My Jeep

For those of you who follow my other blogs I am sorry about the recurring theme. For those who are unaware I purchased a new Jeep at the end of March and it has really captured my imagination. It was only a matter of time before I had to draw it. This is the first of what I am sure will be many drawings of the Jeep. Here's hoping the inspiration spreads to other subjects.

This drawing was initially done with a black and a blue Sharpie pens. These are the new pens with the non-bleed through ink. Once the basic drawing was complete I filled in the black areas and added some grey using Faber-Castell big brush artist pens. The blue was filled in with Prismacolor Premier True Blue marker.

Fun With Pen and Markers

Wow! It has been a while since I posted anything here. I have decided not to take another drawing class this Fall but I plan to keep working on improving my skills. A while back I was inspired to do some work with ink pens and markers. I pulled out some fishing gear with interesting shapes and colors. Here are the results.

This turned out to be a lot of fun to draw. I think I will continue to experiment with these materials.

Ink and Watercolor

Here are a few quick ink sketches from my small sketchbook. I have added some watercolors to these. I have always loved the look of watercolor and ink. This is a technique I will be doing more of.

Eyes

I am about half way through my Drawing II class and I have not posted anything! I have been very busy with work, school and life. Anyhow, here is my favorite project so far this semester. This is a modified version of the Eyes project from page 23 of the Keys to Drawing by Bert Dodson. In this exercise you just draw your eyes as you see them in a mirror. What we did was to draw our eyes first and then we drew the 5 examples eyes you see below. The we drew our eyes again so that we could evaluate our progress. I have eliminated my eyes from the drawing below as I was not happy with that part of the project, but I loved drawing the examples.

I made one small Photoshop edit to the last set. Seems my scanner bed was not clean and I had some lint on the image.

Gas Mask

I find the gas mask to be one of the creapiest things ever invented. There is a sort of primal fear invoked. This is a drawing based on a photo I found online.

More Drawings from Class

Here are few more drawing from my class sktechbook. These are presented in a random order.

The Knight drawing was the final exam drawing for one of the first sections. This section was contour drawings and these were all done upside down. It is an amazing thing to realize that sometimes it is easier to draw something upside down but it is true.

The Old Masters

In my drawing class we spent several weeks drawing the human face. For these drawings we used a combination of live models and works of the old masters. Here we have 5 of my drawing based on the workd of the old masters. Saddly, I failed to notate who drew the originals of these works. In the future I will do a better job of documenting my source materials.

Self Portraits

Well, a sketch blog is not much good without sketches. I have been thing a bit about where I should start with documenting my drawing. I decided that a strictly chronological approach would be a little dull. I thought it might be interesting to see some evidence of the value of formal instruction on artistic ability.

The first drawing of my art class was a self portrait from memory. This is nearly impossible to do and in fact it was not meant to turn out looking like yourself. The purpose is the get a baseline on your drawing skill and as a way to see your symbols for facial features. Below is my first self portrait.




As you can see, this drawing is not very good. Trust me when I say that this doesn't really look like me and I would have been surprised if it had. The eyes and nose are particularly bad. In fact, they are symbols and don't look like real at all.

The final exam for the class was another self portrait. This time it was done at home over the course of a week. I setup a mirror on my desk and started in.


This is a much better drawing. Even if you don't know what I look like you must agree this is a much better picture. I really feel that I made huge progress during this class and it has inspired me to continue and art education.