Drawing and More Drawing


Recently I have been busy drawing, finishing old stuff and starting new ones.  Shortly after taking the photo of this sanguine tree in progress it took a slight turn and looks a little different than what I anticipated.  Soon I will  be posting the finished drawing, so do come back and check it out.


I also worked on this small commission of a baby portrait with a fountain pen.  I must say I surprised myself as to how well it turned out.  Portraits can be hard and to do them with just pen, no pencil under drawing, can definitely make things more difficult.  I accepted the challenge and I'm very happy with it.


Not so long ago I was talking to a friend, and he thought that it would be a great idea to come up with a monochromatic watercolor palette that cold be used for sketching on the go.  He made his own with three or four colors by attaching them to an Altoids tin, I must say he is into something neat.  That left me with the desire to come up with my own set, of course found it hard to stick to just three colors, so I came up with my own watercolor box of twelve earth and neutral colors.


It didn't take long for me to put this new set to use.  I began laying some light gestural washes to get a sketch going.  At first I was not so sure as to what I had done, I thought I had ruined a couple of good pages of my sketchbook.


A day after the paper was completely dry I began doing some pen work on top of the watercolor.  I used some of the color puddle marks to create shapes and connect them.  The mix of the sepia and walnut tones together made sense and I began to envision what the final sketch might look like.


Recently I purchased a set of neutral color pencils that I thought might be a good thing for me to explore.  At first I thought they might be pastel pencils but as began working with them I could tell that they were something else.  There was a silkyness to them, and as I looked closely at the box and dug through all my drawing materials it turned out that they were colored pencils, and I already owned a much larger set which I've had with me since I was in high school.  I have not worked with colored pencils since then, I found them to be unforgiving.  Maybe I was pressing too hard, I may have been using them incorrectly.  This time I'm softly layering the color, letting the pencil barely caress the paper, which is the way I have been drawing in the last ten years.

I loved these pencils so much, especially this warm grey, that I began another drawing.  So far so good...I'm loving this misty effect I'm achieving.  I will be posting soon some of these finished drawings, so please do come back ya hear!

Comments

Anonymous said…
Your work is excellent, thank you for this blog.�� I met you on Instagram.
Maria del Valle (alarttex)

Popular Posts