Drawing Journey Part25 - Rose

So, after a few days of having fun with some simple hatching and crosshatching I decided to do some funky project.

I found a Rose tutorial made by PaintBasket on YouTube which I thought it would be a great way to test my new skills. Link to it is HERE

I wanted to begin with the very same starting point as a gentleman on video, so I paused the video, took a screenshot of the outline he did, resized it a A5 (European size) , did a transfer and I got my 0.35mm technical pen ready. 

I started to watch the video and I can confidently say that I had not seen nothing more boring than that. It was long, dragging and despite the gentleman's soothing voice it was also incredible monotonous. As it was in a real time it took about 1 hour and 45 minutes of suffering. He was really trying to explain his thinking process as well which was nice but did not help me that much so in the middle I decided to just go with it with some faith and hoping for the best. I replicated shadows he did. I replicated the highlights he did. I replicated some strokes he did and so on without thinking why.

When I was done something magical happened. As I was so focusing constantly on very small portion of the drawing I completely missed it as a whole. Then I looked at it from bigger distance and I could see my Rose looking like a professional artwork.

Lesson learned! Give a chance to something even though you think is pointless because magic happens at the very end. I am very grateful for this not "boring anymore" tutorial because without it I wouldn't be able to ink the Rose and my artistic confidence wouldn't improve.

I am so incredible exciting and pleased with the result that I can't wait for my next projects.

See you next time and Have a brilliant drawing day :)

Artist to Artist note :

When you do the same as me please don't claim it as your own, instead give the credit to the person you've got it from.

Drawing Journey Part24 - Beginning of Inking

During browsing on the internet I bumped on some guy who did outlines of his cartoon characters with brush and ink and it looked like so much fun that I bought a Sumi brush almost immediately afterwards.

I fell in love with inking instantaneously and I bought a set of Faber-Castell set of technical pens as well. It was something incredible satisfying to see wet ink drying out on the paper that I could do just simple hatching and crosshatching for hours and hours.

Was a little bit surprised that there are not as many resources nowadays as I thought it would be about using technical pens and all books I bought were dated back to the 80s. I guess it's not "trendy" anymore as it used to be :)

Anyway, my next project is to ink a rose so fingers crossed it will turn up at least good, aiming for great :)

Have a great artistic day

Drawing Journey Part23 - Jug

This exercise was far the best one yet!

At the beginning I had to prepare a tonal ground for my drawing which just meant starting to draw on grey surface instead if white one. Later on I discovered it was more about erasing than using a pencil and I truly loved it.

To make a tonal ground I sprinkled graphite shavings onto the paper and then smudged them to create a smooth middle grey/natural grey tone. A clutch pencils are brilliant for making graphite dust as there is no wood from pencil shaft to contaminate it.

When that was done I started with rough sketch of a jug which could be found on Will Kemp website or click HERE. He used a picture of pomegranate in his course however I liked the jug better.

Then I was adding shadows with soft pencil where it was need and for highlights I used an eraser.

Because I started with already mid-tones placed on the paper I found it very easy to either go darker for shadows or lighter for highlights using the eraser opposite to drawing and shading from the scratch on white card.

Hope you like it as much as I do :)

See you next time and have a great Day

Drawing Journey Part22 - Upside-Down-Puzzle 2

I found Will Kemp Foundations of Drawing course on Lynda.com which seemed to be like a great way how to develop my drawing skill further and because I used the Free Trial offer I had nothing to loose.

It reminded me a theory of the book Drawing on the right side of the brain which Faces/Vase exercise came from.

Back to Will’s course, the first exercise was about re-programming the brain to draw what it actually sees instead of what it thinks it sees.

This upside down puzzles was more sophisticated than the horse puzzle I’d done before. There was a picture included in the course which I printed it out. Following the instructions from the video section I covered the whole pic before I had a chance to see it. I uncovered a small portion, drew it, uncovered another portion and so on and I literally had no clue what it was going to be. after ¾ of drawing it finally hit me that it looked like a portrait.

It still surprises me how easy drawing can be if you flip your picture upside down and working on small section instead of the whole which could be very discouraging and scary if you’re lacking a “drawing confidence “ especially from beginning.

Next time tonal ground drawing so stay tuned :)

Have a great drawing day!