Little Goats

It’s a sad tale, which is why I wanted to draw it.

You know the kind of grief that’s barely there? Like if a musician that you don’t know dies, or maybe the neighbor’s dog, and you didn’t know them, but you’re left with the small feeling of emptiness that comes with knowing you won’t hear new music from the person or see the dog smiling1 on the other side of the fence ever again? That’s what I was feeling today.

It’s the kind of grief that you don’t really know what to do with because it’s so faint. But you want to do something because you can feel it sitting there inside you.

Today I dealt with mine by drawing a comic about it. And because I usually spend all of my time in my head worrying about my lack of artistic skill instead of actually putting pen to paper, I knew I must do it in pen from the start and not use any pencil.

The number one thing I took away from Steven Reddy’s class was to put pen to paper as soon as possible and figure it out from there. Don’t overthink, over-stress, or over-plan, just start and let it unfold as you go. This will inevitably lead to idiosyncrasies that I’ll have to figure out, but it will also contribute to developing my style.

So in this case the goats are wonky and one goat is climbing the fence wile the other sticks its nose through it and they completely don’t match in scale or perspective. But I’ve never drawn any goats before, so it’s honestly just a big win that I drew six goats today in different scales and iterations. I also drew my first ever hand and it’s rather weird, but I’m counting it as a wild success because hands are hard and yet there it is on the paper, recognizable even.

I wouldn’t have drawn any of these things if I had started with a pencil. I would have spent my time worrying about getting it planned out and perfect and would have another unfinished project that would languish forgotten in my sketchbook. I wouldn’t have proven to myself once again that I’m capable of problem-solving drawing challenges way more than I give myself credit for. I would have gotten so bogged down in perfectionism that the story itself wouldn’t have been told.

Stories are the reason I feel the urge to draw and write to begin with. I’ve always been full to bursting with them and I need a way to get them out. I’m so much more interested in telling stories than not, so it’s imperative that I get stuff down on paper, as imperfect as it is, rather than sitting on it waiting to feel “good enough” and missing these opportunities completely. (As my dad pointed out, this isn’t just good advice for drawing, but for my whole life. I need to ink in my life with bold strokes instead of constantly trying to edit it, worried about getting everything right, and not ever really getting around to making a life).

This is my first ever comic, and I’m pretty proud of that. Sincere thanks to Steven Reddy for seeing that comics might be a good fit for me and encouraging me to give them a try. Steven also introduced me to the approachable rough style of Jeffrey Brown’s early work, which showed me that I don’t have to wait until some distant future to be “good enough” because I already have what it takes to get started right now. 💛

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Someday I’ll have a scanner that doesn’t cut off the very bottom of my work. Or i’ll remember not to fill up the whole page when I draw. Or I’ll get a smaller sketchbook. (This happens every time). - I’ll repost if I can get a better scan of it with the last few centimeters of image (just the dog’s back, a bit of thumb and the bottom right side-border are missing. So not too bad.) :)

Dune 1 & 2

Last month we went to our first Dune meet-up, and through the course of the evening, I fell in love. Although I’ve known a handful of lovely artists while living in Seattle, I never found a community that felt like just the right fit. Dune felt like that fit right away.

Once a month, local artists get together over food and drinks at a local restaurant and spend hours scrunched on small cafe tables with drawing supplies strewn about. With heads tilted down towards their papers, people visit while they work. The cafe lighting is rather dim, music plays over the speakers or perhaps someone brings a guitar, and over it all is the rolling cacophony of conversational snippets about everything from Australopithecus to farting unicorns.

The goal is to complete an original work, there on-site, and each artist’s subject matter is as varied as the artists themselves. Most anything goes, and at the end of the night everyone submits their drawings and some cash to fund the printing of a zine full of the evening’s artwork.

The first week, Benjamin and I found a small two-person cafe table tucked behind a column in the middle of the room. It was a great vantage point to observe the flow of the evening and get the lay of the land. Last night we arrived earlier, so we were able to tuck into a corner booth, which is always my preference anyway. After we we’d finished eating and were well under way, three others joined us at our table and set to work. It was nice to meet some new people, and I especially enjoyed getting to see their creative process and watch them work.

My piece for the September meet-up officially launched my Space Snails series into orbit! I’ve had space snails on my mind for months and I’ve played with them at home, but I hadn’t sent any out into the world yet. I knew that I wanted my first Dune piece to be a Space Snail, and I had a lot of fun executing it in black-and-white with ink. (All of my studies at home so far have been in color). It was also a fun challenge to write a little verse to accompany the snail and play with some alliteration. And it was such a treat to see my lovely little space snail in print when we picked up our zines this week!

For this October meet-up, I wanted to feature our vehicle. We’re just days away from a major trip that we’ve been saving and planning for for 1.5 years. For the last couple of years we’ve felt our time in Seattle was waning and we’ve traveled around on weekend outings to assess where we might like to end up next. In the absence of that next-place appearing to us, but with it evident that it was nevertheless still time to leave, we planned some extended travel instead.

This piece ended up turning into a break-up piece and actually afforded me some closure for our Seattle chapter thus far. Without intending to, I wrote a piece to accompany this drawing. You can read it on my writing blog. Apparently, there’s a lot I have to say to this city. It feels good to be saying it now, but this just begins to touch on it all.

So in four days we’ll drive out of the city and into the forest. Then we’ll hop from forests, National parks, coasts, state parks and the like through 9 states through the winter and into the Spring. During this time we should get some answers and we’ll return from our travels ready to start building our next life chapter.

Snail spins slowly in space… 💛

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Watercolors for Days

The Cotman Sketchers Pocket Box. I’ve been using Cotmans for a couple of years now, since I started with watercolor.

I’ve been laying low here for the last week because I enrolled in Liz Steel’s Sketching Now Watercolour online course and it’s been keeping me quite busy! From the intro lessons alone, I was hooked. There’s so much for me to learn about paper, paints, and pens: all the things vital to my dreams for my future art endeavors. I’ve only just finished Lesson One, but I am learning so much already! (Already I’ve learned some techniques that I can apply to some snail-art concepts that I’ve had in mind for months. I can’t wait to get going on those again!)

I focused this week on spending as much time in the online course as I could because I have a watercolor workshop coming up this weekend. I signed up for this online class in advance in hopes that it could give me a boost before the workshop. I figure that having a baseline that’s more than ‘zero’ should help me get even more out of my weekend class!

But, as I’ve worked my way through the online assignments, I’ve finally started to feel the limitations of my student-grade paints. All along others have advised me that artist-grade paints make all the difference and are easier to learn with. Over the last two weeks, I’ve worked hard to familiarize myself with the different artist-grade watercolors and what other artists have to say about them. However, I’ve continued to be reluctant to invest in such costly paints because I don’t yet have a solid enough understanding of pigments, mixing, and paints to be able to build a palette with any confidence.

Practicing varied washes with the Cotmans. I’ll have to do this exercise with my new palette soon. I can’t wait to see the differences!

But thanks to the very practical help and generosity of a dear friend, I got my first artist-grade watercolor palette set up today, months earlier than I originally planned! I couldn’t have done it alone because I am still so new at color-mixing to know what I would want or need. Having the opportunity to go through, paint by paint, with someone who has watercolor experience and also knows my personal style and color-goals was a priceless experience! I’m very grateful. I trust using better quality, more pigmented paints will have a positive impact on my studies (at least that’s what I keep being told!)

As lovely and colorful as this immersion has been (with all of the online classwork and the hours spent researching, shopping, and setting up my palette) I admit that it left me rather brain fried and in need of a break! Luckily, it will take a couple of days for my freshly squeezed paints to firm up in their pans so it’s a mandated moratorium on all things watercolor.

Instead I spent my evening sitting next to my new and lovely palette. I gazed lovingly at it and occasionally poked at it to see if it was dry yet (definitely not) while I spent my evening working on pen strokes.

After so many hours of learning about quality paints and papers in a medium I don’t yet understand, honestly all I wanted was my extravagantly feathered, cheap, ballpoint pen and a plain old spiral notebook. These are tools I know inside and out. I’ve been doodling with ballpoints on lined paper since junior high. It was the perfect chill antidote to all the fancy, brainy learning and research I’ve been doing the last couple of weeks. It was the equivalent of tucking into a mom-made casserole. High class cuisine is a treat to be sure, but sometimes all you want is the familiarity of some comfort food.

These pen stroke exercises are from Pen & Ink Drawing by Alphonso Dunn. (His YouTube channel is a great help for watercolor and color theory as well. His color theory videos got me started in beginning to understand color-mixing!)

I’m going to go do some more comfort-sketching and then I’m going to bed! Goodnight y’all. 💛

Fourth Urban Sketch Meetup

It was a sunny and cheerful Friday morning. The ground was damp from a light rain the night before and the Urban Sketch Seattle group met at the library in the Queen Anne neighborhood. After our initial round-up, I headed straight over to the pink Methodist church because I'm so enamored with it's pink-ness!

I sat myself up on a retaining wall diagonally across the street from the church and began doing my pencil plan. In my Ink & Watercolor class, we were encouraged to keep our pencil plan to 60-seconds so as to stay loose and not get bogged down in perfectionistic details. For my first two USK visits, I stuck to that plan and strove to loosely follow the model of that class (60-second-pencil-plan, inking in contours, putting tone in using ink-wash, and glazing in the color with watercolors). I'd never drawn on location before and both times (and also due to my lack of experience) I inadvertently selected challenging subjects (trying to fit in too much subject matter the first meetup and not enough in the second). I was disappointed with both of those drawings.

By the third meetup I started to hit my stride. I selected a lovely old building that I was quite smitten with upon first glance. I've long loved old buildings and I happily sat myself down to spend time with this one. For the first time I felt I'd found the right balance in my subject of 'enough but not too much.' I knew I wanted it to turn out well and liked that it was mostly a box-shape. I began by using what I'd been learning in my Observational Drawing class. I ran into some trouble with perspective, and worked and reworked it, but when I couldn't get it just right, I gave myself permission to move on because I knew I needed to get started on inking it.

I spent a full hour on my pencil plan. This didn't worry me, as I felt my plan was so solid I should be able to ink it in quickly enough to finish the drawing in the remaining 1.5 hours. I worked diligently and squinted to see all of the details in the brickwork which lended to it's charm. I had to quickly problem-solve how to give the appearance of bricks (both vertical and horizontal) when I was starting to run out of time. I felt tempted to avoid the messy garage before deciding that it lended too much visual interest and that if I left it stylized but based on some things I could see in it, that it would be easy enough to render in time.

I finished just in time and it wasn't until I came out of my delicious drawing frenzy that I realized I'd only drawn the building itself without any context whatsoever! It was floating in midair! I'd honestly been so absorbed in the beauty of the building and it's detailing that I hadn't even considered any of its surroundings at all! After the throwdown, where we all shared our drawings, I went back to my perch and kept working. I wanted the building to have something proper to sit on. I penciled out some of the contextual surroundings and then took a break for lunch. I came back and got everything inked in and left with an unfinished (nothing on the sign above the garage, none of the towering trees behind) drawing that I felt quite satisfied with.

Week 3 was my first experience with merging the skills I'd been learning in my Observational Drawing class with my Ink & Watercolor class. It was the first time I gave myself permission to take the guidelines given to me by each of my instructors (one approaching from a detailed, highly-accurate, realistic perspective, and one coming from an approachable, loose, empoweringly forgiving, stylized perspective) and combine them into an approach that works for me.

Here's the thing. I don't have a lot of drawing experience really at all. My eyes are barely trained in seeing things in a way that allows me to interpret them on a 2-D page. I am very much a beginner. So if I want to have a drawing that I'm proud of it's going to take me a while to dial in and interpret what I'm seeing in a way that can be believably rendered. I need more than a 60-second pencil plan! However, I also don't have any interest in creating highly-realistic drawings. I want my approach to be stylized and an interpretation of what I'm seeing.

So, this is all of the learning and experience that I brought with me to this fourth meetup when I sat down in front of the little pink church. I spent a decent amount of time on my pencil plan, making sure I was seeing angles and proportion and scale reasonably well. But I also didn't let myself get hung up on it. I blended the approaches of my two instructors. This resulted in a drawing that I'm really proud of, but that also has some personality to it. The cross is a great example: I found the 3-D nature of it very challenging, but I sketched it out as best I could, working hard to see it as my Obsv. Drawing teacher taught me to assess things, but not overworking it to perfection and instead committing as best as I could and getting it inked in. The result is a cross that is believably 3-D and also one that has some wonky personality to it! I didn't know how to do the front steps, so I just thought about what I knew steps to look like from my O.D. class and inked it in like a champ. They look convincingly great!

The truth is that this church actually has a winding ramp with rails leading up to the front door, and an awning coming off of the alcove on the right side. They didn't make it in because I realized my initial layout hadn't left enough room for all that railing. I also wasn't confident about putting it in anyway, so I didn't mind that there wasn't room for it. The awning kind of flew under my radar long enough that I missed it at first and just left it that way. Delightfully, I liked the way my drawing was coming together so I didn't mind the way this interpretation worked out with those missing pieces. Though I do find it very interesting the things that we just don't see sometimes! (Case in point: there should also be another smaller tree in the grass median on the right-hand side. I was stunned to discover its existence after 2 hours of staring at this scene!)

After the throw down, I did return to put in some more window detailing in the bell-tower and on the left-hand side. That was the beginning of the left-hand side getting too overworked, which I then made worse by overworking it some more. That was a valuable lesson learned.

I stopped short of adding in the brickwork on the bell-tower or any of the dark roof tiles because I decided I'd like for this to be my first hybrid piece! I'm pleased enough with how it turned out that I am thinking of giving it as a Christmas gift to a couple who I know love this church. So I wanted to preserve it as it is, scan it in, then print out a few copies to test some different roof and brick textures on before deciding how I want to add in that detail. I will also digitally erase the mess on the left-hand side and sort out what detail should be left in and what should be removed so as to better understand how to interpret multiple layers (tree, shrub, window) in pen and ink so that it looks believable to the viewer and not like a mess. (I think I'll handle it like I did on the right hand side where that tree obscures the building in full, which looks very believable).

Once these decisions are made, I will make a fresh ink drawing based from this original piece and add color. It's an ambitious project, but I'm feeling optimistic. And I'm super excited about integrating some tech into my process and seeing what I learn from that adventure.

So this is the story of my Fourth USK meetup. But it's also the story of learning to integrate teaching methodologies into a process that works for me at my current level of ability. Blending these two approaches has increased my confidence and my sense of agency. I'm starting to make work I'm really proud of and I'm enjoying the process of creating it.

Last Ink & Watercolor Class

It's now been a week since my last Ink and Watercolor class. I haven't posted my summary of the class sooner because I fell into an internet hole for a few days in which I did nothing but work on finishing up this website! I've also started an online watercolor course, so that's been keeping me busy as well. But I'm delighted to be sharing this summary with you now, because a lot happened on this last night of class!

The agenda for the class was to take a still-life to completion: 60-second-pencil-plan, contour outlines, ink-wash layers, watercolor layers, and final hatching. I brought the same snail to class wanting to practice drawing it from behind and challenge myself by trying to sort out foreshortening for the first time. The goal was to have the snail appear to be climbing up onto the cassette-tape box.

The infamous tape that gave me such trouble and resulted in the snail's wonky eyes. Also, notice the pencil lines suggesting where the snail should have gone to appear properly grounded. I do love the gorgeous texture on his skin though!

Oh mercy, it seemed like from the beginning it all went off the rails. I thought the cassette tape would be a good exercise in a basic shape (two rectangles) with some added interesting detail (the round and square cut-outs, for example). Boys as I wrong! First off, I once again got befuddled by contours as they relate to holes. Contour lines are something I can stick my pencil-tip behind. I continually draw the wrong side of 'hole' contours because I'm SEEING the line in the back (it was distinct! It was dark and black!) and not the one in the front (which doesn't even appear to be there. It's more like the absence of something!). But the back line, no matter how pronounced, is not a contour. So I had to white out my mistaken back line in the toothed tape-holes and add in the front line. Holes like that get me every time.

I also got hopelessly muddled on keeping my tape-box lines sorted in my head. In my Observational Drawing class, our instructor insisted that we draw all of our shapes through our other shapes, just to make sure we're staying on track and things end up in the right place. At the time he gave me that feedback, I admit I was unsure. But since then I can definitely understand it! It would have helped tremendously in this case. I ended up with a back, top-left corner of a tape box that shouldn't have been there because it lined up incorrectly with the lines it appears to join up with.

The front-edge of the cassette tape actually turned out to be terribly tricky. I got so bogged down with misdrawn lines and made quite a mess of it. So by the time I finally got the cassette to an okay state, I'd quite forgotten about my snail's lovely eye-stalk tentacles. That's why they look so goofy, because I had to work around the tape that I'd already inked in.

So I'm still working on seeing things 'front-to-back.' More often than not, I get carried away by working on the 'next-nearby-thing' rather than assessing my front-lines again. So, in this case, I started with the mushroom (a front-most thing) and the orb (which stood alone), then went on to the tape box (the next-nearby-thing to the mushroom), making sure to not finish all of my lines so as to leave room for the cassette tape and snail. What I failed to catch, however, is that I needed to leave room for my snail's tentacles too.

I must be more careful about keeping an eye on ALL PARTS of my front-most objects, not just the one I start with and not just a portion of the one I'll be getting to next (like leaving room for the snail's head, but not his tentacles). This is a good reminder to keep my image working at all the same rate and not get too bogged down in one area, as my Ob. Drawing instructor was always trying to help remind me. By getting so bogged down in the tape, I lost sight of the snail, which was actually my primary subject and interest in completing this piece.

So everything was off to a terrible start and honestly I felt like a big storm cloud was settling over me. I admit I was grumpy about it! I thought more than once about starting over, but felt like that defied the intent of the class (to let go of perfectionist tendencies and just be in the sketchbook and being flexible with how it all manifests as it goes along). I even pulled out a sheet of tracing paper I had tucked in the back of my book from a former project. But again, it didn't seem in keeping with the intent of the class. So instead, I took notes on the tracing paper about my process and my challenges and resolved to write about it later. Meanwhile, I finished inking and then took a quick break and called Benjamin to fuss about the disastrous consequences on my page. (Sometimes just fussing to Benjamin can help me feel better. He's a very patient person and I'm grateful he let's me fuss! :-D)

I came back in and worked on my ink-washes. I tried really hard to see the tonal qualities. Even though I didn't like the drawing, it was still a great opportunity to practice applying tone. I really applied myself and am largely happy with how that part turned out. I can tell I'm making progress with tone and ink-wash, so that was encouraging! But I decided not to take the drawing into full-color since I was hardly invested in it after so many mishaps during the contour portion.

The second contour-drawing in which I spent more time with my pencil-plan. The snail looks properly grounded here, like he is firmly stuck to the ground while reaching up to climb onto the cassette case. Also, his eyes are properly alert in the direction he is headed!

Instead, I turned the page and started the drawing again. This time I spent more than 60-seconds on my pencil sketch. I used what I learned in my Observational Drawing class and worked harder at forming my shapes. I drew all of my lines through each of the objects to make sure everything lined up. I used some tracing paper to trace my snail. I took a photo of it to have the camera flatten the image for me and laid the tracing-paper over the snail to see where I went wrong.

After trying to sort it out myself, I asked for feedback from my instructor about how I could have made my snail look properly foreshortened (since again, that was the whole point of this piece for me) and he helped me see where I'd made assumptions about what I saw and helped me see what was actually there instead. (You can see those pencil corrections on the first drawing. The snail's body should have been wider on the left side). I used all of that information to inform my second drawing, which I had just enough time to contour and which turned out much better than the first! (I've written more about how I'm finding a happy medium between my two classes here).

Then, I went back and did a little half-hearted hatching and final contours on the original drawing, just to have something to show at the end of the class. Of course it would have been lovely to end class on a high note where I felt like I'd improved wondrously and had a final drawing I was really proud of! But honestly, this feels more authentic anyway. It's an accurate reflection of where I'm at in my learning and the most significant takeaway from this last class in my opinion is that I used my agency to pick and choose what I wanted to get out of that class.

Sometimes the most important thing is to push through the imperfections, but I'd done that all of the previous weeks. That wasn't what I felt like I needed practice on. Instead, I needed to figure out how I could make the best use of my time in that class and so I chose to really focus on dialing in my practice with seeing tone and layering washes and for that to be the sole important purpose of that first piece. I chose to start the drawing over again, discarding the '60-second-rule' for pencil-planning and instead seeing how I could begin to integrate my learning from my two classes to create a better piece. Then, I asked for help in improving the one skill that I'd never practiced before (foreshortening) and couldn't see well on my own.

This to me actually has all the hallmarks of a successful class. Success won't always mean that I end up with a final drawing that I'm proud of. But showing up, problem-solving, knowing how to prioritize what's most important to me, and asking for help when needed are all indicative of much success indeed!

This whole course was wonderful. It gave me the courage to put things on the page. It inspired me to keep my sketchbook on me and take it all over. It introduced me to the Urban Sketchers community. It encouraged me to not over-think it, to cut myself some slack, and to just keep drawing. Truly a successful experience.

Third Urban Sketch Meetup

This is the drawing I did last Friday with Urban Sketchers Seattle. I completed only the building with all of its detail during the allotted drawing time. Then I stayed afterwards for an extra 1.5 hours to work on the bakery and street and parking lot and other such surrounding details. I penciled in a few thoughts on the towering canopy behind but haven’t done any background trees yet.

After sitting with it over the weekend, I’ve decided I’ll either go back and completely finish it on location, or it will stay as is. I really don’t want to finish it at my desk, as I extra especially enjoyed being on site with this lovely old building. After spending 4 hours with it and studying it, it feels like an old friend. One that I’d kind of like to go see again.

We will see if I make it back there in the coming few weeks to add trees and color. Until then, here’s my mostly finished black-and-white, which I also really love (and which is contributing to a little of my ambivalence about finishing it. I love it so much the way it is!)

Finishing it will necessitate a second meaningful experience (rather than sitting at my desk) or it will stay as is, to mark the first enjoyable experience already savored. I’m still waiting to see which direction it will go.

First Snaily Still-Life

From Ink & Watercolor class last week: an insulator from my dad’s collection, a pretty rock, a snail, an old bottle of stamping ink, a small piece of jewelry, and two shells.

I’m very happy with how this one turned out. My studying of color in the days before class helped me be able to better mix colors to match what I was going for which was so rewarding! I still had to ask for helpful reminders about how to mix brown and black though. I don’t have those memorized yet (although by now I can remember brown. I still can’t remember black).

I spent the most time on the snail, because obviously it’s the most important part to me. It was my second go-round with a sparkly rock and it went much better this time. It was my first time with translucent glass and I’m quite pleased with how it turned out except that I accidentally painted over my highlights in my insulator. Good grief! But that pitfall paint over all my highlights in my ink bottle so I’m super pumped with how that turned out!

I spent a lot of time trying to really see the lid on the bottle and it turned out much better than past attempts at similar items. While the pink shell isn’t even discernible (it’s on its side, you’re looking into it’s hole), the yellow one turned out better than I expected upon first contouring it, so that was a pleasant surprise.

I still need to work on color-mixing (the snail’s body turned out darker and more yellow than I wanted) and tone, but it’s encouraging that each week I can see measurable improvement!

There's only one class left. I will miss this class when it’s over, but these still-life exercises have been so helpful that I suspect I’ll keep doing them at home. It will be a great way for me to continue working on seeing contour, tone, and color - which are all areas that I need a lot more practice in!

Second Urban Sketch Meetup

This morning Benjamin and I went to our second Urban Sketch meetup! It wasn’t scary this time since I knew more what to expect. We met at Pier 66 and I picked the ‘water dinos’ since they’ve always captured my imagination. I liked the way they stood out along the horizon.

Some might think my composition includes too much boring water. But if you know me, you know I love water. So I liked the way it was framed between the two angles of the road in the foreground and harbor island in the background. I’d like to be able to draw and paint expressive water, but I can’t yet. It doesn’t mean it can’t still have a prominent place in my scene as I learn and practice though.

The dinos, being so far away, were very flattened to my eye. But I wanted to challenge myself to make them more 3-d to really examine them and understand how the beams and supports fit together, while also practicing the techniques I’m learning in my drawing class. So it was a worthy challenge. I spent most of my time on the dinos: drawing and hatching them.

Then I added a wash to the sky, which in the end made it too dark so I wished I hadn’t. But it was very gray and hazy today. Then I mixed colors for the tree-line, shipping crates, water and sky. I like the tree and crate colors very much and I enjoyed painting the stylized washes of color to give the illusion of the colorful stacked crates. The sky was too dark and not yellow enough and the water too light and not blue or silvery enough. But, I was running low on time and can’t adjust colors very quickly yet as it still takes a lot of thought about how to manipulate them on the color wheel.

Yesterday I spent some time on YouTube watching watercolor color-theory videos which was very helpful in mixing my colors today! My sky and water colors kept turning out too green, so I thought about those videos and worked my way closer to the shade I wanted while also introducing colors to adjust the shade and tone. Very cool stuff! But I need a lot more practice.

I used colored pencil on the dinos and yellow docking things.

Afterwards, Benjamin and I discussed our processes for our drawings and he gave me some feedback. He gave me recommendations for blending the treeline into the boxes and for grounding the dinos so they don't feel like they’re floating. He explained that if I’d left the street lamp in it would have helped tie the foreground into the background and also that I should have outlined my yellow pieces on the roadway. He also mentioned that adding in the fencing along the bottom would have been interesting.

So this gives me some concrete stuff to work on! Mixing colors, blending elements better on the page, grounding my objects, and composition. I kind of liked the lamp post, I just didn’t like that it was in the very middle of the picture. Benjamin suggested I could have moved it a little to the left to balance it while still keeping the visual interest. He’s so right! The fencing would have been nice but I ran out of time. And I didn’t outline the yellow colored pencil bits bc frankly I just forgot them as I rushed to finish. In the end my dinos were too dark because I hatched them and then added colored pencil, so I tried adding highlights, which is silly because they're so far away and my highlight pen is so [relatively] thick that it just made them look like they'd been snowed upon. 

There's quite a lot I would change about this image, but what it comes down to is that I'm glad that I went and spent the time drawing and faced my fears of sharing my beginner's work with other more seasoned artists.

First Rainbow Slug

Yesterday afternoon I made my first rainbow slug. It’s a surprise for a friend who prefers her snails without shells! I had a lot of fun working the design out and especially loved painting it. I started with a rough print of just the body part of one of my snail stamps just to get my guidelines going, then I planned out the rest in pencil and finished it up in ink. I gave it 'rainbow' status by adding watercolor. I have to say that the more time I spend with watercolors the more fun I keep having with them!

First Ink Washes!

This week in Ink and Watercolor class we started ink washes! I’m most pleased with how the sheen on the water bottle turned out, but overall I’m pretty pleased with it in general! The grapes were a fun challenge in trying to get the foreground and background grapes all put in in a way that looked natural. And the squirrel’s fur turned out better than I expected! So did the ceramic bird. I surprised myself as that shape and form started emerging with the ink washes.

I still have a lot to learn with regards to scale. The little cup in front of the ink bottle turned out much too small and the candleholder doesn't have much definition. The pear looks pretty wonky and the shading on it is unnatural. I also want to work more on getting the right mixture for my light and dark washes, because it took me way too many passes to get those grapes that dark, and they still aren’t dark enough!

Overall though, I am pleased. I surprised myself which is a good feeling. This week for my homework I am going to focus on working faster, getting the saturation of my wash-mixed dialed in, and continuing to observe tonal values and translating that into wash on paper.

Hatching Practice

It took me a long time to get this finished, but I finally made it and I’m pleased with how it turned out!

This is my homework for tonight’s class. The syllabus said to practice contour drawing from a still life. And last class our instructor said to practice hatching. So dang. I hatched the heck out of this thing. And wow it took forever, but I did it! I realized once it was time to get hatching that I’d picked mostly all black things. But that just meant I had to get creative with my layering and my strokes. The Holga was my favorite to shade because it has such a great texture on it in real life and loose scribble hatching is my favorite kind to do.

The strap was my favorite to contour bc it was such a fun challenge to observe its form as it twisted around itself. Figuring out its shadow was also really fun, and honestly was easier to see and put in than the Holga shadow which kind of eluded me. I didn’t shade the strap at all because I wanted to keep my options open. I’m thinking about coming back in and doing it up as a stripey rainbow with colored pencils. I thought it would add a fun pop to this b&w image.

It took me so long to draw it that the sun had time to finish coming over our building and into our west-facing window which kind of confused my original understanding of the lighting a little. The light source still came from the same side but the sun was so much more diffused than the lamp-light’s crisp shadows... hence the struggle in seeing the faint-fuzzy sunshine shadows very well.

It was great practice, I learned a lot, and I’m kind of surprised and pleased to have it to tangibly hold and look at and see that it’s real and say to myself “I made that!” It’s the biggest and most detailed pen and ink drawing I’ve ever done.

The Perfect Postage-Stamp

Today’s outgoing mail. It’s been ages since I’ve sent something out (and even longer since I've illustrated an envelope) so I’m pretty happy about it.

But dang if I didn’t find the perfect stamp in my collection AFTER I affixed the floral one! I honestly would have just covered up the flower one if the mountain-cloud one had been tall enough to do so and if the new stamp hadn’t covered over that lovely line of the cloud-bank. Oh well!

I told myself that the flowers are fine because there were so many late season wildflowers out during our visit to the forest and seeing them was one of the distinct highlights of our trip. So the floral one isn’t completely random. But still though, that mountain stamp is A++

A Traveler's First Sketchbook

We went camping and I took my new sketchbook!

So, this ink and watercolor class I’m taking is a total dream. In Spring of 2016 I took my first very intro art workshops. I took a sprinkling of different classes to help me dial in my interests. I also started paying more attention to art styles online and emulating different styles to see what resonated. I ordered some books of my most very favorite childhood illustrator and started studying her work. I started buying art from other artists, which led to me meeting other artists too!

By August of that year I fell in love with pen and ink. I’d always loved it, and after going through the process of weeding out all the things I definitively wasn’t interested in, I came back to ink. I don’t think I’d taken my interest seriously because I’m also obsessed with color. But when I discovered that the favorite illustrator of my youth also did pen drawings in addition to her bright and beautiful painted illustrations, that clinched it for me. I knew I could have ink and color both.

By February of 2017 I was hesitantly putting pen to paper. But then I met Parsley and fell headlong into snail stamps: a necessary detour because the snails could be inked repetitively faster than I could draw. This gave me a chance to practice with watercolor and gain confidence as I painted the stamped snails (meanwhile Benjamin and I discovered a collaborative passion for stamp-carving!).

BUT NOW. It’s time! It’s time to bring ALL of this past observation, learning, and practice into its fullness: making my own ink drawings and painting them. I AM SO HAPPY I FOUND THIS CLASS!

And because my teacher is the best at helping me break through my self-doubt, I took my sketchbook on our camping trip and started documenting our weekend. I painted this tree! And while we haven’t covered any grisaille or painting in class yet, I had the confidence to make it up! I PUT A TREE ON PAPER! (Trees were my focus before snails, so this tree is a super big win because it’s a big time subject of interest and also I didn’t shy away and let my inner critic win).

And now I have a vision of what I want my sketchbook to look and feel like and I can’t wait to keep working on it!

A Nibbed Stump

Here's some nib and ink practice from last night. I can’t believe I never knew how great it is to draw with a nib until these last few months!

True, you can’t beat microns for portability, so they’ll always have a place. But I find nibs so much more gratifying. The way they scratch across the page and the way the ink flows off and pools in the dark spots. It’s so satisfying.

An Edgy Rainbow Snail

Another day another snail.

This time it's an edgy rainbow snail! Colorful but roughed up a little. Cheerful but with some gritty texture. I guess it’s kind of how I feel about life. Lovely and awesome but also messy and imperfect.

Also, the expression marks around his head make it feel like he’s startled or exclaiming about something which I love. Snails keep quiet, but it doesn’t mean they don’t have feels about stuff!

This hand-carved stamp features water-color, prismacolor, and ink.

Inked Snail

More work on the same snail. This time pen and ink over a lightly stamped image. It's great practice for hand-control and it's also fun to play with smoothing out the lines some and adding some subtle variation.

Learning From Others

One way I practice my drawing is by copying work from my favorite illustrator: Gyo Fujikawa. It helps me see things differently and to try to imagine things as she saw them. I particularly love her pen and ink drawings and flip through them when I'm looking for inspiration for my practice.

Here's a few I did a while back. The acorns and ice cream cone are replicas of her ink work and the sundae is a pen and pencil rendering of one of her painted illustrations. All three of the originals are found in Gyo Fujikawa's A to Z Picture Book.