Experimenting

Every so often I feel that I need to branch out into different media. Doing every drawing in pen, pencil or digitally can become very repetitive. Sometimes I like to experiment on projects but sometimes I prefer the safety of doing something for myself and being allowed to fail!

This was done for a friend with silver pen on white paper and then taken into photoshop. She has that original on the front of her Birthday card (I'm quite proud; it looks very delicate) and then I did this afterward.

These were done with black pen and watercolours. Having not used watercolours since 2011/early 2012, it was odd using them again! Each is about the size of a postcard.

These are also done in watercolours with black pen and are postcard-sized. The aim was to get some texture into the pieces and I'm pretty pleased with the result. 

These last drawings were done in coloured pencil. I love the cold Christmas penguin!

Have a good weekend everyone!

Faces

Happy Friday everyone! I hope you're all enjoying advent (we bought our Christmas trees today!) and I promise you'll see those advent paintings that I mentioned soon.

This week has been a crazy week and so instead of showing you some new work, I'm going to show you some old things.

Back in April, one of our university briefs involved making studies of faces. Having never studied the human face from a drawing perspective before, it was one scary brief! Using reference photos of actors pulling funny faces and from modelling agencies, I got to work. Certainly, if you can spot the three drawings of Ricky Gervais above, I'll consider this coursework to have been a success!

 Each of these drawings was done using pen and copic markers. I started using shades of grey but I did so many drawings with them that they ran out and I had to start using different colours! I adore copic markers!

Whoopie Goldberg anyone? This was more than just an exercise in drawing faces, it was an exercise in finding all the shapes, surfaces and forms that a face is made up of. As such, I found that I love doing drawings with lots of contrast in light and shade - all the better for seeing the forms with!

I need to get back into practicing drawing faces; because we see them all the time, they're arguably the hardest things to draw as all mistakes are instantly noticeable. They're so important though as so much expression can be found in them. Maybe soon I'll do a post with some newer face drawings so we can see an immediate comparison and see the improvement.

Happy Friday and I hope you all enjoy your weekend!

Life Drawing

I apologise for missing a post yesterday; I returned home late from life drawing and completely forgot! It's been a while since I last went life drawing and I hope you enjoy these drawings.

Unusually, there were three models present and so we played 'life model tag', the idea being that we each drew a stickman of a post that we wanted to see and the models took it in turns posing for us. We also had a new life model. She is super-skinny but lovely to draw - lots of angles and bones.

Life Drawing Withdrawal Cont.

Well, it turns out that there was no life drawing session this week. Monday is a big essay deadline day for me so realistically I should have been doing no drawing and just concentrating on writing... Well... I can't live like that!

Have some clothed models before the break with some more life drawing afterwards.