Friday, June 26, 2015

Watercolor Wednesday...Posted on Friday

(Ok, so this week has been hectic, but I really want to try getting this weekly watercolor series off the ground...or at least past the first post)

Enjoy and keep sharing my blog with others!

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Watercolor Wednesday - A Simple Start

Since I'm no longer taking art classes as part of my education, I'm trying to use this blog to help me keep improving my skills and most importantly, to keep drawing.

Over the last year, I've discovered that watercolor is one of my favorite mediums to work with  (probably second only to charcoal), so I decided to start filling the pages of my watercolor sketchbook and simultaneously keep improving my skills. I was partly inspired by my participation in last year's Inktober to try to find a theme to work with to accomplish this. Hence the "Watercolor Wednesday" idea.

For now, it just means that I'll devote a little time each Wednesday to working in watercolors. Who knows where I'll end up taking it though!


Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Some On Location Sketching

This last weekend, my church had our annual Lake Day; basically it's our church service, well, at the lake. Over the last couple of years, I've started to use the time before the service to get some quick sketching in. Usually that means some location sketching (meaning the landscape around me), but this years, I wanted to get some work in on my gestures as well.

There's not a huge amount of gestures here; gesture drawing (heck, probably figure drawing in general) is still one of my biggest, if not my biggest insecurity in my art. But, I wanted to post some gestures partly because it makes me feel uncomfortable to do so. Are they perfect? Probably not, yet not every piece of art I make has to be perfect the moment it moves from my pen to the paper. Gestures are still something that I need to work on, so I will continue to do so (hopefully...)

 And actually, given how pressed for time I was, these drawings are more loose than I might have orginially wanted to do...




Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Painting on the Other Side of the Universe (or at least California...)


Every summer, my dad and I take a day trip to somewhere in California; I sketch, he reads. It's been our way of carving out some time to spend together. For a couple of years, dad's been wanting to show me Mono Lake. Now, being a Central California girl, I've gone to Yosemite at least once a year for as long as I can remember, but I don't really remember going as far as the Eastern side of the Sierras (though the family has traveled that way).


I have never seen a stranger place; Mono Lake seems almost completely unspoiled, save for a handful of tourists (numbers no where near as large as the ones we passed on our way through Yosemite). The lake is huge, surrounded by volcanic mountains, and contains more salt than the Pacific Ocean. That wasn't the weirdest sight, however. The coolest thing about Mono Lake are the tufa towers. on the south side of the lake. It seems weird that we are still in California.


These things remind me of coral, and the ones that we were near were huge. Apparently, these were once underwater, but as the water level of the lake goes down, they become more visible.

I used to love using chalk pastels, but during college I sort of fell out of practice with them, so I decided to bring them along. I wanted to warm up with a quick charcoal drawing.


Afterwards, I broke out the chalk pastels, which was challenging. It took a lot of false starts to get to this point and I'm happy I got a chance to go out and do some plein air work in such an unusual setting.





Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Charcoal Reversal Demo

When most people work with charcoal, it's usually drawing on white paper. The process of doing a charcoal reversal drawing is similar in that it's black charcoal on white paper, but we, well, reverse the process. Here's a basic demo on how to create a reverse charcoal drawings. I am planning on adding photos of the process soon.