My Art Workshop

Today’s pencil drawing is inspired by a photo from the old family album from 1971. It’s my uncle at my parent’s wedding. He is reading greeting cards adding his great sense of humour.

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The drawing for today is my mothers aunt, Johanne, playing with their dog in their garden. Their dogs were always called Foxy, so I guess that’s this ones name too 🙂 The reference was another old black/white photo probably from the 1930’ies in the old family album.

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Day two of my “draw a person a day” challenge. This is fun! I drew this in my sketchbook. The perspective on the bike was really hard to get right, and getting her to lean on it and still look relaxed and natural was hard too. So I scanned the drawing and played on with it in Photoshop till I was happy. All in all I ended up really liking this, plus I learned a few cool new techniques in Photoshop.

I have decided to practice drawing people. Both my own photographs and the photos from my grandmothers old albums are excellent as references. The people are my family, and the settings and fashions are interesting and charmingly old-fashioned.

I decided to forbid myself to draw with the pointy end of my pencil today. That way I could not draw the meticulously perfect lines. When I could draw only with the side of the pencil, I had to use my shoulder instead of my wrist. Drawing from the shoulder is a good way of getting more confident lines.

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In the end I had a person in my sketchbook. I need to ask my mom which uncle I drew. I think it is uncle Ejner, but it might be uncle Peter. Fun fact: Ejner and Peter were both farmers and they were brothers. They married two sisters, aunt Johanne and aunt Karen, my grandmothers older sisters 🙂

Two days ago I found time to draw a little using my tablet and computer. I have no clue who this person is. I opened Google image search, typed in “Portraits”, closed my eyes, and moved the mouse around. When I opened my eyes again, I drew the face it was pointing at.

I enrolled for drawing and watercolor painting classes every other Wednesday. Classes started today. It was great fun working with other artists and having a teacher to nudge me to discovering new adventures with my art. So far I did half a painting of a landscape. I snatched a photo with my phone of it. Sadly I can’t finish the painting until next class in two weeks, since I left the painting to dry at the school.

I was struggling with the wet in wet technique. The paper was bulging and the wet color was pooling in the valleys, so it was incredibly hard to control. Next time I might bring my own watercolor paper, it’s a bit less prone to distort as much when it gets wet.

Yesterday I went to buy masking liquid. I have heard it’s a great tool to use when painting watercolors to keep parts of the paper free of paint. White is impossible to get any other way and it’s really hard to keep white parts on an evenly colored background, if you have to paint all the way around many times. I was looking forward to trying that tool out. But something is wrong with it, it’s all thick and impossible to apply so I have to go back to the store and get a new one 🙁 Next time it will be easier!

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I spotted a new species in our garden this morning. A grey partridge (agerhøne in Danish) calmly strolled by. It has been years since I saw one. It was far off at the other end of the meadow. There were no time for tripod and such, so this was point and shoot with full zoom. About three days ago a common redstart (rødstjert in Danish) sat on the fence to the meadow. That was also a first for our garden, but alas, it was long gone, before I was back there with my camera ready.
I have been working in the free open source 3D creation program Blender. I learnt to use the cycles render feature today, even though it was technically super confusing to me at first. But I like my result with this tiny pearl and gold ring.

It has a very low poly count, meaning the shape of the object is defined with as few points as possible. It’s good for 3D games, where the computer has to deal with moving scenes, but less ideal for rendering super detailed, static, 2D images. It’s always a balance to find an acceptable level of details, that wont be too costly to deal with for computers. Because of the low poly count, the ring has some rugged edges and some harsh black shadows.

Making the metal texture look like gold with the reflections and all was a challenge – involving learning to use HDRI images for lighting the scene. But making the pearl texture was the real hard task in this project.

Pearls are not just white. Their mixed colors makes them beautifully iridescent in places. Light bounces off them and a bit through them too, plus the surface is not just perfectly smooth. With a lot of trial and error, and a lot of research, to see how other artists dealt with the challenge, I think it worked out OK in the end.

Rendering the ring took the computer almost an hour. I bet I could have nearly drawn it all on paper in that time too! But since the ring only exists in my imagination and now in the computer, that was not really possible. All in all this was a nice test project to try out new features and effects and learn how to use them.

Today I went for a walk. I wanted to practice macro photography, but the wind was strong, and the critters I had hoped to practice on, had probably gone into hiding. I went to the closest local little strap of forest, since the wood pecker in there kept yelling at me.

In the forest I encountered a few insects and flowers to practice macro shots on after all. Best shot was this fly. But soon mosquitoes found me irresistible, so I ended up fleeing the forest and went for the local road instead.

The jersey cows there are always fun to watch and today was no exception. One of them had just given birth to a tiny calf. When I walked by it had just learned to stand, but walking was still hard! I took a few photographs, but the cow did not like me being there, so I soon moved on. It was a beautiful day for photography again 🙂

Today has been glorious. Weather was perfect and I was off by my bike around 10am. I went all the way to Langå and back home in the other side of the river, around 22 km in all.

I had barely left home before a deer presented itself for a perfect photoshoot. After that great start the wild animals were just lining up – rare and less rare. A few kilometers further down the road I nearly hit a water snake baby, and as I stopped to look at it as it fled out of sight, I discovered a bright almost fluorescent yellow spider – a cucumer spider.

I also met the aurora butterfly, the least weasel, and a lot of birds along the river. When I was nearly home I met another photographer and had a good chat with him, getting all the good tips of wildlife photo opportunities in the area right now.

Surprisingly many of my photos turned out really good. I guess that my friends Glenn´s and Ray´s efforts to teach me how to use my camera properly is slowly paying off.

When I got home I thought this was enough adventure for today. But this evening Oscar, the rabbit, returned from his winter hiding and ran straight over our meadow and lawn. Good to see he is still alive and kicking. Later as dusk kicked in, a fox took the same route. We rarely see those so close to the house. Sadly – by this time it was too dark to take pictures.

I found a webpage (Posemaniac) with 3D hands to rotate in any direction. That’s pretty convenient when I want to draw hands, though still not as good as drawing from life.

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The weather was beautiful today so I grabbed my camera when I noticed a white wagtail (hvid vipstjert in Danish) in our old oak, and went for a little garden walk.