Placid Painting

Just passing time the other day, I sat down to do a couple of doodles.

I had no plan other than to have some fun and see where it took me. The results got a bit weird, but may also be a result of the objects I’m practising on drawing at the moment.

I want to get better at drawing humans and animals, and I guess this was a way to draw them in different settings..

Anyway, this is how it looked:

Drawing from imagination

Drawing from imagination

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently did my very first digital drawing through the program ProCreate.

The great thing about digital painting, is the option to regret a pen line or brush mark and be able to delete it.

Yes, this takes away some of the magic, but it’s a great way to get some practise painting or drawing. It’s also great if you want to achieve a specific look, but need a few tries to get there.

Anyway, the other day I thought I’d do some more practise drawing faces, and had a go at it for about 45 minutes.

I did a lot of mistakes, but the option to regret my choices did help me see where I went wrong, and what I had to do to get where I wanted.

You can see the whole process in this time-lapse video, which probably saved a huge amount of paper..:

The world of different mediums are really sparking my curiosity these days.

As a result I’m suddenly in the possession of a bunch of different equipment, planning to try it out all at once…

Well, I guess I have to take it one session at a time though, and last evening I had a go at the digital world.

I recently bought the drawing program Procreate, and I just find it all-consuming when I’m entering this digital world.

My first ever digital painting was of a man I made up in my head, just wanting to get familiar with the touch of the screen and the different options available.

It ended up like this:

To my huge delight I also found out that you can get a time-lapse of every drawing or painting you make, so I think it’s sure to say that making a digital painting is something that’ll happen quite soon.

So, to round up my first digital session, here’s the time-lapse video as well:

To practise my ability to draw people in movement, I thought it would be a nice task to try and draw a soccer player about to kick a ball.

It’s hard enough to draw a human being sitting or standing still, so I soon noticed the challenges that comes with drawing something in motion.

Is the knee in the right angle? Are the shoulders in a natural position? How does a hand look when you’re about to kick a ball?

All these – and a lot more – questions wandered through my mind as the drawing came to life, but I have to admit it was a lot of fun!

This is how it ended up:

The left arm and hand is not good at all, and the shirt don’t fit nicely around that area either. The eyes are not well aligned, and the ball is not that round.

All of these errors considered, I still had a blast drawing it.

I think the power and motion of the kicking movement comes through, and I can imagine how he’s going to kick the ball in just a second or two. Maybe it’s the last kick of the ball in a huge game?

All of this makes the drawing a lot more interesting, as the dynamics bring life to it all in a much stronger way than in the drawings I’ve made with people just standing still. Like this:

I think people in motion is the next step for me!

I’ve been doing a lot of pen or marker drawings lately, which I find really enjoyable.

To get some change of medium though, I decided to do a quick pencil drawing the other night.

It’s been a while since my last pencil drawing. I also bought a bunch of tortillons recently, which I wanted to try out.

So I decided to use a reference drawing from one of my tutorial books, depicting a young girl looking straight at the viewer.

So I made the oulines with a 4H pencil, going over my preferred lines with a sharpened HB pencil, and started making out different values of shadow using both a 2B and a 6B pencil.

I then picked up a few of the tortillons, and started scrubbing in the shadows and the skin tones.

In retrospect I think the shadows around the mouth became a bit to dominant. There is also a lot of improvement to be done regarding the eyes. Both the pupils and the size of the eyes combined is a bit off, and the hair could have turned out a lot smoother.

I think the nose turned out pretty well though.

Anyway, it was a fun experience to try out the tortillions, and I’m definitely going to pick them up again soon.

This is the drawing by the way:

In the recent months I haven’t had much time to do long painting sessions.

Therefore, I’ve been doing a lot more sketching and drawing in the time gaps available each day.

The other night I used about 30 minutes doing a quick pen and marker sketch. It’s based on this drawing which I found randomly on Google and got an instant urge to draw.

So I did a quick sketch with a pencil before going over it all with a Micron 0,1 mm pen.

I also added some colour to Winnie the Poohs shirt and Piglets scarf with a marker, to make it stand out a bit.

I’m quite happy with how they turned out, but the surroundings could have been better.

I especially dislike the little knoll with the trees on them. It just looks wispy..

Anyway, this is how it looked:

As we’re arranging a kids’ party in the near future, I’ve gotten a very festive mission.

The theme of the party is woodland creatures, and I’ve been asked to draw up some cartoonish creatures to go with the table decorations.

So I drew up some outlines with a pencil, went over my favourite ones with a pen and added some colour to them using my pro markers.

Some of the creatures I’m quite happy with, and some I don’t like at all. But I’ve been told that they look good enough, so I guess I should settle with that.

Anyway, I drew up the creatures on a marker pad, glued them to a thicker cardboard paper and cut them out with a scissor.

I made seven in total, and this is how they looked ( I used a reference photo from google by the way):