Animal Gesture Drawings : July 23rd 2015

A major goal of mine is to squash any resistances I have toward drawing. Sometimes, I want to draw, but I'm reluctant to actually do it, because...drawing is hard? I'm allergic to emotion? I'll explode under all the self-inflicted pressure?? I will begin to feel that life is inevitably futile and sad??? Sure, sure, that all may be (just slightly) exaggerated, but - whatever the reasoning - sometimes I do avoid drawing, even when it feels like something I ought to do.

But in order to achieve some greater ambitions, such as drawing wildlife in the field that will never, ever stand still for you, being much better at drawing is a requirement. Speaking of wildlife again, drawing not just quickly, but precisely, would be my lofty goal.

I would like drawing to feel as natural and unimpeded as possible. I think if it ever truly feels easy I might feel like I'm doing something wrong. But natural, quick, sharp, automatic, with less doubt, less "I'm not sure what I'm doing; this is a jumbled mess I can't make sense of; I hate this drawing and everything it stands for", would indeed be nice.

Top left two: 30 second sketches (peahen, kiwi). Right side four: 1 minute sketches (macaw, sparrow, dove, duckling). Bottom left: 10 minute macaw.  Sort-of center: 5 minutes each for goose and seagull.

That's where gesture drawing comes in! Practice, practice, practice. Quick sketches, always with a set timer, and hopefully I'll get into the habit of doing these more often than just once every blue moon, because it's an important exercise for me. Building comfort with drawing, more confidence with skill, and more familiarity with anatomy, form, shape, shading, style. Trying to build myself a little no-pressure free-draw zone while still saying "Hey. Get good."

More 30 second birds surrounding a 5 minute horse, 5 minute squirrel, and 10 minute kangaroo. Yes the kangaroo was in a weird as heck position with strange perspective. It was not trying to be handsome or sensible like the other animals.

Helping a lot to make this practice easy is a neat figure and gesture drawing tool completely free on the internet: http://artists.pixelovely.com/. I love that they have animal drawing among the choices, and that you can customize the kinds of animals you want, focusing on birds, mammals, or anything from bunnies to tarantulas. I enjoy doing the "class style" program with a variance of sketch times.

Having a timer really helps cut back on the existential despair. Although there's still a lot of internal screaming and frustration words on those thirty second drawings, that's just part of the thrill. The joy of art, I should say.

My 30 second and 1 minute mammal sketches are not pictured here, because most are nigh-indiscernible and my brother made fun of them. Good exercises, not always pretty to look at it, not always something I'm gonna want to see again in ten years.

My brother did not make fun of this parrot, the way he made fun of the poor squiggle cats.

There's an awful lot of mental calculation that goes into drawing and it's only consistent practice over time that's going to improve that. You have to learn how to look, and what to look for, to construct your drawing, and how to do all the proper proportion checking and re-checking that will eventually become automatic. I still have to catch myself when I automatically draw a wing at the wrong angle, and that's just one example.

Five minutes was not enough time to draw that entire horse and all its legs. Not with my limited familiarity with entire horse and weird flailing leg anatomy.

Given that my ultimate goal is to draw things that move, well enough that I can capture things like personality, detailed body language, accurate identifiers, and behavior, the more automatic all the basic processes can be, the better. I want no hesitancy when it comes to putting pencil to paper.

Rosetacular!

Well, well, what do we have here?

  

Colored pencil, on paper, in the shape of a rose? A rose drawing? Complete? 100% feline approved??

I've been working on this little beauty for a little over 2 months, and I'm finally done with it. Good riddance! No, it was quite fun, and really turned out much better than I expected.

So I started out with some crummy phone pictures of a rose. Now, I was going to draw the rose while it was, y'know, still alive, but do I get anything done on time? Ha! No.

Rosetacular! Right? Now we move into how exactly you get from a sub-standard photograph to a (hopefully) above-average piece o' art. You already know I ditched the leaves. Why? I dunno, I thought about it. I just wasn't feeling it, I guess! I wanted something simple, I suppose.

A light sketch, and the laying down of a few colors. Feeling it out, hoping everything will look okay in the end. Then a bit more definition, and the addition of the stem. Clearly you can see that I am like "man, I do not want to get into all those layers." Do you know how many petals are smooshed into that rose? Too many, that's the correct answer. I took a slow and steady approach to the whole thing.

Slow and steady can win a race or two, I think. You can see I'm working from the outside in, and shading and defining everything as I go, tweaking everything bit by bit, petal by petal. At this stage you can see I'm mixing in more colors. And yes, I did use about 25 colored pencils for this project, with probably 10 of them getting the most use.

Clearly, there's only so long that the inner rose petals can be avoided.

Then, of course, things start to get tedious. And confusing. I try to define the shape and placement of each petal, but then there's the layers of colors to add, to make the shading, to make everything more rich and (hopefully!) more wonderful.

On the picture below, you can see that I'm going into the final stretch: all the petals are there, everything has color, and now it's just a matter of buildup, filling in the gaps and defining the details.

Once that's done? Oh, sweet victory-

It kinda looks like a rose, yay! It's all I ever wanted. Quite the journey, my friends. Are we all richer for the experience? I know I am.

 

Works in progress: snakes and stuff

I woke up one day and felt like painting a snake. Luckily this is a dream I'm quite capable of fufilling, so I jumped right into it:

This is a terrible picture full of glare (it's glarrible!), but it gives you an idea. I wanted something up close and personal, sweet colors, a snake that's fierce, beautiful, captivating.

 You can see here that the snake begins to grow up, gets more definition, less of a shadow and more of a living thing.

After coating the snake with another layer of paint, I start adding scales.

This was really quite tedious.

But really quite worth it, I think.

I got a little frustrated trying to change the eye around, messing with different colors and things, so it lost a little bit of its luster as more scales were added. I'll get back to it. The scales, now that they're all more or less in there, will now of course need to be refined. And I don't know what'll be happenning in the background. Or what color the snake's eye, or even the snake itself, will end up being.

I based the snake's look on Atheris squamigera, a bush viper.

Photo from wikipedia. More here!

I knew I wanted to paint a viper of some sort (..I just like vipers?), and a search of viper species led me to squamigera, an exceedingly beautiful and captivating snake.

Next in line:

Flamingos! This is a considerably smaller painting, and it's not nearly as far along as its snakey roommate. Right now it's really no more than a rough sketch. We'll see what happens to it in a few weeks!

Next up is a really fun project: tape art!

The assignment: recreate a classic masterpiece of art, using a myriad of decorative and practical tape. I chose to work from this piece by Joan Miró. It called to me. So lively! So weird! So much detail! And cool shapes.

You can see I chose to zoom in to the little bug fellow. At first I was a little baffled by how on earth to work in tape, and thought, "goodness gracious, this is going to be tedious and insane." And yeah, it is kinda tedious (and maybe kinda insane), but as I got used to it, it became really fun, and really satisfying, too. Multiple rolls of tape, cutting, cutting, and more cutting, sticking and resticking, hands full of tape and scissors and multiple funky little pieces. There's almost a sort of rhythm to it.

I'm enjoying it way more than I thought I would at the beginning, and I love the subject I chose. This painting is really fun to explore, and recreate in my own way. And the tape itself is so charming.

Finally, we've got some colored pencil work:

If you give a rose to an artist, you can almost guarantee the artist is going to draw it, right? Isn't that some law of nature? Wouldn't nine out of ten artists agree? I dunno, but if you give me a rose, I'm gonna draw it, that you can say for sure. The color's so rich and vivid, the sentiment's so sweet, and if you stare at it for a week or so, well, how can you resist?

I hadn't worked in colored pencils in a long time! I felt rusty. They seem like they should be very simple, but I don't think they are. Lots and lots of layers, slow and steady work, building up the color and the form.

I think it's coming along really nicely. If I do so say so myself. Don't know what I'm going to do with the background yet, if anything. I do have a lot of colored pencils, so its nice to put them to use after they sat around for a while (I mean - vacationed for a while, in colored pencil land!). Good to remember the fun stuff they're capable of.

It's very motivational to look back and see how artworks have progressed!

Birds of Lightning!

*wipes dust off blog* *coughs slightly* I've got another painting to show you! Friends, family...strangers?

chillin'

It's a bird made of lightning or with the power of lightning or something like that, you know, the sort of thing writers come up with when they start wading into the realms of giant talking sturgeons and angsty neon pink squirrels. You might even recognize it from a sketch a few posts back. A sketch that I actually did finish, woo hoo!

You can CLICK HERE to read more about the Lightning Bird, see a different picture, watch me question my life choices as per all the usuals.

Also, here on the blog, you can now sign up to get an e-mail alert whenever I make a new post, I know at last one person wanted such a thing so there you go, look in the sidebar. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds and browse posts via topic, if you are so inclined. I'll leave you with a very beautiful picture of my very beautiful cat:

so gorgeous

new paintings, and a sketch!

This is a two-hour sketch of my own hand, holding a lovely pair of craft scissors. It was incredibly fun, and a great exercise! Just the right level of complicated. For me, drawing hands is always fun. They're so expressive! It's just like drawing faces (which I also enjoy). And like faces, they're so easy to break down into simple components, so easy to understand how they work when you've spent some time practicing. I need to stop being lazy and put some effort into sketching more often.

In other news! Those under construction paintings I posted a few weeks back are finished now, and on my website. They didn't change much, but they've got better photographs and long rambly descriptions. Cardinals are here, black and white moon bird is over here.

In other news, I've got not one but two unfinished paintings I need to start working on again. One is humongous, one is small, and they're both birds. Is anyone surprised?

Experimental Text Adventure sketches

Sketched some critters from my text adventure in the middle of the night, when I was having a hard time falling asleep. Sometimes images start burning into my brain when I can't sleep, and it's soothing to be able to put them down on paper. Then they're not running around inside my head. Drawing can be relaxing, and once the images are out of my head, falling asleep tends to be easier.

It's been awhile since I've drawn a squirrel. I'm sure this is all sorts of anatomically incorrect, but midnight sketches are all about not worrying about that stuff.

Swirly-whirly Crow.

 Last but certainly not least, a being you're quite unlikely to see in your backyard, or anywhere else in reality: Lightning Bird. A personification (birdification?) of lightning.