Me drawing students drawing...

I'm teaching Life Drawing this Fall semester so I have plenty of opportunities to practice sketching the figure.  Even though I have wonderful models, I do enjoy drawing the students the most!  I love the way they slouch on horses or in front of easels.  I also love sneaky drawing them when they aren't looking.  It's so much fun-bwahahaha!

Honse

I start teaching in a week so I've been prepping and flexing my art muscles by drawing* this magnificent honse! What a beauty! A+++

*Let's be honest...this is a procrastination sketch. I needed a break from typing up Syllabi and Schedules. :)

Bob the Cat

This is Bob, Mom's outside cat, drawn with ball-point pen on a notepad. He's a lousy model so this loaf and micro-nap is the best I could do with his constant weak screaming and skittering about.

From my sketchbook... It may be because I haven't had cheese in ages, but this lunch utterly hit the spot! So simple but soooooo good!

July 29 2024

From my sketchbook, drawn with a Micron PN...

I spent a day out at Irvine Park breathing fresh air and sitting under trees. Summer weather has been pretty decent this year and I appreciate that as a very pale, somewhat translucent heat-sensitive individual.

July 18 2024

From my sketchbook...been busy working on art for a gallery show I want to enter later on this year. I'm still messing around with the Uniball/Speedball ink combo I mentioned in my last post. I like the method, but I'm waiting now for coupons to drop so I can pick up some waterproof brown ink to experiment with. The colors may be a little more lively if there's a warmth to the values versus pure black.

I was impressed by the organized chaos of my desk post-art frenzy so I took a pic to memorialize it. Things to note...the yellow little pot is a ceramic yogurt container I picked up at Sprouts. That tiny jar of yogurt was three whole American bucks (!) and tasted okay, but I was more interested in using that cute container for watercolor than the probiotics inside. I've also been obsessed watching/listening to Campaign 3 of Critical Role. I started from the beginning earlier this year and am up to episode 60 now. I'm also watching the Thursday livestream each week too. It's sort of weird consuming the story at two different points in time, but the lore is so heavy it helps to watch/rewatch things as they progress.

Experiments with ink

I was browsing through books at Art Supply Warehouse and ran across Everyday Sketching & Drawing by Steven B. Reddy.

The art was really appealing I already owned most of the supplies* so I tried Reddy's process out using reference from Line of Action. I lightly sketched in big shapes with pencil, drew in lines using a Uniball Vision pen (it's waterproof!), painted in values using Speedball Super Black ink (it's waterproof when dry!), glazed watercolors on top of that, and then used a little bit of white gouache to pop in some light. This was a fun study! I also really like the recommendation of the Uniball pens. They aren't too expensive and the ink flows well on rough paper.

*I have enough art supplies at home to open my own art store. Seriously...you should see my pen collection, I got a gabillion of them stored in various mugs and Talenti gelato cups.

Bonus pic! This is also from Line of Action. I didn't want to add color on top of these values. One of the drawbacks of layering on top of black is that bright colors would get muddy with this method. It works for the donkey above because there was a lot of gray in the reference. Not so much with the green grass this kitty is lounging on top of.