One Month of Daily Drawing
February 1, 2020 at 6:32 pm | Posted in Drawing | 1 CommentTags: 2020VisualDiary
After last year’s experiment with Inktober I promptly stopped drawing again. I still want to get better at drawing, though, so as a New Year’s resolution I decided to start a new sketchbook and try to do a small drawing every day. One month in, I largely succeeded, only missing two days, and those days were very much full with other things so I knew in advance I wouldn’t be able to find the time. I’m keeping my materials simple, basically ink pens in black and white with different line widths, and white or natural paper.
Just to keep myself accountable, I’m tweeting the results. You can sneak a peak here. I didn’t make any plans on what to draw each day, just wanting to get into the habit for the moment. As the month went on, a minor theme of transparent objects and their shadows emerged.
Here’s my favourite from that category, a fancy latte glass that got repurposed as pen storage:
And my favourite overall, which isn’t transparent, but a ceramic frog from a friend’s collection:
I’m currently trying to figure out where to take this, but for the moment, daily drawings it is, no matter how small or how bad. I hope with some more practice, I’ll start to figure out what I actually want to get better at and then practice that.
Inktober 2019
November 3, 2019 at 7:31 pm | Posted in Drawing | 2 CommentsTags: Inktober
I’ve been keeping in touch with a few of the artists I met at the Dublin 2019 Worldcon via Facebook and my newly created Twitter account. At the beginning of October they started talking about and posting drawings tagged with something called Inktober. I got curious, read up on things and spontaneously decided to play as well.
It’s not as if there’s a dearth of art supplies around here, so I dug around for an empty enough sketchbook and my ink pens. What I found was an half-full sketchbook where I’d worked on designs from a zentangle book for textile artists. Not wanting to commit to anything complicated, I decided to keep to the zentangle-sized 9*9 cm squares and to fill one of those for every day of October. Since I can waste huge amounts of time to come up with the “right” idea and was sure that would derail me sooner or later, I also decided to use the official prompts from the website linked above. I continue to find that my creativity works best when I don’t let it roam completely free, but give it some constraints to hang on to. I must have made the right choice, since I made it all the way through the month, doing a small ink drawing for every day:
The prompt is in the captions, and you can click on the images for larger versions. And, so you can see how my sketchbook looks like, here’s my favourite page spread:
This is also now a very full sketchbook, I had to squeeze the last sketch into the absolutely last square available. Yay!
Still noodling over what I’m going to take away from this. Left to my own devices, I’ll probably get back to drawing for the next vacation diary sometime next summer. This is something that needs consistent practice, and I’m not quite sure how to go about achieving that. I’ll probably never draw for drawings sake, but I’d sure love to be able to confidently get ideas from brain to paper, where they can be examined and evaluated for committing art (usually using fabric and thread). Leaving this here for the moment as food for thought.
Sketchcrawl — Again
July 12, 2009 at 2:15 pm | Posted in Drawing | Leave a commentTags: sketchcrawl
So, yesterday was the 23rd Worldwide Sketchcrawl, and our little group from last time grew again, so there were four of us this time. The weather was not really nice and way too cold for mid-July, so we decided to meet at the museum. When everybody had arrived, at least it wasn’t raining, so we went outside to do our sketching. The results are collected here. Those are my sketches:
We went down to the riverbank and everybody did a drawing of this pedestrian bridge. It’s amazing how different the perspective can be from just a few metres apart!
And this is what happens when you sit on the riverbank and don’t move a lot while sketching:
I took five pictures of this duck from about a metre away, sitting on the ground.
Just a few metres along at the riverbank there’s this beautiful Art Deco building, housing an indoor swimming pool:
And this is my version:
Lots of fun was had by all, and we’ll certainly repeat this next time.
Sketchcrawling on a Sunny Spring Day
April 12, 2009 at 6:52 pm | Posted in Drawing | 1 CommentTags: sketchcrawl
sketchcrawl.com is a website that organizes drawing marathons around the world regularly. Having read about that from a fellow blogger already a few months ago, I had the opportunity to join in yesterday. The three of us had lots of fun! I haven’t found the time to practice and improve my drawing skills lately, so this was a brillant excuse to go out and actually draw something. Here’s the result:
In fact, I got reminded that I like doing this enough so I went out on my own today to do some more drawing. And as is often the case when I’m looking for something to draw, I found a place I must have walked by dozens of times by now and I never actually saw what’s there:
It’s the old cross from the tower of a little church which has been replaced by a new one, and they put the old one up at the backside of the church. It’s a great idea, when do you usually have the opportunity to look at a cross from a church-tower close up? It’s mounted on a big stone and looks really beautiful. So, hopefully there will be more sketching in the near future, I definitely plan to be there for the next sketchcrawl!
On a different note, my blog stats insist that there’s something to celebrate today! I can’t really believe it, but this is my 100th post on this blog. That’s a couple of years worth of weekly posting, which just about fits, so I haven’t been slacking very often. For the curious, here are some stats: I’ve had 33,706 page views till now, and my most popular page is the Needlepoint Lace Tutorial. This blog has been quite an adventure, and I think quite a few projects around here get finished just so I can post them here, which is a good thing.
So, on this note, I’d like to ask you what you like most on my blog and would love to read more about. I won’t promise anything, but I’ll try to take up any suggestions you have.
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