring Brush size: å and ø
Touch ring Brush hardness: < and .

Buttons to bind:
————-
1) Settings
2) Radial Menu
3) D
4) A

5) Step backwards (Ctrl+z)
6) Control
7) Shift
8) Alt
—————

There. That might save me (and maybe you?) quite a lot of time next time it happens.