My Art Workshop

Whew! It’s been a productive day today. First I finished the bacon and piglet theme and as it was finished somewhat early I felt like drawing more, so I went for the Sketch Daily alternative theme for today: Skunks. I had great fun doing the otter a little while back and I wanted to try out doing the skunk in a similar style.

Hours spent digitally drawing today is somewhere around 8 effective hours or even more. I think it’s time to pad my own back and tell myself – Well done 🙂

Sketch daily theme: Bacon. I could have just had fun working on digitally mimicking bacon material. But I had to do a bit more because piglets are amazing! I had fun almost all the way through this work. Except perhaps when I totally ruined the bacon at one point and had to more or less start from scratch. That was annoying but taught me to use layers, layers and more layers.

I am totally fanatic when it comes to this topic, I know. It comes with being a biologist I suppose. I usually buy my bacon from a friend who keeps his pigs running free in the fields.

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Coloring the Barber Shop I loved doing the mirror. That was a good and fun exercise in imagining the entire scene seen from the back.

“Olsen’s Barber Shop”. I wanted that on a sign on the back wall. But it looked way too crowded so I had to settle with the barber sign in the mirror. But just that you know: The guy is definitely “Olsen” :).

It’s truly a challenge to get the coloring to look good, since it’s so terribly easy to color the life out of a drawing, when working digitally. I think I reached a solution that works. Limiting my palette, working with the majority of colors with less saturation, using colors with more saturation and more contrast very sparingly and strategically does help a lot.

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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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Hah! this was fun. SketchDaily theme was “Femme Fatale”. I took a walk thinking of an idea for the theme and this idea of a coldbloded killer came up.

Getting her face and hand right proved difficult even using a few references. I like the hand of the poor dead guy in the background a lot better. The color theme is dark and rather cheesy. I think the image turned out to be an eerie combination of a dark killer theme combined with a bit of a disney wibe. That was not entirely on purpose, but a coldblooded killer is super creepy so I am ok with that 🙂

All in all I got the idea down as I had imagined it.

When I was around 5-6 years old I had my first nightmare that I still remember. It came during a huge hurricane that blew over a lot of trees in the nearby forest.

Our house was old and poorly isolated and my family all went to bed early that night. It was hard falling asleep. The rain was pounding at the windows of my dark room and the wind was blowing around the house corners, so strongly that it was roaring like a wild animal.

On the roof of our house right above my room stood our old and worn tv antenna, which when the wind grabbed it, at some point started to howl very much like a wolf. In between the very strong winds the damn thing rattled, giving a weird metallic foreign growling sound.

In my vivid imagination all those powerful sounds grew into a mighty beast: “Mørke-ulven”. Translated directly it means something along the lines of “The wolf of darkness”. It was haunting me all night long and its terrible howl I can still hear in my mind to this day.

I still remember the sheer horror of facing this creature. I knew it was coming for me and it meant my doom!

I have tried to draw “Mørkeulven” a few times by now. I never manage to truly capture the horror – Yet. But some day I will 🙂 Today I tried with watercolor and afterwards quite a bit of digital drawing. It was a fun painting to make and I like the result even though this is nowhere near as dramatic and scary as “Mørkeulven”.

Another day of figure drawing. Today I decided to focus a bit less time on finishing a whole Croquis Cafe session and instead have a bit of fun with one of the fast drawings. This model had the most amazing super long hair and it lent a lot of expression to play with in the drawings.

A few years back we traveled to Hurgada, Egypt. Next to our hotel lived the perfume merchant. Entering his shop was like walking straight into Ali Baba’s World of Wonder.

A strong scent of etheral oils and lotions lay heavily over the small room. The floor was covered in a thick luxuriously soft red carpet, which customers feet would sink deep into.

In the middle of the room a large red leather couch was placed in front of a glass table. This was where the customers were seated as they were presented to various products, choosing just the right mix of scents.

The walls were all mirrors covered with glittery glass shelves for every imaginable kind of perfume containers. Pink, red, bright green and naturally lots of gold and tassels were dominating the room.

So when today’s SketchDaily theme was “Fanciful Perfume Bottles” I knew I had to use one of my photos from that shop as reference. It’s a pity you can’t sense the scent of a picture 🙂

Yesterday I went for another Croquis Cafe session, trucking along with my figure- and gesture studies.

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Today I decided to do the SketchDaily theme. Since the theme for today was the author H.P. Lovecraft, my husband suggested I could do the Cthulhu. I had no idea what a Cthulhu is? But ok I’d give it a shot.

Searching information about this mighty beast I learned it is a scary horror beast, that’s supposed to be part octopus, part dragon with wings and spikes and tail and everything, and part human…

I have to admit I had trouble imagining that. And searching for references it honestly looked like I was not the only artist struggling. In various renditions I found the beast looking more like the flying spaghetti monster to me.

I was clearly on my own in this quest. So I started finding references for the various creatures of which the monster was a mix. I have to say the octopus is quite likely one of my favorite animals. So I knew I could not possibly downplay that part. I like dragons too. I had to let the creature have its wings as well, but where to stick them on an octopus to make it look somewhat natural?

Luckily I had the “human part” to save me. And with the memory of the scary Davy Jones pirate captain in “Pirates of the Caribbian: Dead Man’s Chest” I finally had an idea that might work out.

After many, many sketches I ended up with this version. It is weird as it should be and if not scary then at least alien. In spite of its weirdness I still feel it has personality. I think I might feel a bit sorry for the Cthulhu. Perhaps it’s not evil at all, just misunderstood?