My Art Workshop

My Wacom Intuos Pro tablet broke. It’s my only alternative to using my mouse for creative activities on my computer, so my digitally creative world broke down with it.

It shields my right wrist from carpal tunnel syndrome too on many occasions where I use my mouse a lot for other work. I use it every day and I love it. In short: My Wacom tablet breaking down is a disaster. But a new one is insanely expensive 🙁

But I am a super lucky spoilt one! My mom decided to help out, and here I am a little later with a brand new Wacom tablet! Thank you so much Mom! You saved me, I love you <3

It took me a day to set up my new tool. Having it cooperate with my Danish keyboard proved difficult. Wacom in combination with PhotoShop and Windows apparently are not thrilled about keyboards with more letters than the basic English ones. But with help from various blogs and forums, now it works like a charm and I am so happy about it. This is first drawing done with it. It’s just a quick sketch of my hand, focusing on minimizing the chicken scratch and gain more confident lines 🙂

For Sketchdaily the theme yesterday was Mjolnir.

I researched for images of Viking art with Thors Hammer, finding most of them in a form similar to the one I created hereunder: Short handle with a sturdy ring at one end, and a heavy slightly curved metal end.

I like the Mammen style of the Vikings, so that definitely had to play a part. Since it was Thors hammer specifically, I found it fun if I could somehow incorporate his two rams “Tandgrisner” and “Tandgnost”.

Wanting to incorporate all these details in one drawing it took a few sketches, before I found a solution I liked. The drawing is digital as I wanted to get to a fast result with an iron effect, while keeping all the tiny details.

Figure sketches using the Croquis Cafe at Youtube as reference.

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Art dump of my work from yesterdays Croquis class in Aarhus. I was shocked when my teacher came by, looked at my work over my shoulder, and suddenly bend over it, to smear a paper towel with graphite powder all over it. In my eyes, in that moment, he totally ruined what I was doing. It did create an interesting effect I guess, and in retrospect I get what he was trying to provoke me to do. But it was a hard pill to swallow. I was angry!
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Two days ago I found time to draw a little using my tablet and computer. I have no clue who this person is. I opened Google image search, typed in “Portraits”, closed my eyes, and moved the mouse around. When I opened my eyes again, I drew the face it was pointing at.

I found a webpage (Posemaniac) with 3D hands to rotate in any direction. That’s pretty convenient when I want to draw hands, though still not as good as drawing from life.

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The weather was beautiful today so I grabbed my camera when I noticed a white wagtail (hvid vipstjert in Danish) in our old oak, and went for a little garden walk.

After this great fun Croquis weekend I decided I am now a master at drawing. So I ventured out into the world to draw the neighbour´s jersey cows, because that would be easy peasy now that I am a master, right? Well not quite!

First of all: Who the hell invented cows? They make no sense! They have humps and bumps and bits poking out everywhere! Second: Did you ever try drawing with 5 cows in your lap? That’s…hard.

I was comfortably seated in the pasture at a safe distance around 30 meters from the herd. The sky was a bright blue. Around me was only grass, meadow flowers and butterflies. It was purely idyllic. But by the time I had found pencil and paper, I had cows everywhere around me so close they were licking my toes and hair and cheeks and paper and pencil. Friendly, very curious and huge, especially when seen from a seated on the ground perspective!

The adventure of drawing cows ended prematurely with a hail storm. I have no idea where it came from, but it had me fleeing trying to save my papers from getting soaked. I shall be back – this was so much fun!

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This is a fairly quick sketch of my granddad Jens Victor in his twenties. Drawing clothes is hard! But drawing clothes from old photographs is also super inspiring.

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I made a small drawing yesterday. It was only around 10 – 15 mins work, using my own photo as reference as usual. It was way more fun to do this little cheetah than I thought it would be. I am happy about the result. It is funny how time and effort sometimes don’t at all correlate with the quality of the resulting drawing. Sometimes less is way more 🙂

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It is hard to start up drawing again after having had so much fun doing photography. It’s so much faster doing photography, and very rewarding doing photography when being in a place like the Camargue. On our way home from France I did a bit of drawing in the car. The flamingos refused to leave my mind so I ended up drawing one. They are fun to draw!

Back home I am trying to get back to drawing humans. The place I found with reference pictures is starting to annoy me, since the slowest timing between pictures is 120 seconds and I miss being able to spend just a bit more time on it. So I cheated. I paused between each picture so I had a chance to draw what I wanted to draw. The following drawings are 180 sec/pose instead and I am much happier about the results now. I think I see progress.

Finally I did a few hands too.

I went for a walk today and found a truely sad roadkill. The prettiest grass snake I ever saw. They are rare in Denmark and non venomous. This one was 40-50 cm long, beautifully black, going nearly cobalt blue on the sides with bright yellow spots on the neck. And stone cold dead it was. I felt sad. It’s soon Winter and I bet this one was searching for higher ground to be safe from floods when going hibernating. He almost made it. We only have two species of true snakes: The grass snake and the common adder. I never saw the adder in the wild and the grass snake I only saw a few times.

Later today I started the car and went to pick up the snake, brought it home, and showed it to my kid, before I snatched a few pictures of it. Now it doesn’t look like a roadkill any longer. It rests peacefully in our garden.

Back home I did not feel like doing quick poses today so I just chose one pose and spent a bit longer time on it. I liked how defined this woman’s back is . This is somewhere around 10-15 mins work. Again it’s pencil on paper, using my new sketchbook.