My Art Workshop

Today I made this little guy. My reference was my own photo and the real life otter from a nearby Zoo. The real animal was actually eating a chicken, but I thought a fish fitted the drawing better.

I was trying so hard to work with confident lines since the shape of otters is so amazingly fluid. So I had a rule in this drawing: My first initial quick swirly scribble will be the entire overside of the otter. So I did a few quick confindent wavy random lines to test it out. As I had done a few lines I liked, I decided for one of them to be the base line for the entire drawing.

Getting the texture of wet fur down was a challenge in Photoshop, but it was fun playing with different brushes to get the right effect.

A while back my aunt paid a visit. She paints watercolors too and suggested we could share the passion and paint something when we had a few hours of free time.

I chose to paint one of my neighbors Jersey cows. I still had a few unused photos of them from my earlier adventure to the Jersey cow fields nearby. This one was extremely cute as she stood there peacefully chewing on a dandelion flower. I just had to paint her.

I very much like some of the old Danish poster artist’s work. I think this painting has some of the same charm, and I especially like how the background turned out and how the dandelion and the cow’s tail and ear breaks free of the frame.

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The past couple of days I did a few Croquis Cafe sessions.

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Today I drew a Viking Age cloak pin from Hedeby (Haithabu). I got a photo of the piece at Moesgaard Museum a few years back. The piece is tiny. It is bend and scratched and exhibited in a very dark room with many other treasures. It’s very easy to overlook when visiting the museum.

I love Moesgaard Museum and have visited many times the past years so by now , when I visit, I have the time to take a closer look at the less prominent exhibited items. This little cloak pin is now one of my favorites. It was difficult to draw and paint as the material is so varied, almost earthy in some places and then shiny golden in others. Behind all the wear and tear it is clear, that this little piece is richly ornamented with a fierce dragon head.

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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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Having a wrestle with digital drawing again. This time I am trying to reproduce one of my own photos of a white heron in the Camargue, Southern France to practice proportions and textures.

One thing is getting the drawing right, but coloring in Photoshop easily turns a drawing very flat and plastic like. It takes some exercise to figure out how to counter that.

I am ok with the way this image turned out, even if I did not entirely get rid of that polished look. I attempted to get as close to the realism of the photo as possible. I think that worked out ok, both with the heron anatomy and pose, the lighting, and the flow and reflection of the water.

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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 🙂

Doodling in watercolor turned into this pattern thing.

Merry Sheepmas!

Watercolor and a bit of digital editing to fix minor errors. Reference: My own photo. Living goat: In a field about a kilometer from my house. Bell: Created with inspiration from a few different reference photos found on Google.

Getting the right light grey woolly feel was hard to do in watercolor. But using a white gel pen to scribble lightly over the base watercolor painting brought out the effect I wanted.

A while back I joined a watercolor class on Reddit. I finished first exercise with the painting of the rum bottle, which by the way, now live happily with friends.

Today as the power was out for hours anyway, I decided I’d give watercolor exercise II a try. Combining the work in monochromatic with a technique I had watched on Youtube, by a very skilled watercolor artist, Iraville.

Plus, since today’s theme on Sketchdaily on Reddit was “tuxedo cat” I decided the subject had to be a still life with a cat then.

The family cat who seemed to have a bright future as model, cooperated for a grand total of about 5 seconds. Then he went hunting my brushes and then he was off, distracted by the kids left over chicken dinner. So in the end, this exercise is mostly painting from memory and imagination.

I had lots of fun playing with the fluffy technique and keeping the exercise limits of using only one color. As it turned out I hated the color I had chosen though. In the scan it turned out mostly bright yellow, even though it started out as brown on the paper. Its official name is “Raw Umber”. To fix it I desaturated the scanned picture till it was just black, grey and white with a slight warm tint left. I like it a lot more this way and it is still monochromatic as the exercise dictated.

So I learned a bunch from this exercise. The new painting technique turned out extremely hard to control and of course working in monochromatic you need to have good control of the small differences in hue. All in all I think it worked out. I like the little fluffy grey cat a lot.

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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