There’s no denying that portraits are a tricky business, but after practicing for many years now, I feel that I have mastered the basics. Fine tuning is always necessary, but I rarely make drawings that are so bad I have to tear them up anymore. I have a new challenge coming up though – a portrait of a baby – something I have never done before. Drawing children is a whole new thing for me, so I’ll be looking through my art books and doing a lot of practice sketches.
I haven’t done any portraits in a number of months, so I wanted to get some practice in the other day as a sort of warm up exercise. This is a self portrait with wet hair, done in graphite in my craft paper sketchbook. I can see a lot of problems with it, but my boyfriend immediately recognized it as me, which is always a good sign.
I am always looking for artists who do great portraits. Many of them hone their skills by sketching people on the subways and trains. Here are a couple of artists that do great portrait work. Leave a comment with a link if you come across any others.
Cully
France Belleville
Lauren Nassef
Adebanji Alade
Stephen Gardner
I get to see Katie once a week and I often try to draw her, with varied success. Usually she won’t stay in one position long enough for me to be able to get the sketch down, but I have been getting better the more I draw her. I had plenty of time on this particular day because she was really tired and sleepy after a long game of fetch.
Roz has a page on her website dedicated to drawings she made of her dog Dottie every day for a number of years (1998-2003). I really love dogs but I won’t be able to get one of my own for a couple of years at least. One day I would like to have my own dog so I could undertake such a project, but until then I will draw other people’s dogs when I get the opportunity.
I had a chance to meet up with my friend’s roommate’s cat Tigre again last weekend while on a visit. I don’t know if you can tell in these sketches, but he is a very fat cat, and the name Tigre, while sophisticated, doesn’t really seem to fit in my view. My friend calls him “Fatty” and various other variations of the term. I think he is the perfect “Bopper.”  He was a little bit moody this time, but he stayed in the same position long enough for me to capture these small sketches. I sketched him while we asked each other Trivial Pursuit questions and I drank a tiny bottle of beer (7 ounces). It was a nice Friday night.
The other day I was looking through the recent activity on my flickr account and I came across a comment on a picture I uploaded ages ago. It was surprising to me really, because it was something I did in my former life (notice I don’t sign my work this way anymore) and I wasn’t really expecting to see it.
Orin Zebest took this image I made of an “imaginary landscape”:
and used it for the background for this “imaginary postcard”:
I really like seeing the creative evolution here. When I originally made this drawing in 2008, I used this photo as an inspiration, then Orin used my drawing to come up with the postcard to use on his (really cool) wedding website.
Most things I read about copyright are negative, such as Google and other corporations in the US and UK lobbying to change legislation to profit from individual artists. Katherine Tyrrell recently wrote about The farce of the Digital Economy Bill, which is a really informative post about the situation in the UK. In general though, I think most individuals are respectful of others, and the Creative Commons licenses are a great way to allow others to use your work for creative projects like Orin’s wedding site. I don’t know that I could go so far as Leo or Michael and uncopyright all my work, although the concept is very intriguing. My default setting on flickr is to label everything “all rights reserved,” but I will soon undertake a project to reorganize my flickr page and I’m already looking for some pieces that I can release under a Creative Commons license. And certainly, if you would like to use a piece of my artwork for a project, drop me a line and I’d love to talk to you about it.
I am working on a small zine made from one sheet of paper photocopied and folded into a six page booklet. My plan is to make these drawings after work and on days that I am more tired. After some time I will have enough drawings to make a couple of different editions. I had wanted to do this project for some time, but I finally started working on it after reading how Michael Nobbs is making a new ebook in 20 minute increments. This is also a great post he wrote recently, which focuses on how to keep getting work done even with low energy.
I also posted this image on Sketching in Nature, the group blog hosted by Cathy Johnson that I participate in. These days I am doing more nature sketching, so expect to see more of me there in the coming weeks, and I usually won’t double post those sketches here.
To celebrate the last day of tax season yesterday, I sat in the garden and did this sketch in the evening while sipping a cup of tea. It was a little chilly, but it has since dropped 20 degrees and it is supposed to rain (and maybe even snow) this weekend. I’m glad I took the opportunity to get outside a bit. I did the watercolor part afterwards, inside.
Because of the yucky weather, I have some inside projects planned for this weekend. I am working on a small booklet (mini zine) and I have a couple of sketches done for that which I will show you on Sunday.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Here is my offering for April’s VPO based out of the Canary Islands. I was feeling a little experimental when carrying out this piece, hence the multicolored designs all over the place. I did it on a 5 x 7 watercolor block that I found while cleaning out my art supplies a few weeks back.
I’m thinking that I might do all my VPO pieces in the same size and media so I can frame them all together when I have a nice collection. Speaking of framing, I just signed up for a workshop on matting and framing this coming June. I am excited about this because I have a lot of pieces waiting to get framed and I’d like to see them finally on display.
I just spent a lovely twenty-four hours away from my computer. I still had my computer with me, so I had the option to use it, but I was doing so many other things that I didn’t have the desire. When I checked my email today, I came across this post which really reminded me how much time I waste online and otherwise, doing very repetitive and admin type tasks. I’m not about to disable comments on my blog, but I did find some of his other suggestions helpful.
What struck me the most was the warning that came at the end. If I’m not working on a meaningful ongoing project, I could inadvertently create a time vaccuum and start filling it with other meaningless tasks out of boredom. Therefore, today I am officially starting a project that I have been putting off for some time. Hopefully I will have some WIPs to show you soon.
On another note, I added a subscription section to my sidebar, to make it easier if you wish to read my blog through RSS, or email.
This year Orthodox Easter and regular Easter were on the same day so I had a lot going on, and I started to feel a little stressed at times. After everyone left the house on Sunday evening, I sat in the living room and drew these pears that someone had shipped to me as an Easter gift. I was enjoying the complete peace and quiet so much that I didn’t even play any music. The only noise was the sound of the refrigerator compressor. I’m amazed at how much drawing I got done in so short a time without any distractions.
I hope everyone is having a lovely Easter weekend, and as we say in Greek, “Christos Anesti” (Christ is risen). I’m only making quick sketches this weekend, as I’m concentrating on being with family mostly.
It seems that the library in my city caters especially to senior who love to read mystery novels. Being on an economy move lately, I’ve been going down to the library every week or so to pick up new books and I’ve been reading a lot of mysteries in particular.
I really loved The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie because the main character is an eleven year old girl and the whole thing reminded me of the sort of book I used to read when I was that age. The story takes place in the 1950’s English countryside. Flavia de Luce is a huge nerd and spends her time plotting against her two nasty older sisters and researching chemistry and various forms of poison. She ends up finding a dead body in the cucumber patch and gets herself wrapped up in a nice little murder mystery. I would recommend this book to anyone who is looking for something fun and entertaining that is not too involved or complicated. Apparently they are turning it into a series so I will definitely be wanting to read the next one.
I never did finish the drawing because I couldn’t justify using so much of my lovely green colored pencils after I caught my careless error when it was too late. I am including it here for other people’s edification. This is an example of the importance of having one’s drawing surface as straight up as possible, and double checking one’s work throughout (see the top right corner of the book). When making a drawing on a flat surface like a tabletop, this sort of issue comes up often. Everything appears correct when you are making the drawing, but once the piece is held up for normal viewing, the angles are skewed and distorted. Portraits are especially easy to mess up this way, often resulting in noses that are too long.
There’s no denying that portraits are a tricky business, but after practicing for many years now, I feel that I have mastered the basics. Fine tuning is always necessary, but I rarely make drawings that are so bad I have to tear them up anymore. I have a new challenge coming up though – a portrait of a baby – something I have never done before. Drawing children is a whole new thing for me, so I’ll be looking through my art books and doing a lot of practice sketches.