Looking GIrl

Another technical pen drawing, this time on textured paper for making acrylic paintings. What clean clean lines that makes (way better than the printer/copying paper I did my last drawing on).

Obscured #1

I have been thinking and thinking about how to sneak this picture in under the topic "sneaky," and it really was this Illustration Friday topic that got me thinking about making the picture in the first place, but this boy is definitely NOT sneaky. He may be obscured by some very strange plants (and they ARE real--I drew them from a photo in one of my perennials books), but he is very present in the world.

This is another exercise from Bert Dodson's book Keys to Imaginative Drawing, where you make some kind of drawing of plants (or, as he suggests, tangled clothesline) and then photocopy it several times and draw some people behind it. This is my first one. I spent several hours on it yesterday, but I'm very pleased how it turned out.

Skewed Sketch #4

I'm having a lot of fun with these. I can do them even though I feel like crap (sick for the first time in many years), and I can do them at school while my students are watching a movie, and I'm really really really liking the clean lines from the technical pens.

Skewed Sketches

So....I bought some technical pens, which I really can't afford, but damn, it's hard to resist art supplies. I also bought some arty kinds of books. This is an exercise from one of them--Keys to Imaginative Drawing by someone Dodson. I have his other book, Keys to Drawing, which I think is one of the best drawing books around.

The idea here is to push yourself away from absolute representational realism into more manipulation of images. For the exercise, you take a photo (or a real person) and do a blind contour drawing or very quick sketch, and then use those distortions as the outline and do as realistic rendering as possible from the photo or person, but the whole thing is skewed. I actually really really like these. I used my new technical pens.

Afterwards #2

The party is over, the dishes washed, and it will soon be time for bed. But a good time was had by all!

Illustration Friday: Afterward

No matter how good or bad an experience you have, there is always an afterward, a time when it is just you, with your head, your thoughts, your emotions, and you will either celebrate or mourn; in either case, it will be a kind of let-down, because it's just the rest of your life, and though it may not seem like it at the time, it's just as real as what you're missing.

Spent #2

Well...this one's not much better. The dog is better, though, and I think I'll go get some ink or other REAL art supplies out!

Spent

I know that this composition is pretty static, but this is how I feel after a spending and evening late into the night at dog-emergency-room. I don't believe in heroic (and expensive!) measures to save the lives of dogs, but my dog impaled himself in the abdomen on something while chasing a squirrel up an oak tree, and we had to do something.....