My Art Workshop

I like this challenge style I decided upon yesterday. Todays drawing was about the same pipeline as yesterdays:

Play with super quick croquis sketches, watercolor, soft pastels and a final touch up in Photoshop.

The paper nearly broke again but the fact it’s rough and gritty and also so very fragile makes this so much fun! I am used to being so afraid of the clean paper and of making mistakes. But with the past two days drawings, I try to push myself to care less, and it turns out way more fun and creative really.

Today I ended up with a pink girl.

I joined an artist initiative I came across a few days back. A Danish artist Maiken Damsgaard has started what she calls “Februar i farver” (February in Colors). The idea is to submit a creative product each day in February that fits the theme.

Since I need to practise my figure sketching skill and really would like to be doing some croquis I decided to combine things a bit. So my theme for “February in Colors” might be “The Human Body”.

My aunt wrote me a sweet email today and sent me a few drawings she had made in soft pastels. I played with those a few times earlier and it’s always so much fun. So for today I decided to combine super fast figure sketches with soft pastel.

After I had sketched, colored with pastels and added watercolor and ink too, I decided to take a photo of the painting and bring it to Photoshop, to continue playing around a bit with all the digital tools.

This painting definitely had a messy birth but it was also a lot of fun to make.

For Sketchdaily the theme yesterday was Mjolnir.

I researched for images of Viking art with Thors Hammer, finding most of them in a form similar to the one I created hereunder: Short handle with a sturdy ring at one end, and a heavy slightly curved metal end.

I like the Mammen style of the Vikings, so that definitely had to play a part. Since it was Thors hammer specifically, I found it fun if I could somehow incorporate his two rams “Tandgrisner” and “Tandgnost”.

Wanting to incorporate all these details in one drawing it took a few sketches, before I found a solution I liked. The drawing is digital as I wanted to get to a fast result with an iron effect, while keeping all the tiny details.

Figure sketches using the Croquis Cafe at Youtube as reference.

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Today I wanted to play with water colors again. I also wanted to get back to doing Artist Trading Cards. I combined the two, doing ATC cards for two Sketchdaily themes: “Plein Air” and “Repoussoir”.

For the Plein Air I decided on one of my old digital photos from Auckland skyline. My husband and I had gone for an evening trip to the viewpoint at Mnt. Victoria at Devonport. The city looked almost magic as its reflections stretched over the water.

It was a beautiful evening and it was fun to paint it now, even though it was difficult to fit Auckland into a piece of paper the size of 6.4 x 8.9 cm!
I also had a photo from when we went to Rotoroa. It was another beautiful evening. Framed by a giant willow tree the sun was setting over Rotoroa lake after a chilly, but calm Winter day.

Again I went for the ATC format, so I did not have much room to try capture the atmosphere from the old photograph. I find it tricky using masking fluid with water color for such a small format. But a white gel pen helps with adding the last crucial details to turn such a tiny painting interesting.

Two themes from the Sketchdaily themes spoke to me today: “Portrait” and “Formal Wear”. Portraits are always great fun to make, even though it is insanely hard to get a good likeness. I like how the shadows in the hair turned out and how the many different colors of red works together. Smiles are hard to get right. Next to baby faces I think smiles are the hardest. I like how I captured her expression, she looked a little shy, but also super sweet.
“Formal Wear” is an old drawing I now found a good opportunity to finish. I had done a lot of research for it, but had initially only finished the woman. Getting the man fitted into the movement fluently was challenging. But it was also great fun completing my initial idea of having a couple dancing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers style.

Today I made this water color mouflon skull. I wasn’t sure if I liked it for a very long time, while I worked on it. Colors flowed together in ways I had a hard time controlling. Textures I attempted to make did not turn out as expected.

But I think I am slowly learning to never give up on a piece. If it looks bad it’s often just a matter of pushing through that phase. Keep working on it, seeing where to add a bit of light or shadow or contrast to find what it was missing.

On this piece the background really tricked me. On my reference photo, that I shot once at a viking fair, there were thick bushes and trees in the background with quite strong light and shadows.

But all that greenery just looked flat in my painting, until I dared add very dark tones, even black. Then it all looked like mud. I tried adding droplets of water on the dried green surface, lifting off some color and creating a flowery effect in the background. That did help create some interesting textures and add some life to it.

Somehow in the end, when the skull was done too, and I added a bit of white gel pen and black ink, it somehow all came together. Now it’s one of my favorite paintings 🙂

Sketchdaily theme from November was “Space Travel”. Once I tried to paint a space theme in watercolor. It was incredibly hard to get a real sense of the enormous debt in space when working in that media.

This time I went for a digital drawing to get that necessary multi layered effect and complete darkness. I used a couple of Hubble Telescope images as reference and inspiration. I am happy how that turned out. I love the soft, cloudy feel of the nebula and the almost sprinkled, sparkly shine of the many stars.

I have very little experience in drawing space crafts. In this example I wanted the space craft to look metallic, but still have a soft, organic, almost animal touch. As if it was a creature moving through space with a mind of its own.

The little space craft turned out a tough learning experience. It was partly frustrating, partly very interesting to make. I added a bit of reflected light over its upper rim in the end, and I think that worked. The space craft floating in the foreground of the scene very much enhanced the debt in the image.

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Creating machinery that looks like it’s actually working is a challenge I should look more into. I have a stash of my own reference photos of different machines and machine parts, collected for this exact purpose. I have a hunch it might be a lot of fun to play with, since rusty old metal parts are always interesting. The Danish artist Storm P. would be an excellent source of inspiration too.

Today’s theme on Sketchdaily was “Kaiju”. I had no idea what that is, but Wikipedia helped out:
“From Japanese “strange beast” …a film genre that features monsters, usually attacking a major Japanese city or engaging other monsters in battle.”

I did not feel like drawing Godzilla or the Michelin man, but gorillas? Yes!. So here is King Kong.
It is pretty hard to find references with angry gorillas. They are powerful, but also so gentle. So this is my own guess on how a giant gorilla might look like, when it’s huge as a house, really scarily angry, and the star in a Kaiju movie.

I could probably have done the perspective more extreme for the action theme, to underline the Kaiju twist, but I am happy with the drawing as it is now too.

Sketchdaily theme for December 1st 2015: “Chess Piece”. Done as a fairly quick digital sketch. My childhood favorite subject, turned into a chess piece. I like the shiny material it’s made of and the flamey background. No references are used for this. Sometimes it just feels good to play without rules 🙂

Roe deer in Winter Wonderland, painted in water color with my own photos as references.