My Art Workshop

I was struggling trying to record my drawing and painting process today having set up camera and various structures to try keep it steady and in focus while I worked. It’s not easy! I need to improve the lighting for sure, but I did finally get the technique working.
It takes a while to edit a drawing video like that into a short snippet that shows the progress without having the viewer sitting through the rather longwinded boring parts of me drawing small repetitive details.

I will definitely try this out again, when I figure out how to fix the lighting. It would be nice with a more sturdy supporting frame to hold the camera too. Perhaps some day it will be technically possible to show the result here on the blog 🙂

Instead of the video, here are two of the birds I ended up with, that I really like.

Earlier today I started another project that might be fun: Patterns. This will be fast work, but hopefully something that is easy to start out with as a warm up for other drawings. Today my hand decided to do a brick wall in watercolor and a bit of gold gel pen.

Today was the last day of Easter vacation. The prompt of today was “Lizards” and so I set out to find inspiration in my photo collection. What I found was that I have surprisingly many photos of lizards and it was hard to choose. But those three were so amazing together with the blue, green and red contrast so I ended up with a lizard from Camargue, one from Florida and one from South Africa.

Today’s prompt was “Woodland creatures.” I sat down and constructed a painting. But as I finished and had it scanned and was working on the last finishing touches in Photoshop I decided the painting was too crowded. So I cut it in pieces and ended up with three separate paintings instead.

Last Friday the challenge for #365daystoaportfolio was to draw and/or paint fish. So I decided to try catch up and do a koi today. I had it drawn fairly early in the day but I wanted it colored too.

I went to Twitch to see if I could find inspiration. There I found Nina Huang who was working on painting an amazing Japanese inspired pattern, using a cunning technique to have the pattern turn out as a repeat pattern. She uses her own art work to send to China to get it printed on fabric and then she sews clothing from it! I found that absolutely amazing. Her webpage is very inspiring, I love her thoughts on the creative process. I was so inspired by her, that I could share my drawing with Nina same evening.

Last Wednesday the challenge to draw was cats. It’s the same process as yesterday – crappy paper, black pen, no regrets and watercolor dapped on in splotches to create…something. The more I draw and paint like this, the more it feels like coming home. It’s strange, but it feels good 🙂

Studying dogs, using a pen and watercolor. It’s a challenge working with the pen instead of pencil. I can’t regret and change a line. I am trying to get a better grasp on using watercolor being more loose than I ever tried before. It gets parts of the drawings really wonky, but funny enough I like the results a lot. So in general Yay for my decision to use my small, ugly super cheap sketchbook where I don’t take my drawings so terribly serious. It’s not at all made for watercolor and the paper bends like crazy when it gets wet – still, it now holds those drawings and I really love them. It was great fun just letting loose, and the result to me looks alive and casually elegant 🙂

Did this yesterday using a felt pen and quick watercolors. They are all insects from my garden.

Larger resolution

Continuing the people theme. I went to the mall again today to draw another 20 completely innocent people. And again it was great fun!

I think this might be the right (and fun) thing to do to push myself to get better. It’s not exactly practicing realism. With people not standing still but walking around this is not life drawing like if I went to a croquis event. This is more like a mixture of that and my own cartoonish style that I have to use when I need to “fill in the gaps” when the person has long left and the drawing is only half way done. As I get better at anatomy and proportions the filling in gaps part will get better and better.

Today I was more loose and less concerned with realism and more with capturing what I had seen – colors, clothes and accessories and more importantly: Gesture and personality. In some of the drawings I think I somewhat succeeded in that while others developed far from the original person.

That is not necessarily bad though as long as the result still looks somewhat believable and still captured a moment I wanted to express. I have worked with strict realism and gesture drawings for so long that this experiment is really fun and so very different to do.

So today I did it. For the first time ever!

When I had to go for a drive anyway, I brought a bag with my cheapest sketchbook with sketch paper, my new awesome water refill brush, my water color travel set and a regular black felt pen. I found a spot at the cafe and started drawing people. No time to be perfectionist, no eraser, no regrets! Nobody stayed in place for longer than a second. Man was that scary! But I had set out to do it and I had bought a drink to sit in the cafe for a while so damn me if I would walk away from there with no drawings, so on I went. The results are colorful. But I had so much FUN. I might go do this again another day. Perhaps I will even do the 100 people challenge I just stumbled on here.

In the plane to South Africa I found time to do a small sketch. Rasmus wanted a snake so here is one. I have no idea what kind of snake it is, it just came straight from my imagination as I had no references and it has no markings of any kind since the plane landed before I got to that. Originally it was just a plain pencil drawing added a bit of blue color pencil as background. The other colors are added in Photoshop later as we got home.