My Art Workshop

Continuing the wolf practice. I think I am starting to see some progress 🙂

October is here. I have been looking at this art challenge for years finding it a great initiative. So this year I am doing it: Inktober! The rules are simple: Draw every day for October. Use ink. Post the results online with #Inktober.

Ink is permanent. If you make a mistake that mistake will be staring at you forever after. And if you do this without even putting down a few weak pencil lines first as guides you have absolutely no safety net. So why not live life a little dangerous 🙂 I decided to learn how to draw canines – wolves in particular. I have tried this a few times earlier. For the past days I have been getting familiar with drawing with a nip pen and with wolf anatomy.

Nip pens are evil by the way. I could have just gone with a pen brush or a fine liner or even a ballpoint pen. But nope. If we are going to live life dangerous we might as well walk straight off the cliff and do it the old fashioned way – it might be fun too 🙂 So here are the last three day’s production of wolves.
I am not done learning to draw wolves in ink just yet. But I have all October to learn, so I am very optimistic about the project. These pages were fun and also very interesting to create. Using a new media is a challenge – a good one 🙂

Been visiting my in-laws this weekend. It was nice being with family and I found time to draw a bit while being there. I found my old photo of the stretching tiger and did a watercolor version of it.

In the plane to South Africa I found time to do a small sketch. Rasmus wanted a snake so here is one. I have no idea what kind of snake it is, it just came straight from my imagination as I had no references and it has no markings of any kind since the plane landed before I got to that. Originally it was just a plain pencil drawing added a bit of blue color pencil as background. The other colors are added in Photoshop later as we got home.

Hands are hard, since they can move in all kinds of impossible positions. Still there’s some absolutely clear cut rules you can’t violate or they will instantly look wrong. Feet are even worse! But hands and feet are so much fun to draw. I think feet are my favorite, especially these since this is my child’s happy right foot 🙂

Sketchdaily theme today was “Barber Shop”. I was not sure what to do so I did a bit of research on Google and found a barber in some western movie.

He was my main inspiration for the character. I really liked his expression and outfit and the vintage atmosphere. I wanted the characters face and body a bit different from the western guy though. So I found another photograph, which served as ressource for his face and the glorious mustage. To get his pose right my child played model.

The barber chair was a challenge as well. Searching Google I came up with so many different interesting vintage chairs. In the end I chose a combination of a few as reference for this one.

When fleshing out a drawing like this, it really is an advantage working digitally. I can change, erase and redraw and move parts of the drawing till it all fits my mental image.

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Drawing this small flask turned out to be very hard. Not only is it glass with all its fun distorted reflections. It’s also strictly symmetrical and when seen from the side it exhibits a lot of similar ovals, which is definitely the hardest basic form to draw in a consistent way for me.

When I grabbed the flask in the kitchen cupboard I thought “This will be a fun little exercise”, but gee! It took a lot of determination to work with the proportions and getting the many ovals somewhat right. After that came the work with the fine details and the reflections too. This took at least an hour longer than I anticipated. But I think I got my sense of proportions and basic shapes exercised, and that was the point, so it was after all a useful exercise.

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Finding a way to draw the pattern of knit. It is quite complicated to somehow mimic without drawing every single shadow and highlight of each strand of yarn.

This started out as a super fast pencil drawing in the cheap sketchbook. The book is to be used for doodles, which I am not supposed to put much time or energy into. Casual creations with no stress and no clear goal besides just having fun. I think it’s healthy to have a sketchbook like that, to let go of the perfectionists approach to drawing at times.

Unfortunately in this case it did not work quite as intended. After scanning the drawing I ended up in Photoshop playing with coloring the drawing and this is how it all ended. A bit too overworked to just be called a doodle. I like this doodle way too much, for a doodle I am not supposed to give a damn about 🙂

I was challenged by a friend to draw architecture.

So here is my version of La Sagrada Familia referencing to my own photo from when I visited the great cathedral designed by Antonio Gaudi in Barcelona.

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Today I found a sketch daily theme to illustrate: Ponytail.