Hat trick
I’ve been talking to some of my art friends about going to a life drawing session and they made some very good recommendations about using materials I’m familiar with. Usually I draw with either ink or watercolor, unless I’m doing something digital. But neither of those seems well suited to a life drawing class. I think that graphite or charcoal would be best, until I can get around to using paint, but that may take some practice. So I’m going to do some exploring with different media before I attend that first session. I rather like the look and feel of toned paper – it seems a bit easier to create dimension than building it all up with the graphite. I’d really love to do drawings with brush pen, and I guess there’s no reason I couldn’t bring a few different things to try.
Earlier today I saw a neat pencil drawing on toned paper, and I had some “bogus rough sketch” paper on hand to experiment with. I drew this using a 4B water soluble Derwent pencil (then I added some water to slosh it around a bit) and finished up with Prismacolor white pencil and some 4B Derwent graphite pencil. I think I’ll try some figures, too, just to see how it goes. I recall seeing some fantastic figure drawing on toned paper in Drawing magazine … around here somewhere … hmmm …
Oh and UCLA beat Alabama, onward to the Sweet Sixteen. Go Bruins.
More vegetables – tiny eggplants
Another one for the “Draw a Vegetable” Challenge!
I had a terrific dish at a recent potluck and meeting of the Botanical Artists Guild of So. California. The hostess gave out the recipe to everyone present and I filed it away as something I wanted to try. Today, I saw these baby eggplants at the market and decided that I would give it a try. It includes small tender eggplants, italian parsley, diced tomatoes, calamata olives, garlic and some spices – all mixed with the hands and baked in a shallow pan. But like a raccoon who must wash everything before eating it, I often feel compelled to draw or paint it.
This was sketched in my Superdeluxe Aquabee workbook, 9 x 9, 90# weight. I learned some things from it that I’ll take into consideration in doing a real painting. The best thing I learned was which colors to use to get that eggplant color, and I figured out some ways to get the colors to mingle on the wet paper.
