My Art Workshop

Visiting my in-laws I found a bit of time for drawing. Yesterday I did this eye study. Doing the reflections in monochrome was very interesting work. Especially the reflections of the lashes really made the drawing come to life.

Sketchdaily prompt today was “Cemetary”. I decided on a simple lineart style and found references for various grave stone sculptures. I liked a combination of several as basis idea for my little cherub here. This is what I ended up with. The cherub and a nightingale on a gravestone at full moon.

Since I can’t get out to enjoy the Spring properly, I can create it right here sitting with my broken leg elevated – Hah!

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Today a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi.

I found a really nice photograph of her and wanted to recreate it in a digital painting. I am testing my new Wacom Intuos Pro. It’s a great tool in combination with Photoshop. At times though there are almost too many options, so the trick is to keep it simple and preserve some light and mystery in a digital painting.

At the same time it’s always a challenge to create portraits, especially the ones seen from an angle like this. I think the face is close to a really good likeness and the curve of the hat ended up ok. Colors are not overly strong and the background is faded and blurry, but still interesting and giving a bit of information about the lighting in the scene. I like this one.

Sketchdaily theme today inspired me. The theme was “Head over to reddit/drawme/ and find a photo to draw a portrait from”.

I went to look through a gazillion photos of people asking artists to draw them. For some reason this little kid caught my eye. He is just insanely cute and whoever took the photo chose a rather interesting bird’s eye view perspective, which truly is a challenge to reproduce in general.

Now doing portraits of children is about as hard as it gets. Doing a portrait of a child in a crazy perspective…. I don’t know what I was thinking. But it went surprisingly well I think and did not take me as long as I feared either.

So here is beka_targaryens pouty kid in his bear slippers. Thank you for the source photo Beka.

I did a quick little llama doodle yesterday. And a bit of figure drawing from one of the Croquis Cafe videos on Youtube
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It’s time for another art dump. I decided I wanted to learn how to draw owls. So I did a few sketches. One of them I gave away for Christmas.

While we were at my Moms place for Christmas I brought my watercolors and did a few paintings too. First another owl, then a kitten in collaboration with my kid (he drew it and we both painted it), and finally a fox. All three watercolors turned into presents too.

Now we are back home – just relaxing and catching up on everyday stuff. A wonderful Christmas to end a wonderful year 🙂

My kid wanted a griffin. I had to study eagle heads and lion legs to get it working anatomically and this is what we ended up with. I kinda forgot griffins are supposed to have wings too. I’ll get that right some other day 🙂

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As I had oceans of free time today, I decided to try out a drawing I knew would be difficult. This old Ford is a handfull to draw. Lines, curves, and perspective have to be exactly right for it to look good. I was not sure if I wanted to color the finished drawing, but I am happy I did. I very much like the color theme and the color pencils worked quite well for this project. Reference: One of my old photos from Egeskov Castle.

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Here is today’s sighting: Lots of Eurasian nuthatch living in the trees of Schönbuch Forest. We also met a few red squirrels and saw lots of marks of wild boar.

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Yesterday we went for a walk in the local forest, Germany. On our way back a flock of these gorgeous, super cute, and tiny, long-tailed tits came right up to us and stayed in the closest tree for a minute or so. In the wild they look like tiny flying snow balls with tails 🙂

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