My Art Workshop

Today it was time for my Wednesday water color class. I drew and painted this little water color still life. I did not have enough time to finish it in class, so I brought it home and finished it as well as I could without the actual objects in front of me.

I like how it turned out and this was first time I got that devious masking liquid stuff working. I had it for months now, but never did it work as I hoped for. I went to the shop where I bought it, because it was all dried up, gooey, and impossible to work with. I got a new one, that had the exact same problem and in the end I gave up on it.

Till today. I decided to try one more time, and as it suddenly, magically worked, I used it after all. It made a nice shiny effect on the old blue coffee pot.

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Art dump of my work from yesterdays Croquis class in Aarhus. I was shocked when my teacher came by, looked at my work over my shoulder, and suddenly bend over it, to smear a paper towel with graphite powder all over it. In my eyes, in that moment, he totally ruined what I was doing. It did create an interesting effect I guess, and in retrospect I get what he was trying to provoke me to do. But it was a hard pill to swallow. I was angry!
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I decided to go for something really hard for today. Todays theme at Sketchdaily was “Master study” more specifially this self portrait made by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. The real painting is of course made in oil. I was not up for learning to use oil paint for real tonight so I went for a digital version.

Finding brushes in PhotoShop that worked for this was a bit of a challenge since I did not want the plastic digital look. I think in the end it worked out – after hours and hours of struggling. I learnt that skin color is not just a pinkish beige. It’s green, grey, blue, pink, red, yellow, and brown – all colors! Here is my version of Louise Élisabeth’s self portrait:

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I am still doing 5 randomly rotated book sketches every day. It’s still so hard to get perspective right, but I think today I saw a tiny bit of progress – yay!

A friend asked me to make a gift shop logo for her. This is a sketch with my first idea, combining a heart with hands giving a gift. It’s a bit busy for a logo, but I still like the idea 🙂

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It’s been a while since I did anything in a Disney style like this on purpose 🙂 Many younger artists have their foundation in Manga style. I was into Disney’s cartoon movies as I was a kid, so it’s that style that is visible in my work at times.

I did have great fun researching Chernabog and looking through Disney’s “Fantasia” to find their rendition. I was inspired, and I like my finished drawing. Especially the village with its spikey roofs was fun to make. The drawing fits the halloween theme and the daily challenge on Sketchdaily today, which was “Night on Bald Mountain”.

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Today I decided to do an exercise I found at “Ctrl+Paint“: Draw 20 drawings of your phone. The trick is to move it between each drawing to get practice in judging different angles and perspectives. I found my phone annoying since gravity often took over – messing with the angles I had decided to draw from. Instead I found a 3D model of an old book at Sketchfab. It worked even better, as I could rotate it in any plane as I liked.

I put on my usual Noise generator and started working. It’s strange that – to not be too distracted while working – I find that having a bit of noise calms me to concentrate. At the noise generator I recommend the “Subaquatic Dream” and the “Cat Purr” and sometimes the “Cafe Restaurant” is pretty good too on very low volume. I tried out Audio books as well. But I get too distracted to be able to work simultaneously, so I had to give up on that. Audio books are better for cleaning chores and long drives alone in the car 🙂

When I was done with 5 book drawings I had had enough. It’s hard to do! I still felt like drawing though, so I went to Sketchdaily at Reddit, to check out today’s theme: “Swords”. I knew I had photos of a pretty cool viking sword, so I was happy drawing that. Here it is: My viking sword from late 9th century, found in Northern Jutland and exhibited in the Viking section at Moesgaard Museum, Denmark.

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During the weekend we visited my cousin and his family, and we had a wonderful time there. I squeezed in time to do a small still life drawing, using colored pencils. They had a beautiful pitcher on a shelf, and in front of me they had served a plate of their delicious blue grapes – homegrown of course! Doing the reflection of the grapes on the pitcher´s side was a challenge, but also a really neat effect. Drawing fifty small round grapes and then coloring them all and adding highlight and shadows to each is a daunting task.

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My kid wanted a griffin. I had to study eagle heads and lion legs to get it working anatomically and this is what we ended up with. I kinda forgot griffins are supposed to have wings too. I’ll get that right some other day 🙂

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Today’s task at my drawing class was to paint a portrait. I started doing a few initial, very soft pencil strokes, just to get the main features arranged correctly on the paper and then I went on with the soft pastels. Soft pastels are fun! And I never knew these worked with water too. The reference photo I was working from today was black/white, so adding color to this one was completely up to me.

When I had the face, hat and shirt done, I wanted to try be more free and relaxed doing the background. So I added color there in black and green shades and then went over it with brush and water. It turned out a big mess. I learned that soft pastels are already very rich in color on their own, but that is greatly enhanced with water added.

When the painting had dried, I tried to level out the mess a bit – by layering more white and yellow pastels over the really dark parts and black pastel over the very green parts. Some parts I smeared out with my fingers to create contrasts to have his face stand out from the background. It all did fix the mess a bit. Considering it is the first time I play with a pastel and water combination, and the first time I got likeness fairly well in first try, I very much like the finished piece. I love the color palette.

The reference photo for this painting was in an old booklet, which my drawing teacher had collected and given to my class for inspiration in school in the late 80’ies. The same booklet held the reference photo for the lady I drew in ink not that long ago.

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Yesterday we went for a walk in Bebenhausen, Germany. The small village was packed with beautiful, hundreds of years old, stockwerk buildings and I had fun taking photos there. Later I went for a quick sketch of one of these photos, and today I finished it, adding color with color pencils and a white gel pen.

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