It’s Friday!
At one time in my life, Friday was the highlight of the week. I loved Friday because I knew that the night would be spent either at the local bar, a friend’s place, or maybe with a movie, because I didn’t have to get up early the next day!
Now that I’m retired…well, you already know how that goes. I sleep in every day, so I could potentially stay up late any night of the week. If I wanted to. Which isn’t very often any more.
Nevertheless, all those years of anticipating Friday as a celebratory day has made it permanently special. But now, instead of going out, I turn on some classic jazz, sometimes pour a nice glass of wine, and enjoy a quiet afternoon at the drawing board.
This week on the drawing board…
I started a new tutorial provided by Lisa Ann Watkins on her Patreon channel. It’s called “Mocha Pup”. She teaches this particular colored pencil drawing in workshops, so I thought it would be a good starting point for me to learn how to draw colored pencil animal pictures.
I love her work; she’s very talented and has won many awards for her animal portraits. My only complaint is in regards to the materials she uses. The paper is very expensive, and it seems like she uses many of the colored pencils that have to be purchased separately, pencils that I don’t have. I know she isn’t deliberately trying to make the work expensive. She’s been doing this for many years and already has the pencils, and I’m sure her commission fees easily pay for materials. But for me, the cost is an issue. Sometimes I have to substitute.
And really I shouldn’t complain. I just have one extra step of figuring out what pencils I already have that will work in the drawing. Which is a good thing, since it gives me lots of practice in developing an eye for color. And besides, I don’t want my finished artwork to look exactly like the 200 or more similar pieces that might have been created in Lisa’s workshops!
This one started with a watercolor pencil drawing. Yesterday I completed the first wash, as you can see in the picture above. I am very happy with the performance of the recommended Pastelmat paper as it took the water very well. I can see why she loves it: it will hold a lot of pencil layers in addition to this wash. So it seems to be worth the $13 per sheet.
Today I’ll start building up the fur with dry pencils. I expect this drawing will take a lot of time, likely weeks. It measures 9″ from the top of the dog’s head to the bottom of the white fur portion. Not a small drawing!
If you want to check out her work or tutorials, Lisa’s web site is at Animal Art by LAW.
The other project I’m working on is a charcoal tutorial by Kirsty Partridge.
Kirsty is one of the most talented young artists I’ve seen. I’m not sure there is any medium she can’t use successfully. She has a Patreon channel on which she consistently puts out many tutorials in a month, which is amazing considering how much time it must take to create the video in addition to doing the art work. Sometimes I wonder if she ever sleeps!
Anyway, I love her charcoal drawings. Charcoal is a super forgiving medium, even though it doesn’t seem like it at first. I love how it gets black really black, unlike graphite. I’ve completed two portraits in charcoal in the last couple of months and was going to do another. But she just released this flower tutorial so I thought I’d try it!
Kirsty provides reference photos and line art, but in honor of my recent decision to do more drawing by hand, I didn’t trace the line art. Instead, I spent an hour last night doing the sketch and filling in the dark parts of the background. The next step will be to start shading the rose.
Kirsty made this tutorial a three part series. This rose is just the first flower. I think it will be a good practice piece for charcoal shading and will provide a break from the intensity of the colored pencil drawing.
Kirsty has tons of YouTube videos, too. You can find her YouTube channel here.
originally posted at annettezimmerman.com
