My Art Workshop

I am considering how to do the next watercolor challenge. This time it’s “Monochrome still life”. In the meantime, while I am pondering, I made apple juice. The sun is shining beautifully and the color of the juice turned out so nicely I decided to set up a small scene with it for a photo shoot.

I found a new Reddit challenge. A new watercolor exercise is given each week. First theme was “Still life”, so I decided to try to paint a bottle of rum without putting too much time in it. So this is around 2 hours work including time to have the different stages of it dry.

Today I found a sketch daily theme to illustrate: Ponytail.

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.

Another Ctrl+Paint drawing excercise. This time focusing on proportions and outlines. The assignment said “draw ten objects only tracing their outlines” so thats what I tried to do, though paying attention to line weight too.

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Inbetween drawings I put a lot of effort in, I need to practise simple things – line weight, line confidence, forms, shading, and proportions. Some days I have filled 5 sheets of papers with ellipses or boxes. It sounds mindnumbingly boring right? And it is. But each time I have done it I find my other drawings benefit from lines that seems so much more confident. I haven’t put them on the blog since they are a tad bit repetitive, but they help with the hand-eye coordination since drawing is also a basic motoric skill like riding a bike. Yesterday I went for drawing 20 spoons. Today I might be working on outlines and stilllife.

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Yesterday I went for drawing something simple that would still be a challenge since it’s curvy, but still has very strict symmetry. I did not get it entirely finished as I liked – reflections in the water are missing and I did not entirely nail the symmetry, but I can see progress. Things are gradually getting better. I think this project is as done as it gets now – on to new challenges 🙂

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And on a whole other note, since this now happened to me again for the millionth time or so. This will be technical and probably not make much sense to others but me, but I am tired of having to sieve through the internet each and every time I face this problem so I am going to put the fix on my blog now.

The problem is that my Wacom Intuos 4 seems to keep losing the keys I bind to the touch ring on it. So when I think I can zoom or change brush size nothing suddenly works. This happens out of the blue, and apparently on a regular basis. I can draw happily one evening and when I start my computer next morning everything is a mess. The problem arises because I have a Danish keyboard and Photoshop, Windows and the Wacom drivers have apparently not entirely come to terms on how to handle non English keybords with this. There is a fix, I just keep forgetting, so here we go:

Touch ring:
————–
Touch ring Zoom : Ctrl+ and Ctrl-
Touch ring Brush size: å and ø
Touch ring Brush hardness: < and .

Buttons to bind:
————-
1) Settings
2) Radial Menu
3) D
4) A

5) Step backwards (Ctrl+z)
6) Control
7) Shift
8) Alt
—————

There. That might save me (and maybe you?) quite a lot of time next time it happens.

So many years I had this one photograph from when I went to Budapest in 2002. It’s dreamy and foggy and a bit magic. My digital camera at the time was fairly good but compared to modern digital photograph standards it’s crap. So I tried to paint the motif. It turned out so very far from what I had hoped, but after a few months of consideration and finally finishing it. I still like it with all its imperfections. So here it is after all.

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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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