My Art Workshop

Continuing the wolf practice. I think I am starting to see some progress 🙂

October is here. I have been looking at this art challenge for years finding it a great initiative. So this year I am doing it: Inktober! The rules are simple: Draw every day for October. Use ink. Post the results online with #Inktober.

Ink is permanent. If you make a mistake that mistake will be staring at you forever after. And if you do this without even putting down a few weak pencil lines first as guides you have absolutely no safety net. So why not live life a little dangerous 🙂 I decided to learn how to draw canines – wolves in particular. I have tried this a few times earlier. For the past days I have been getting familiar with drawing with a nip pen and with wolf anatomy.

Nip pens are evil by the way. I could have just gone with a pen brush or a fine liner or even a ballpoint pen. But nope. If we are going to live life dangerous we might as well walk straight off the cliff and do it the old fashioned way – it might be fun too 🙂 So here are the last three day’s production of wolves.
I am not done learning to draw wolves in ink just yet. But I have all October to learn, so I am very optimistic about the project. These pages were fun and also very interesting to create. Using a new media is a challenge – a good one 🙂

Just fiddling around with a few new techniques of digital drawing. I found a great tutorial and am feeling inspired. Perhaps these will end up as my own personal deck of Tarot cards.

I followed along a stream on Twitch this evening where several people drew human faces to a specific color scheme and within a set time. It was great fun! What became very clear in this exercise is that it’s far easier still to draw with a reference. Drawing from memory is a huge challenge. Still fun though 🙂 The drawing is referenced from my old family photo album.

Another holiday of painting. It feels good to be active being creative. Today has been calm and I found time to paint the view of the lake Bodensee in Germany. While on holidays I don’t really have any way of editing photos so here’s a few progress shots again:
My masking fluid came in handy today, to reserve the space for the boats. It gave me the freedom to play freely, splashing water and color everywhere to paint the sky and the lake waters without worrying about keeping the space for the boats clean. You see it as a pale green color on those two first shots.
Masking fluid however don’t remove easily on my cheap crappy paper which was never intended for watercolor. In fact I ended up removing masking fluid + the upper layer of paper.
With a bit of patching up errors and destroyed paper I ended up with a version I quite liked after all.

In all this I find it great fun to push the papers limits – sometimes what looks like errors can be turned into funny effects. Sometimes errors are just that: Completely irreversable blunders that destoys a painting 😀 For the longest time the sky in this painting looked like the last option of the two, but somehow, using a piece of paper towel lifting off color, in the end things worked out 🙂 I have been lucky two days in a row now ending up with something I like.

Arriving at Bodensee this afternoon. The campsite is beautiful and we are looking forward to exploring tomorrow 🙂 Today I spend a few hours just painting whatever was in front of me when I was lazying around outside the camper van. A huge thunderstorm finished the evening off with a spectacular lightshow over the lake.
A couple of progress shots
No image editing possible at the camp site, but here is the finished painting for today 🙂

Yesterday as I was minding my own business, this creature suddenly marched onto my desk, plopped down on its big fat ass in front of me and demanded to be put to paper.

I tried to ignore it for a good while. Creatures demanding to be placed into existence like that have no manners and should not just be let loose like that. After a while those puppy eyes he sent me softened my artist heart, so I noted down a few lines on a piece of paper. Nothing serious, nothing at all to be fussing about. But the creature jumped and clapped his hands excited. So I asked him what he liked and he went, “Bees!!”

I decided it was safe to add one. So a few more lines were added and the creature howled “Yes! yes! – and flowers!” and pulled my thumb. I grunted and added flowers randomly and then pushed the paper away, deciding that would be enough time wasted on him. And he did seem happy as he settled into existence with his flowers and his bee. So I went on with what I had been doing.

Only – it did not take long before I heard this rather loud insisting whisper: “This is great! But…it would be greater if the flowers were red, and the bumblebee is unhappy. He is not properly yellow and black striped. You can’t have a bumblebee that’s just plain white, it’s just not right!”

Of course I ignored him. Damn creature was not going to decide whether I should spend my entire day dealing with his colors. But he kept at it. Louder and louder he went whining about the colors. In the end I got tired of his complaints and found my watercolors and splashed some color on him. He loved it, but of course he demanded glitter and white gel pen too and a signature to make his head even bigger.

Rasmus says he whispered his name to him. So I present to you Darfoogb and his bumblebee, in color and all.

Larger resolution

For my birthday my kid gave me these new watercolors and a nice stack of watercolor paper too. The weather was amazingly beautiful this weekend. We were all in the garden enjoying it and celebrating, so I brought it out and started testing all the new materials. It ended up as an abstract painting that I quite like too, so here it is.

Been visiting my in-laws this weekend. It was nice being with family and I found time to draw a bit while being there. I found my old photo of the stretching tiger and did a watercolor version of it.

Today I continued my project on figure drawing. As I have done before I went to the Croquis Cafe on Youtube. It’s a great resource for artists. This time though I ignored the timed poses and just paused the video at each pose to get it drawn as accurately as I could. I need to figure out how the parts fit together properly before I can move on to the fast drawings.

So here they are, ten poses done.