I spent the last two days drawing this overgrown statue of a cupid. It wasn’t until after I finished and took a photo of it that I realised I had drawn it on the wrong type of paper – hence why it’s quite bright, washed out and shiney instead of dark and contrasting. It’s a shame. In real life this picture quite looks as if it is almost 3-Dimensional on the page and pops out at you. Maybe once I get all of these prints digitized will it look better. Until then, here it is:

Charcoal

On Wednesday I was away – driving. I spent all of yesterday and today drawing this next piece though, of a Kitten and a Tiger. It was extremely complex and a little daunting to do. It wasn’t hard, just… tough. Funny how that can be. I guess the only way to explain it is that it was an all-over concentration. In most drawings there are area’s of toughness, but this one didn’t let up at any point in time. It was a real workout for me to do. So I hope you enjoy it.

Charcoal.

Today I drew a young lad and his companion – his dog, fishing off of a little row boat called “Life’s Ruff”.

It’s just a simply nice picture and nothing more. Relaxing, friendly, and fun. A neat little play with the ripples and reflection of the water, and nice curvature of the boats design.

Charcoal

Continuing with the speed drawings – and finishing up my ‘horse-theme’ for the time being, here is a charcoal drawing of Horse Jockey’s.

For this picture I searched for quite a while to find a source that had an angle and set-up that I had in mind. I removed all other elements from the photo that I was working from. This was the hardest part – as there were about three other horses mixed in with these two featured horses. It becomes a science to figure out which horses feet belong to which horse as they all tend to look the same.

When using an image to base a drawing from, it isn’t just copying to me. Sure, I try to draw things as realistically as possible, and usually I’m using multiple photo’s to build up a scene. There is nothing new to this. In the Renaissance Period even the Master’s had reference books that were filled with images drawn by other artists. In high school we used illustration books – which were fileld with ‘stuff’ – everything and anything – as a reference for artists to use. These would have been used for advertisers in the days before the internet. Of course, when I’m using an image I’m not merely stealing it for myself. I touch it up, make it my own. I have my own ideas of how I’d like colours, contrast, cropping, and other elements to look like. Prior to finding this landscape of horses, I was looking for multiple pictures that I could combine and draw together – if I hadn’t found one with the horses legs in the right motioning-position. As well, there is a certain angle I wanted my horses to be running at. Here, it’s not quite flat sideways, but slightly on an angle. This allows me to give more information on the jockey’s profiles and show off the clothes that they are wearing. And spot sunlight off of the chest of the horses.

I touch these images up a little on photoshop before I post them. Only because I don’t have a scanner handy for my to work with the size of paper that I use. When taking photographs of artwork, you get minor discrepancies between how the original looks and how it looks on the computer. Here I tried to clean the image and return it to its normal form as much as possible. However, I’ve lost a bit of detail in the dirt-kickup, and the chests of the horses are brighter than in my drawing. Besides that I would say I’ve managed to get it quite close to the original. Eventually I’ll have them professionally digitized, but until then – here is how it looks:

CHARCOAL

After two days of hard work, and many distractions, I’ve finally completed this charcoal drawing of a Sleeping Cat. It feels like I ran a triathalon to complete this one – but boy am I ever proud of it.

It was quite the challenge to keep my page clean. I made two mistakes within this picture, but I won’t say where, as they aren’t too noticeable.  The whiskers were really a handful to do, but I’m pretty sure they came out alright. The fluffy fur was actually the funnest part of this whole drawing.

Charcoal

Today I decided to do a speed drawing. In three hours… which doesn’t seem to be that fast, but it is fast ‘for me’ when I try to draw with this amount of detail. I know that people could probably do it faster, and others could also do it better, but this is why it’s called practice. Either way, I’m still proud of this drawing study. I’m still not used to using charcoal, but it’s turning out a lot cleaner. Right off the bat I realised that it doesn’t erase as cleanly as I expected it to… so I had to change my tactic (you can tell in the dirty buckles on the top most part of the harnest. It’s nice to get back into drawing. It’s been since before Christmas!

Charcoal