Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Drawing in different mediums

Okay I am not the greatest artist.  My images are at times overly simple, badly done or even just awful but sometimes I come up with things that even I say look good.

For years I have been very fond of taking a pencil and sketching but having three kids meant that any art supplies I had disappeared between one day and the next more often than I could count.  Not that I hold that against my daughters.  They are all very talented in what they decide to do.  They have imaginations that I like to claim come mostly from my genes (sorry dads) but I know that really comes from deep inside them.  They all can tell stories via the many different mediums that exist.  As they grew older I am hoping they will follow in my footsteps and offer those stories for sale to the world around them.

But back to me =) Everyone knows I am a writer first and foremost but at one point in my life I wanted to be an artist.  One teacher in my years of taking art in school destroyed that dream for a while by little things like telling me I wasn't doing enough to "Fill" the paper to accusing me of cheating and stealing anothers work.  Any one who knows me for real knows that I don't do that but I was a kid and it put me off doing original art of my own for a long time.

Now i know I am a good copy artist.  If you go over to Elfwood.here:

http://www.elfwood.com//~lprior

You can see some of my earlier pieces of art.  Most of these have been lost do to moving countries so sadly they are only available as a digital image now.  Some of the work there was copied from other sources and then changed a bit by adding colors and other things to make them better.

The fan art of Ranma, Shampoo and others is what a lot of people do when learning to draw/paint/color work.  You need to try and find the flow before you try to do original stuff right?  Well that is what i told myself.  I do know a lot of famous artists would do drawings or paintings of statuary or even live models so they were not pulling it from their heads entirely.

Flash forward a decade or two and it is the new millennium and I am in a new country with a hubby who is a great artist himself.  While injuries have stopped him from drawing, he does his art on models now...cool stuff that I am just learning to do.

But back to drawing.  Thanks to the dollar store i have a nice quality drawing pad that I can use with various different types of things.  From simple number 2 pencils to color artist pencils to oil pastels, I have been experimenting and trying to find what I can do with these tools.  And thanks to winning a short story contest I have bought myself artist quality oil pastels, water color pencils and water color paper.  So I get to play between my other creative pursuits.

I flipped through what I have done and while none of them are museum quality I think I am slowly getting better.  We start out with the simple pencil drawings, some partial and others complete











As you can see some are okay and some are awful but occasionally some are pretty good...As I retrained my hand on how to flow I was happy with the start of this.  So I moved to using the fine artist colored pencils my hubby gave me as a surprise gift (love my hubby)














As you can see I do better with color than just black and white.  Yes I have duplicates here but some images show different angles.  And yes i have a lot of flowers but I seem to be doing my best work in flowers.  My best photographs are flowers, my best paintings are flowers so why not my best drawings right?

Today I decided to pull out my oil pastels and try a few drawings.  Now I have not used actual oil pastels in well over two decades.  As I type this i have multicolored smudges all over my hands and in a way it feels really good.  Like the artist in me is trying to break free again.








Now you can see that I am just barely back to using oil pastels the right way.  The flower and the oranges aren't too bad but the bottom pic is HORRIBLE!

And one last little drawing.  I pulled out the water color pencils to see how they felt in the hand and on the paper.  This drawing a little different and yes that one ear is bad but it was fun.  Once I get through a lot more stuff i plan on taking a water brush to this image and see how the colors blend.  That is the cool part about water color pencils.  You draw like normal and then do a wash and it becomes a water color painting!  So who knows where I will go with this medium 



So you can see that I am a bit of a nut but I do more than write short stories.  These were fun and I plan on more soon but first I think I will go do some acrylic paintings again.

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