My Art Workshop

Continuing the 365daystoaportfolio, yesterday the theme was “Fantasy creatures”. I decided to go for one of our own Scandinavian mythical creatures: Lindormen (the lindworm).

The biggest, most famous of them all are probably the Midgard Serpent (Jörmungandr) and also Nidhug (Níðhöggr). According to legend, Ragnar Lodbrog (Lothbrok) fought and killed a lindorm and won the maiden it had kept hostage. This was where he got his byname “Lothbrok”. I think my lindorm is one of the smaller specimens 🙂

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Today’s challenge was farm animals, so I chose to draw and watercolor another cow. I definitely see progress from last I attempted this, so yay! 🙂

I did another flower pattern in watercolor as warm up.

Today’s pattern. Those patterns are fun to do. There’s room for exploring different materials. Today I was inspired by a drawing I saw that incorporated this hair painting technique. I inked the base drawing and then colored with watercolor and gold gel pen.

Yesterday I made a watercolor combined with markers inspired by the patterns in wood.

I am learning that patterns actually take a long time to do as soon as they are not super simple. It’s a bit annoying but then on the other hand I learn a lot about confident lines and drawing shapes in a somewhat consistent way and about mixing watercolor and controlling it too.

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Today I wanted to try something a bit daring and different. So I went for a portrait from RGD in watercolor. In general watercolors are hard to control, and I struggle with likeness and proportions in portraits. Usually they take me hours to make. But since I worked with a pen and no eraser this was much faster work. It’s different and daring, like the model I painted, and it was also great fun to do.

Today’s warm up pattern I think took me longer to make than the portrait. All those damn tiny handdrawn and painted dots! What was I thinking? But I like the colorful result, so it’s OK 😀

Today’s quest: Turtles

I was struggling trying to record my drawing and painting process today having set up camera and various structures to try keep it steady and in focus while I worked. It’s not easy! I need to improve the lighting for sure, but I did finally get the technique working.
It takes a while to edit a drawing video like that into a short snippet that shows the progress without having the viewer sitting through the rather longwinded boring parts of me drawing small repetitive details.

I will definitely try this out again, when I figure out how to fix the lighting. It would be nice with a more sturdy supporting frame to hold the camera too. Perhaps some day it will be technically possible to show the result here on the blog 🙂

Instead of the video, here are two of the birds I ended up with, that I really like.

Earlier today I started another project that might be fun: Patterns. This will be fast work, but hopefully something that is easy to start out with as a warm up for other drawings. Today my hand decided to do a brick wall in watercolor and a bit of gold gel pen.

Today was the last day of Easter vacation. The prompt of today was “Lizards” and so I set out to find inspiration in my photo collection. What I found was that I have surprisingly many photos of lizards and it was hard to choose. But those three were so amazing together with the blue, green and red contrast so I ended up with a lizard from Camargue, one from Florida and one from South Africa.

Today’s prompt was “Woodland creatures.” I sat down and constructed a painting. But as I finished and had it scanned and was working on the last finishing touches in Photoshop I decided the painting was too crowded. So I cut it in pieces and ended up with three separate paintings instead.