My Art Workshop

Today a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi.

I found a really nice photograph of her and wanted to recreate it in a digital painting. I am testing my new Wacom Intuos Pro. It’s a great tool in combination with Photoshop. At times though there are almost too many options, so the trick is to keep it simple and preserve some light and mystery in a digital painting.

At the same time it’s always a challenge to create portraits, especially the ones seen from an angle like this. I think the face is close to a really good likeness and the curve of the hat ended up ok. Colors are not overly strong and the background is faded and blurry, but still interesting and giving a bit of information about the lighting in the scene. I like this one.

My Wacom Intuos Pro tablet broke. It’s my only alternative to using my mouse for creative activities on my computer, so my digitally creative world broke down with it.

It shields my right wrist from carpal tunnel syndrome too on many occasions where I use my mouse a lot for other work. I use it every day and I love it. In short: My Wacom tablet breaking down is a disaster. But a new one is insanely expensive 🙁

But I am a super lucky spoilt one! My mom decided to help out, and here I am a little later with a brand new Wacom tablet! Thank you so much Mom! You saved me, I love you <3

It took me a day to set up my new tool. Having it cooperate with my Danish keyboard proved difficult. Wacom in combination with PhotoShop and Windows apparently are not thrilled about keyboards with more letters than the basic English ones. But with help from various blogs and forums, now it works like a charm and I am so happy about it. This is first drawing done with it. It’s just a quick sketch of my hand, focusing on minimizing the chicken scratch and gain more confident lines 🙂

I have been playing with some of my many photos from our Thailand trip in November. Here are a few of them that I really like.

The first one was a lucky catch of two lantern bugs sitting on a tree in Kao Sok. They look like marvelous aliens, their patterns and shape are almost unbelievably beautiful and strange too.

The cat with the unusual mismatched eyes is from the same place. She was a playful one who was occupied with hunting the Ridleys Racer cave snake in a tree just when we arrived.

I took up the hunt as well with my camera ready to shoot and got lucky catching the snake as it was casually moving away from the cat.

All the little miracles we found within a radius of perhaps 10 meters. Kao Sok is a treasury!

Sketchdaily theme today inspired me. The theme was “Head over to reddit/drawme/ and find a photo to draw a portrait from”.

I went to look through a gazillion photos of people asking artists to draw them. For some reason this little kid caught my eye. He is just insanely cute and whoever took the photo chose a rather interesting bird’s eye view perspective, which truly is a challenge to reproduce in general.

Now doing portraits of children is about as hard as it gets. Doing a portrait of a child in a crazy perspective…. I don’t know what I was thinking. But it went surprisingly well I think and did not take me as long as I feared either.

So here is beka_targaryens pouty kid in his bear slippers. Thank you for the source photo Beka.

I did a quick little llama doodle yesterday. And a bit of figure drawing from one of the Croquis Cafe videos on Youtube
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I am not entirely sure this fits under my creative challenge, but today I’ll share about my experience with baking my own rugbrød (Danish rhye breads). Thanks to Kristina Hobbs who shared on her blog exactly how she made her own sourdough and rugbrød. It looked really simple so I decided I’d try my luck with this too.

I started the project last Tuesday so by now it has been almost a week underway. Sourdough has been bubbling away happily on my kitchen table for days. Every day it was fed water and flour. A scent of yeast and fermentation was quickly spreading in the kitchen. Finally last night the sourdough was ready to bake.

This evening we had half of one of the breads for dinner. It had turned out really delicious.

I had left the hard ends on the kitchen table after I had cut up the breads. But family apparently liked it so much, that later when I went to the kitchen, all those scraps had mysteriously disappeared. 🙂

Today’s submission for February in Colors. I met a group of interesting Danish artists. Being part of a group, working on and sharing a creative process, is very inspiring.

Getting a finished piece done each day is a challenge. Especially as the days progress, I realized I needed some sort of routine and a specific style to stick to for this series.

The style I settled on is a mix of water color, soft pastels and digital tools and the motives are mostly drawings I do at croquis exercises or anatomy studies. I like what I produced this week.

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Yesterday I had fun experimenting with anatomy doing another of the Croquis Cafes on Youtube. I did number 138 which is technically cheating my own system, since I am doing them in sequence and I have done number 72 – 80 by now. But I got tired of drawing naked ladies, so I went for Dwayne here instead.

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I created a super low poly 3D scene in Blender. Sketchdaily had a beer theme a few days ago. I decided this would fit just fine, if I could get a nice Blender render of it. Setting up lighting, finding a good camera angle, and getting a nice render without frying my computer was a challenge. After adding a few Photoshop filters I submitted this result.

The items were made to be imported to a game, so I had to keep the polycount super low. Had I created this solely for a nice render, I would have smoothed out a lot of edges. Still even with its roughness, I like the render as well and the items looks great in the game 🙂
The beer texture for the scene was hard to get right. Finding a bubble brush for Photoshop and using a lot of layers to give a sense of debt in the liquid did help.

February in Colors 6. I had drawn the lady years ago while on vacation. She was the result of me reading Andrew Loomis drawing book with lots of advice on how to draw the human figure. I tested the tricks out while drawing this lady. She is not a living human, but rather someone who apparently was living in my imagination 🙂

For February in Colors I used her as the base for the style I have decided on in this challenge. Using masking fluid to keep areas clean; I used a very loose watercolor style. I feel good about having given life to a person, who has rested in my imagination for a long time.

Another drawing for “Februar i Farver“. I struggled with this one for a long time. I started it at my drawing class this morning, just sketching the hand and inking it. Then back home I wanted to color it, as I had done with the previous drawings for the challenge. It did not work. As I colored it, it just turned into a weird mix between mud in a puddle and a drawing in some bible for a strange religion. I hated it and I was so close to starting all over, going for another pretty nude lady.

But yesterday I had watched a youtube video with a wise artist. His said that he had never ever given up on a piece of art even having to struggle for long.

So I told myself to not give up on the damn thing. I could not do much about the mud phase though. More color would just muddy it up even worse. Taking off color was impossible at that stage. So I ended up cursing at it and bringing it to my pc to work on it digitally.

Finally at this point I reached a version I am OK with.