My Art Workshop

Another batch of fairly fast drawings of faces. I still use that quickpose website I found with reference pictures, that change automatically after 120 secs. But I must admit i am really tired of having to rush like that all the time. So now I cheat. When I can’t stand the fast pace any longer, I stop and go back to the references and play with the drawings till I like the outcome. That’s how I did the top two ones. The bottom row has issues, but they were done in a lot less time. I need to do a series of ears to learn how they are constructed because they are complicated! All in all I am happy about today’s result.

It is hard to start up drawing again after having had so much fun doing photography. It’s so much faster doing photography, and very rewarding doing photography when being in a place like the Camargue. On our way home from France I did a bit of drawing in the car. The flamingos refused to leave my mind so I ended up drawing one. They are fun to draw!

Back home I am trying to get back to drawing humans. The place I found with reference pictures is starting to annoy me, since the slowest timing between pictures is 120 seconds and I miss being able to spend just a bit more time on it. So I cheated. I paused between each picture so I had a chance to draw what I wanted to draw. The following drawings are 180 sec/pose instead and I am much happier about the results now. I think I see progress.

Finally I did a few hands too.

We went to Arles today. I visited that city three times, and still I could barely recognize it, when we went there today. It seemed so large and busy compared to when I went there by interrail and later by bike and stayed at the camp site. The city center is still tiny narrow streets with colorful windows, flowers, cafés and washing lines. We strolled around the city, and I had fun taking photographs.
We found the yellow café, which Vincent van Gogh painted. It was drowning in a swarm of tourists, but we saw it 🙂
The Roman arena is an amazing build that used to hold up to 20.000 people. It is being carefully restored to its former glory, but as it is still in use today. The builders are facing a challenge to rebuild a roman ruin with modern facilities and security. These days the forum only holds around 12.000 people, which is still pretty impressive.
And finally on our way home I caught them, the white Camargue horses in their natural habitat. Foals are born black and change to white coat around 5 years of age, so meeting a herd of horses will show all kinds of color variations from black over grey to white.

Yesterday we went to see Pont du Gard. We went there years back, when we went to Provence on a biking trip. Back then we walked in the river all the way from our campsite to the aquaduct. Yesterday we took the easier -though less adventurous path- by car, since the river was too wild to walk in at this point, after the floods. This place is magic. It is amazing that the Romans were able to build something this large and impressive, that still stands today, 2060 years later. And it reminds me of the wonderful first summer with my husband.

Today we went to the Camargue again.
From a walk between the ocean and the brackish water of the Camargue at a thin strip of land, just east of Saint Marie de la Mer. The red grass is a fantastic contrast to the blue water and the yellowish mudflats.
I finally caught a good picture of the white heron. We spotted so many of them today.
And of course the flamingos were there – hundreds of them.
This little blue wonder was hard to catch. I am not sure of the exact species. It has quite distinct tails, but searching google gave me no good guess, so lets just call it a blue. I had to donate quite a lot of blood to the Camargue, while standing still long enough to capture this guy. The mosquitoes here are ferocious!
Our kid spotted this incredible green lizard.
I still have no great pictures of the white Camargue horses. This is best shot so far. Shot through the car window at 90 km/hour. Not that we did not get close to them, but most of them are held in enclosures, and I want a photo of them in the wild.

The black bulls though I got! Well …nearly in the wild anyway.

I finally made it! We went to the Camargue and I am absolutely ecstatic about it! What an amazingly beautiful place. Three times before in my life I went to Arles, Southern France, and each time something went wrong, so I never got to see this natural wonder. But today I found myself in the heart of it, and it was everything I dreamt of – and then more! So bear with me, this will be a marathon post of photos.

On our way to Camargue my kid spotted this! Never in my life did I see this many storks gathered in one place in the wild. We do have these birds in Denmark. But they are so rare that the newspapers write about, it if a pair of storks decides to build a nest in Denmark.
From there on it was just one little wonder after the other. As a biologist and photographer this was just heaven.
Eurasian coots resting on the shallow turquoise water. We were looking for flamingos, but these guys were beautiful too!
Great crested grebe and great cormorant were around too.
Eurasian coot, great crested grebe and great cormorant are all common in Denmark. Still they are a pretty sight. But we were looking for flamingos and suddenly there they were in all their pink glory.
It looks like I just snatched one pic and there I had it all perfect huh? Yea…no. I think I snatched a hundred if not more of the flamingos (and of the storks too by the way) To choose only one for the blog was next to impossible! But this next photo was exactly that: One super lucky shot where I had one chance and one second to point, focus, shoot. The next moment all what was left was a small ripple in the water and mud.
It is a ladder snake. Wikipedia later told us it is a common snake in the region. It is very aggressive and territorial and non venomous (we think). The three of us were totally ecstatic when we spotted it in a small muddy shallow stream.

From there on we stumbled on a lot of other critters: A coypu, which is an introduced pest from South American and really should be killed on sight. But this guy was incredibly friendly and walked right up to us, with a gorgeous, yellow, tooth, charming, smile. He lived to see another day. Down the path we found butterflies – red admiral and a speckled wood butterfly – a frog and a white heron. We saw prints in the mud from wild boar. We also got a few quick flashes of the bright blue kingfisher, sadly way too quick to catch for a photo, and of course there were herds of black bulls and white Camargue horses all over.
We went to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer for lunch. The waves at the harbor there were impressive.
From there we went to Aigues Mortes to see the medieval city, and the impressive medieval city wall and to take a stroll on it. The pink water that surrounds this village nicely illustrates where the flamingo gets it’s color from.
And then, bathing in the evening sun it stood there, glaring at us, waiting for me to snatch its portrait. So of course I did 🙂

I went for a walk today and found a truely sad roadkill. The prettiest grass snake I ever saw. They are rare in Denmark and non venomous. This one was 40-50 cm long, beautifully black, going nearly cobalt blue on the sides with bright yellow spots on the neck. And stone cold dead it was. I felt sad. It’s soon Winter and I bet this one was searching for higher ground to be safe from floods when going hibernating. He almost made it. We only have two species of true snakes: The grass snake and the common adder. I never saw the adder in the wild and the grass snake I only saw a few times.

Later today I started the car and went to pick up the snake, brought it home, and showed it to my kid, before I snatched a few pictures of it. Now it doesn’t look like a roadkill any longer. It rests peacefully in our garden.

Back home I did not feel like doing quick poses today so I just chose one pose and spent a bit longer time on it. I liked how defined this woman’s back is . This is somewhere around 10-15 mins work. Again it’s pencil on paper, using my new sketchbook.

Today quick poses as usual. But this is the first time for a while, I actually used a real pencil and paper. What a relief! I thought I was getting my Wacom pen tamed. But drawing with a real pencil is just so much easier. So I bought a sketchbook. I will still be practicing the Wacom pen, especially since it’s so easy to find a picture in Google, and just draw right here at the computer. But I will definitely be filling my sketchbook with real drawings too.

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Back to the full figure quickposes, 30 sec each. And as a new challenge: Mouths without any time limit on those.

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It is a pretty foggy day today. It is cold and it smells of fall. But as I was looking out from the livingroom wrinkling my nose going “eeew”, I spotted a tiny wonder. I had to grab my camera and go catch it. So today there will be photographs in the blog. I have a few from the past weeks that I would like to put here too.

The old tractor has a twin, which we think once upon a time might have been blue… or yellow … or green…

And finally I went to the Scandinavian Zoo a couple of weeks back. “Snowball” and his mate are just beautiful, even in their Summer coat. And his blue eyes are just amazing.

Today I chose only male faces. I tried to vary the pencil thickness to play with shadows and forms. It is so hard to control, but when it works, it is pretty good. I still need to learn that by my Wacom pen controller. Roll forward = thinner, roll backwards = thicker. I keep getting it mixed up and cursing at the pen, when it does the exact opposite of what I was trying to do. Still, I must be getting better after all! Today was the first time I encountered google pics suggesting I added name tags on the faces on my drawing 😀

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