My Art Workshop

Today was beautiful spring day. I ended up gardening in the sunshine. Later I did an exercise in drawing garden tools. It’s nothing really serious but I had fun with it anyway 🙂

One of the amazing animals we saw in South Africa was the genet. We nearly drove past it during the pitch black darkness on our way back to camp, when Rasmus spotted the reflective eyes of this beauty in a tree.

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In our safari in South Africa one of our drivers asked me for a drawing. This guy was my obvious choice. So I found my small water color travel set and took up the challenge. We had met The Lion King several times in our safaris. We have heard him roar at night just outside camp and we have heard him purr gently in the tall grass just next to our car. I left this original painting with Jodie and only brought home the photo of the drawing. Here he is for you to see and for me to remember.

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SketchDaily theme today was “Andy Warhol”. I was tired of doing fast sketches so I went with a bit of a challenge today. I found an ancient photo of me wearing my grandmothers old hat and attempted a self portrait. That’s hard! As it was done I had to figure out how to get that to fit with today’s theme so I went to play with color in PhotoShop and ended up with a version that is a bit Andy Warhol..ish.

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I still like the original drawing better, but the play with color was still fun 🙂

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My daily digital sketch. Chinese inspired war horse in an action pose, seen from a challenging angle.

Today’s theme was “Make an object come to life”. It’s usually a fun challenge and when I decided to make a reading chair that loves reading over peoples shoulders it was kinda fun to draw.

Looking at today’s work the drawings are not as polished as I would have liked them to be. But at least I caught up with the SketchDaily themes and besides, I read somewhere that the polishing of drawings carry little in so far as teaching oneself to draw. Most of the learning process is found in the composition and the fleshing out objects and proportions.

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SketchDaily theme: Suitcases. I had visited the old vintage train station at Ree Zoo during Christmas. It was all nicely decorated for Christmas and had a real impressive christmassy atmosphere with steam engine and christmas lights. In a corner I found and photographed a pile of old suitcases, that I found super charming. Today that photograph aided me in my work with this sketch. Now as charming as the old suitcases were that day, they did seem a bit boring standing there in a pile as a drawing, so the cat and umbrella was added. I think this might be a warm “Welcome Home” scene now.

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Continuing the South Africa animal theme. I found this photo of the amazing secretary bird in a random google search and I just knew I had to paint it. I tested a watercolor technique where sprinkling salt over the wet paint will create a nice interesting effect. I like how that turned out. As it turned out we were super lucky to spot one of these in South Africa when we went on Safari there later this year.
In the car going back home from Funen I was trying to use my Ipad as a drawing tool. Let’s just say that is a challenging tool! My first drawing disappeared with no trace before I got to save it. And the next one…, well after many curses and attempts to edit and correct and redraw and work around Ipad bugs and road bumps until the thing went out of power, I ended up with this for the Sketchdaily theme “Candles”. Not my best work ever, but I got to play with a tool I am very far from comfortable with and it was fun in the end. It was an experiment in a completely new media 🙂

Sketchdaily theme was “Kings” yesterday. I had a loose plan drawing Gorm the old, Harald Bluetooth and Svend Twobeard – the old Danish viking kings. I did start it but then lost interest as it did not turn out as I had envisioned. I talked with my mom on the phone and she suggested a lion for the topic. I found an old photograph in my stash from 2005, Hagenbeck Tierpark in Germany. Here is my final version for the theme “Kings” – an old male lion. I can’t wait till medio March when we are going to South Africa to see the lions in the wildsite!

The entire summer of 2016 we have enjoyed the little sweet elephant that seemed to grow out of nothing and suddenly stood there in full bloom right in front of our living room windows. Where it came from is a mystery, but I know the base was once a small exotic Japanese maple tree that sadly died a few years back. Some of the other ingredients were ivy and honeysuckle mixed with various pretty weeds and flowers, that were not really supposed to grow there.

I liked our little elephant. Even as late as October/November it still stood there sweet and peacefully patient with flowers and red berries on its back, refusing to let the winter depression creep in on us too fast. Sadly in January a storm hit and knocked it to the ground, so now there is only a small pile of leaves left. Today I drew it to remember the little fairy tale that grew in our garden in 2016 🙂
I took a photo of the elephant at the end of November. Most flowers were gone by then but a few berries were still left on its back. 🙂