My Art Workshop

Today I played around in my 3D program “Blender”. A while ago I had made a hamster wheel and today I made the hamster that fits into that. It’s been so long since I used Blender, that my fingers had forgotten a lot of key shortcuts and my head has no clue. So it took a bit of searching the internet to do simple things, before it seemed to come back to me.

It did in the end. Enough for me to create today’s little hamster. He looks slightly dorky from certain angles, but I think it gives him personality. He is a super low poly model. As low as I could get it without ruining the shape and the expression (568 triangles to be exact).

Now I need to animate him, so he can run around in the hamster wheel.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RfFQpphyt3U

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It’s time for another art dump. I decided I wanted to learn how to draw owls. So I did a few sketches. One of them I gave away for Christmas.

While we were at my Moms place for Christmas I brought my watercolors and did a few paintings too. First another owl, then a kitten in collaboration with my kid (he drew it and we both painted it), and finally a fox. All three watercolors turned into presents too.

Now we are back home – just relaxing and catching up on everyday stuff. A wonderful Christmas to end a wonderful year 🙂

Back from Thailand I’ll do a bit of an art dump of some of the drawings I did while on vacation. I took 2500+ photographs. Many of them turned out great, but it’s impossible to choose so I’ll stick to my drawings here.

I managed to draw or paint every day while we were away. I am so happy I brought my watercolors. I won’t put it all here, some drawings were not exactly brilliant, but a few of them I am happy with.

Beautiful Gung, one of the staff at Jungle Village, Ao Nang, where we stayed in Thailand. We ended up feeling like family there.
Beautiful Jaep, another menber of the staff who danced for us one beautiful evening. We were being so spoiled by those wonderful people. Thank you so much Jungle Village!

Hrm, this is supposed to be Beyonce. She was featured as theme on Sketchdaily on Reddit. It’s not really looking like her, but I’ll give myself credit for the work anyway, since this was my first time ever trying to do a real portrait in watercolor. My watercolor paper for this trip was the smallest I could bring – 12×18 cm. It’s hard getting really fine details when the painting is that small. Good thing I brought thin and tiny brushes too 🙂
10 baht – pencil and colored pencils.
Si Island – one of the many exotic wild islands we passed a few kilometers off the coast at Ao Nang, Thailand.
After I got back I have been doing hard core drawing exercises like “Draw the same book 20 times from different angles” or “draw a straight line…then draw it again 8 times. Then repeat with 20 other straight lines” or “draw 100 plain boxes”.

It’s not really drawing practice, that suits being exhibited here. I have to admit it’s about as exciting work as doing the dishes or folding socks.

But that’s kinda the point. I am working with muscle memory practice – crucial for improving hand-eye coordination, sense of proportion and form, and also gaining line confidence. But there’s not much entertainment for my conscious mind in it, and no pretty product to be proud to showcase either.

I think I am seeing results after a few days of this actually. The internet’s drawing experts, who advocate for doing this on a regular basis, if you are serious about drawing, might be right.

I am following a system I found at “Draw A Box”. The lessons and challenges are killers! However they are super effective.

I did not like the theme on Sketchdaily today, so instead I decided to draw a girl I saw today. I never saw her face, but I liked her outfit and her energetic walk. It’s just a quick sketch, but it was fun to just draw from imagination and memory for once.

Today’s Sketchdaily theme: Dessert. I went for a strawberry pie as I practiced digital painting again. Bread crumbs are hard to draw in a soft, moist, delicious way, and strawberry sauce is really difficult to get to that sticky, sweet texture. Sometimes I wish paintings could be experienced with other senses too 🙂

Quick fox study for SketchDaily on Reddit, using my own photo as reference.

Todays SketchDaily theme on Reddit was “Lyrics interpretation”. For some reason this was the first song that came to my mind.

So I decided I might ask my kid, if he wanted to join in this challenge too. He agreed and we spend the entire afternoon and a good chunk of tonight painting to illustrate “Puff the Magic Dragon”.

We had so much fun tossing ideas at each other, helping each other with choosing colors and just working on something together 🙂

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I rediscovered a concept. Years ago I saw a small notice about artists doing small cards to trade with each other. The cards were mostly traded at various events, but the point was, that the cards were traded for free. They are a way to share a bit of work with fellow artists.

I liked the idea so much, that I printed that note with the description and kept it for who knows how many years. But since I did not really have connections to trade with anyone I never tried making any cards.

A week back I saw the cards mentioned again in the artists corner of Reddit. At times they trade cards, and if I sign up for the next round I could join too, trading with people all over the world! So since the SketchDaily theme for Friday was “Free draw” I wanted to get this started.

My aunt had just sent me an awesome watercolor she had made of various autumn mushrooms and leaves. That inspired me so much that I went to my garden to find stuff to draw and then went for todays painting. Watercolored artists trading cards – theme: “Autumn apples”. I absolutely love how these turned out.

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“The Terrorist” (our playful cat) was very interested in helping me out.

Especially the elderberries he loved helping me with, tilt they were crushed all over the table in purple puddles. He looks so deceptively peaceful here, but those hazel leaves in the foreground were on his radar. They made a funny noise when he padded them down with a paw and chewed on them. It was the white rowan berries he ended up abducting off the table and down all over the floor. Stupid cat 😀

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This is one of Malcolm Liepke’s portraits, that I tried to mimic as closely as possible in digital painting. I liked mimicking his style. It’s rough and courageous and so very different from my style. The reference I was working from is here.

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