March art work (2): Drawing and sketching

March art work (2) Still catching up on what I made in March….

Here’s some of the drawings from early March, before I got ill. I felt like working on the theme for the big paintings often, but not always. So here’s some of the sketching and drawing I did in March….

On some days I just made quick sketches of my flower subject in my sketchbook, and even one in an altered book.

Neocolor II and gesso in an old book

Graphite and colored pencils in sketchbook

Quick graphite sketch in sketchbook

On some days I just let my imagination work on a background of random marks.

Some of these were slightly influenced by an ongoing class. I enrolled in several classes that run over a longer period of time. For some courses I like taking only some of the lessons – and not necessarily when they air, but when they seem to fit my need. Early in March I felt like trying out a lesson from Radiant II, Art Journaling (hosted by Effy Wild). I started by watching the lesson by Sarah Trumpp. I was attracted by the fact that the lesson was divided in short videos – and by her quirky style. Afterwards I made new random marks in a sketchbook, saw a face and started drawing in the wet paint. Though my drawing doesn’t look like what Sarah did in her lesson, for some reason it fitted with her idea  about ‘Blame someone else day’. 🙂 So I thought I’d better give her some credits.

On some days I made more elaborate drawings, like the day I followed Carla Sonheim in drawing by using an eraser (an assignment in the E lesson for the “Y is for Yellow” class). These two were done on tracing paper on March 6 (I seem to have dated the bottom one wrongly).

On the next day I felt like doing something else. I felt like doing quick sketches, and sketching the same or similar birds using different mark making tools. This is a repeat of an assignment we did last year in Year of the Spark. Typically an assignment/exercise to try a lot of things and use a lot of paper. So I used printer paper to not have a feeling that it should be great art straight away. I used: charcoal, graphite, conté crayons, Neocolor II (watercolor crayons), markers –  to name but a few of the materials. Here’s some of the results I liked.

The day before I got ill, I redid an assignment from the B lesson of Yellow class. I showed some of the blind contour sketches after Picasso paintings in an earlier blogpost. In that post I showed the drawings after paintings of Picasso for reference. Here’s one I did using photo references of animals. The blue pencil was added after doing the blind contour drawings. I liked this assignment a lot. One can never practice drawing enough. And the attraction of this assignment for me is adding the blue pencil : it helps to make the drawings a little more real, adding value and shading. I rather like the frog in this one.

As you can see I did many different kinds of drawing during the first two weeks of March – in between painting sessions on the large paintings of flowers (on March 1, 8, 10 and 11) and two days of watercoloring (March 12 and 13).

Most of these techniques are not done for the masterful results of course, let alone to create realistic drawings. They are either aiming to train the eye, or the eye hand coordination,  or to train the imagination and other ‘creative muscles’. Doing all kinds of exercises is a wonderful way to keep the creative practice going on a daily basis. (Also good to keep active creatively on days when there is no time for painting large.)

What do you do to stay creative? Please let me know!

LINKS

More about March art – Big bold flower paintings

The Radiant II course hosted by Effy Wild (that’s her art alias); you can find out about  Sarah Trumpp – and other teachers on the course – through the course page.

“Y is for Yellow” – the year long class by Carla Sonheim can be found on Carla’s online classes page.