Drawing Challenge Day 1 - Ship

Ever had those days when nothing seems to go right?  And you started out the day with such high hopes and you just didn't perform?  Day 1/day-2-that-became-day-1 were those kinda day's for me.

I liked the sketch.  It had certain qualities - it had potential.  But I couldn't do it justice.  I ended up overworking everything and getting happy with the grey wash and lost sight of what I wanted to do with the piece.  It didn't have any of the energy, the direct, intentional, and confident expression that I was looking for.  Not a bad idea - just not well executed.

In the end I think I achieved some of the narrative aspects I wanted.  The piece works pretty well compositionally, though there are several tangents that should have been addressed.  But overall, for a piece that I spent about 10 hours on, it could be worse.

Could be better, too.

My thoughts at the close of the "first day", after finishing the first piece: It's hard to go to bed disappointed with yourself.  It's great to be excited and hopeful about learning a bit and training my brain to sit down and work on art everyday and looking forward to improving.  But really, this could turn out to be 29 more days of "wow, I forgot how difficult making good art is (i.e. wow, I think I'm really bad at this)".  What have I gotten myself into?

A Personal 30-Day Drawing Challenge

So after a very long (and unplanned) hiatus, it's time to get back into the groove and make some art.

This summer was rough - actually this whole year's been tough - and I have been questioning everything.  I have been trying to fix everything - especially myself - and have really not fixed anything.  Ambiguous?  Yes, I guess that is.

I have been trying to decide who I am.  I have been asking myself so many questions - What am I doing here?  Am I really an artist?  Do I even have the guts to do art?  What kind of artist do I want to be? And I do not have answers for any of these.

The point is, I need to stop planning to fix what hasn't broken yet and just do.  My goal is to move forward, to find joy in telling stories and making art.  Which may be easier said than done.  Is it weird to say that I'm a little nervous?

Now, I want to develop a black and white illustration method (I'm intentionally not using the word "style", by the way), and because I've been following Jared Muralt, Niroot Puttapipat, and Andrew Mar's ink drawings on Instagram for a while, and because it is Inktober, this challenge will be done in ink.

I have a 1-word prompt assigned to each day with 2 alternates in case of emergency (i.e. the inexplicable absence of a muse).

At the very least, I will be posting pictures of the work on Instagram and Facebook.  I'd like to post the final here everyday, but I don't know how feasible that is.  So, I will say that I will be posting the round up of the previous week's drawings here on the blog every Monday until the challenge is complete.

Parameters

One drawing per day
Medium: Ink
Colors: no more than 3
Size: no smaller than 7" x 8.5"

Goals

Through this challenge, my aim is to build confidence in myself and my capabilities while continuing to develop an creative process.  In each piece, I will be focusing on developing my visual storytelling abilities specifically through composition, contrast, detail and character development.

Start Date

Monday, October 26th

End Date

Tuesday, November 24th


My access to a computer and or Photoshop may be hit or miss for the next week, but again, you can follow the progress on Instagram or Facebook.  Final drawings will be for sale in the store.

From the Prayer Room Week 12

So this is the piece for this week.  I've decided to try and color it digitally, as you can see below.  I'm using Wylie Beckert's process that I head about in ImagineFX.  

 

     

We'll see how it goes.  I'm a little discouraged at this point, but, I'm gonna try and push through.

From the Prayer Room Week 6

I'm catching up, slowly but surely.

Sea Gypsy Value Sketch

Here's the value comp for the Sea Gypsy piece I'm doing for the SCBWI scholarship contest.  Any thoughts?  Speak now or forever hold your peace!

From the Prayer Room Week 5

I know, I know, six weeks and I've only gotten one week finished the way I initially proposed.  Sigh.

Things are a little busy here on my end.  I've decided that For the next few weeks, I'm only going to worry about the sketch portion of this project.  I'll finish "Here be Dragons", "Surrender Unto Hope", and week 3 (which I'm going to call "Ruah"), but after those I'm going to pick and choose the ones I end up painting until my schedule settles a bit.  So . . .

For weeks my mind had been turning over the character of Tulkas - one of the Valar from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion.  Nienna, Tulkas and Orome are have always been my favorite of the Valar, but the explanation of that would take to long.  Anyway, here's some excerpts from The Silmarillion about Tulkas:

But in the midst of the war a spirit of great strength and hardihood came to the aid of the Valar, hearing in the far heaven that there was a battle in the Little Kingdom; and Arda was filled with the sound of his laughter. So came Tulkas the Strong, whose anger passes like a mighty wind, scattering cloud and darkness before it; and Melkor fled before his wrath and his laughter, and forsook Arda, and there was peace for a long age.  And Tulkas remained and became on of the Valar of the Kindom of Arda; but Melkor brooded in the outer darkness, and his hate was given to Tulkas for ever after." 

"Greatest in strength and deeds of prowess is Tulkas, who is surnamed Astaldo, the Valiant.  He came last to Arda, to aid the Valar in the first battles with Melkor.  He delights in wrestling and in contests of strength; and he rides no steed, for he can outrun all things that go on feet, and he is tireless.  His hair and beard are golden, and his flesh ruddy; his weapons are his hands.  He has little heed for either past or the future, and is of no avail as a counsellor, but is a hardy friend . . . Tulkas laughs ever, in sport or in war, and even in the face of Melkor he laughed in battles before the Elves were born." 

So I went into the prayer room and this image of a laughing warrior God had been humming in my head for a few weeks.  At some point, someone read Isaiah 64 (specifically verses 1-4), and I couldn't get the idea of Tulkas out of my head for the rest of the night.  So I went with it.  Psalm 2:1 & 4-6 (thanks Rene!), Psalm 3:3-4 and Psalm 18:28-36 were also read over the course of the evening . . .

So I started trying to draw Tulkas - or the aspect of God that Tulkas embodies: a storm of righteous anger that casts down evil to make way for joy.  So I'm calling this week's sketch "Tulkas Astaldo".

I had this epic idea of what Tulkas would look like - helmet, armor, the works.  A mighty, big picture with a man like figure clothed in everything strong and imposing!

And it wouldn't work.

I nearly shredded the page drawing and redrawing the sketch.

So I went back to Tolkien to reread everything and found myself caught on this concept of Tulkas as a wrestler.  My two brothers wrestled in high school, so I know a few paltry facts about the sport, and I knew that helmet I kept trying to draw would get in the way of any wrestling.  The armor, too. So I went back to the drawing board (so to speak) and tried to put my human imagining aside in favor of the work.  And then, as if by magic, I found the sketch.  Go figure.  Goes to show that simpler is better sometimes.

Initially, I wasn't sure that I liked the final product - there was a lot of struggle even after I found the sketch.  But I think it's growing on me.

From the Prayer Room Week 3

Woohoo!  All four weeks' sketches are done! I am caught up - now to finish the paintings . . .

This piece is going to be a full painting once I finish "Coming Storm" and a couple others.  It's kinda cheating to not do a painting in a week for this one, but I think the idea is strong enough that it deserves a full scale effort.  So.  No title as of yet.  But I have a model in mind, hopefully she says yes; I hear she's a bit camera shy . . .

From the Prayer Room Week 4

Wait, what happened to week 2 and 3, you say?  Have no fear, they're in the works, too.  I got a bit behind with the whole Spectrum thing.

As you can see, my brain seems to be stuck on the ideas of water and light.  But that's the point of all this: an immediate creative response to whatever was impressed on my heart at that time.  The sketches don't typically illustrate whatever I wrote down, but they try and capture a feeling, an idea, an emotion that I had.  For instance, last week's (which you haven't seen, yet) is directly related to several things that were prayed about and sung, but is a more declarative reaction on my part.  This one is more about where I am right now.  The truth is that for most of these, They feel significant, but I don't necessarily know exactly what they're about every time.  The interpretation doesn't come all at once.  Anyway...

This one's going to take a bit longer, I'm going to experiment with technique and have no intention of finishing by the end of the week. Week 2 should be done by then, though.

Also, check back later on this week to see my overview of SFAL 3!

From the Prayer Room Week 2: Update

Made it!  Here's a scan of the page.  

So, I was debating between this idea and another for this week. The other could have been really beautiful or really creepy, but in the end it was a little too direct, in a "in your face", "here's the message" kinda way. Haven't tossed the idea out completely - maybe something for another week?  We'll see.

I felt like there was more narrative, more of a question about what was going on with this idea.  And it was underwater.  I have always wanted to do an underwater painting.  

From the Prayer Room Week 2

I'm running behind today, limited access to a scanner and photoshop due to house/dog sitting! But here's a photo of the page. Check back to see a scan later tonight or tomorrow!

New Side Project: From the Prayer Room

So, I know I've been a little . . . absent . . . over the past four months.  Sorry.  I've been busy. Busy in ways that I don't have time or energy to go into detail about right now.  Soon, I promise.

Until then, I thought I'd talk a little about a new personal project I'm going to be working on.  Starting in January I've been a part of the prayer room my church started here in Houston.  Through this whole experience I've been learning more and more about prayer and worship and art . . .

Anyway,  all that's the subject of a later post.  Suffice to say, I'm wanting to find out what my role in this whole experience can look like and what art in worship looks like.  I'm working behind the scenes, and there's not much opportunity for me to enter into worship, but there's nothing that prevents me from taking the thoughts I have during the set and doing something with them later.  So, I've proposed this personal project to take those ideas and words and thoughts and turn them into a painting.  I'll start with phrases, verses, words and pictures that come to me during the set, I write them down in my sketchbook - what you see up there on the left hand page.  Those get turned into thumbnails and I take the one I like the best and do a 5x8 sketch on the righthand page.  I'll work on the sketch till I feel like it's done, post the final here on Tuesday.  Wednesday through Friday, I'll take the sketch edit it a bit in photoshop and print it out on watercolor paper.  Painting will be small, no bigger than 9x12, which I'll post (hopefully) by EOD Friday.   So yeah, I have no idea what I'm doing, I'm just throwing things out there and seeing what happens!

Here's the first piece!

Also, I'll be at Spectrum Live in Kansas City this year . . . at a booth.  Yeah, so that happened.  More on that next time . . .

Sophiloupe

A distant cousin of the jackaloupe, the sophiloupe is an even more rare specimen of American mythological creatures. However, they are carnivorous and should not be approached without extreme caution. They can be won over with offerings of pencils - any kind will do, though they prefer 2B - and the occasional  kneaded eraser.  If caught they will grant three wishes, though the usual caveats apply. 

Some Preliminary Work for Ari's War

In lieu of a Christmas piece, I give you some prelim work from Ari's War.  Enjoy!  And a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Sara

Remember that piece . . . ?

So, that piece I posted way back in, what was it?  June?  Yeah.  I have been working on it.  So.  It's going to be the first piece in my black and white portion of my portfolio.  This is obviously just the final drawing.  I am putting it on the board today.  Cross your fingers!

I got some pieces of inspiration from SFAL2 back in May.  I jotted then all down in my sketchbook to review later, but 'Bear Attack' jumped out when I asked myself what was an experience I knew about.

It's kinda hard to say how these experiences kind of merged in my head - but they did, and I had all the pieces before I could really trace them back to their source.  So . . .

For those of you who know or have gone back through my blog posts, you know that I spent some time in Alaska at the end of my junior year in college working on my thesis.  It's kinda a long story, but what you need to know is that the school gave me money to go up to Alaska for several months and I ended up getting on board with someone who did outreaches and ended up traveling all over the state, helping out and taking pictures and drawing and painting.  Anyway, I was up there during the summer for part of that when the salmon were running (as in going upstream lay their eggs).  We went fishing or hiking (when we had time, which wasn't often), and one day near the end of our trip, we ended up in the area around where the Russian Kenai Rivers join up.  We had been there all summer, seen almost every kind of wildlife there was to see: moose, caribou, eagles, etc.  You name it, we had seen it.  Except for bears.  And it was salmon season, so that was a little odd.  We had heard the bears were out, we had even been witness to some of the damage they can cause by breaking into storage sheds and garages to get into meat freezers.  But I hadn't seen one.

So we hit the woods, hiking down to the river and the first thing we hear from people hiking up is that there are bears everywhere. And there were.  Like three.  Two huge grizzly cubs and a mother black bear.  None of them were as big as the bear in this piece, obviously, cause this is fantasy, but we had an experience or two that day that I will never forget.

The other piece of this little story is kind of about one of my brothers, Mark.  He's married and off doing army stuff - and that was always one of those things that everyone knew was going to happen because my brother is a warrior through and through.  He's always been that way.  Anyway . . .

When we were little, we would go up to Tennessee a lot; my parents had bought a cabin up there that we rent out and homeschoolers that we were, we would drive up there and stay for months at a time, fixing up the house, pulling weeds, cutting firewood, etc.  Sometimes I think that homeschooling is just and excuse for parents to have ready access to child labor anytime and anywhere - which is why I have every intention of homeschooling my kids whenever I have any.  Anyway . . .

We had two dogs at this point, a golden retriever and a beagle, and even though they had free reign to go off and run all over the mountain, we still occasionally took them on walks (I'm not sure why either).  Which is what we were doing when some giant monstrosity of a dog runs up completely out of the blue and attacks our golden retriever.  Now, all six of us are freaking out - my mom, my two younger brothers and two younger sisters (one of whom was like, three).  One of my sisters is crying, youngest brother is crying, Mom had picked up my littlest sister and is shouting trying to get the owner to come and take care of their dog, I'm trying to keep the beagle out of the fight, and Mark is just mad.  He jumps onto the back of this huge dog (that's bigger than he is, cause he's, like, eight) and starts beating it's back with his fists shouting "Get off my dog!  Get off my dog!" Which, of course, freaks my mom out even more.  But Mark doesn't care, he wraps his little hands around the other dogs collar and just keeps tugging, trying to pull the dog off our golden.

Anyway, I don't remember how we got that thing off our dog - but I'm pretty sure it just got fed up with the little hellion on it's back.  But that's Mark.  Never met a challenge he couldn't beat; throws himself 100% into whatever he's doing.

So all that to say, these are the two main ideas that came together in this piece.  The little kid with the pitchfork doesn't really know what he's going to do with said pitchfork, but he's not gonna stand there and let the giant demon-bear eat his sister and brother.

The Bear Attack

New idea for a piece - more information to come!

Dragon Tamer: Still a WIP

I imagine sometimes that this stage of painting is not unlike being pregnant.  The vision of the final is so close to being real, but there's still so much time to put in before you see it.

Meanwhile you just feel fat and irritable.  Those of you out there who have been pregnant, let me know.

I did a study over a photo of the Dragon Tamer piece and it was . . . not a pretty sight.  So after aimlessly perusing the internet for "photo night scene" and "moonlit person", trying to remember the name of night paintings I'd seen or come across, and countless other queries, I hit the books.

Which is honestly what I should have done in the first place; I own a copy of "Color and Light" as well as "Imaginative Realism" by James Gurney, after all.  My obsession with books can get me into trouble sometimes; I have so many that I forget or get overwhelmed by too much information.

If I hadn't been so busy looking and reading I would have kicked myself - all the paintings, all the information was there.  At the very least I had a new direction to try and take the color studies.

And as you can see below, take them places I did.

Glowy dragon needs to not make a reappearance. 

Meanwhile I was also working on the final sketches for the Save the Dates.  Simple, I kept telling myself, beautiful color, strong shapes, concentrate on the feeling.

I can't help but think that simple really just means LOTS of work, but maybe I'm doing something wrong . . .

Last year when I went to Tennessee, I went to Cades Cove (possibly one of my favorite places on earth).  We got there before the gates opened and were able to drive through just as the sun was coming up over the mountains.  There was fog and fall trees and deer and it was amazingly beautiful. So when I started working on this piece, that morning is what I was thinking about.

The first one . . . wasn't awesome.  At the very least it didn't get me excited to start the piece.  It didn't recall any of the beauty, any of the feeling I was trying to capture.  There were things I liked, but overall it was just boring.  So I did another one.  It was better, but my struggles with Dragon Tamer have shaken my confidence, so I kept at it, trying to find something that really worked.

I looked up some morning fog, looked up paintings of fog (oh, hello Turner, hello Whistler), trying to just steep myself in the essence of what I was trying to create.

So I made, like, a million color comps.  And then just quit and broke out the watercolor paper and started doing it old school.  I didn't have much more success.

So here's where I am with Dragon Tamer:

Wait, aren't those color comps, you say? Why yes, yes they are . . .

Because this is where it is in real life.  Still.  I still can't seem to find the key.  I've been taking it into my room at night, hoping that by looking at it before I fall asleep, I'll be able to work out the problem in my sleep.

It hasn't worked.

And here's where I am with the Save the Dates:

Color comps everywhere!

Fog doesn't usually drift like this, I am discovering . . . 

I haven't done so many color comps since I was a sophomore in college.  Little Red Cap tricked me with how very easily the steam effect was created and I dived into the color comps here thinking "Fog is like steam, I got this!"

WRONG.

Fog is not like steam.  Especially fog that has light coming through it.  And I can't seem to make up my mind as to what this is going to look like - realistic?  Stylized?  And I'm worried about this nagging voice that's telling me to go make maquettes for the owls so I can light them (shut UP!) correctly.

Both of these were supposed to be DONE by now.  I have a schedule!  Save the Dates were supposed to be a mash up of watercolor-y effects goodness.  In-and-out, easy-peasy.

Freaking owls.  Freaking fog.  Freaking DRAGONS.  Do your worst, you won't win . . .

Working on something for Ten Paces and Draw: check back February 18th to see the final reveal.

Holy crows, I really am a masochist . . .

Dragon Tamer: WIP

Just in case someone out there is wondering what "WIP" means - it stands for "Work In Progress".

Moving along, slowly but surely.  This piece has become infinitely more intricate and complicated than I originally anticipated.  I'm about 22 hours in on the final, way off schedule (I'm supposed to be working on my sister's save the dates, shhhh), and I am now stuck and having to lean heavily on Photoshop to solve some of the color problems I am having.

I had intended to have the final done by next week's post, but I doubt that is going to happen.  So look forward instead to another update on this as well as an update on the Save the Date illustration I will be working on.

It's going to be awesome when it's finished, though!

The sketch for the Save the Date.

Drawing Dragons

On the off chance that this might be useful to someone, or for myself to look back on later: here is how "Drogo" came to life.

Anytime I try and do something in art that I haven't done before, I look to the masters.  Fortunately there are several Dragon Masters and they all tend to congregate over at Muddy Colors blog.  What's even more helpful is when all said Dragon Masters congregate to talk dragons over a two week period - which they did last September.  And piz-de-resistance: Justin Gerard's fantastic post on filling the storehouses in your brain with reference info from real life which you can read here, as well as some other tips on using real life to inspire fantastic illustrations here.

So I pulled up a whole mess of reference and dived in - and almost immediately got lost.

But I discovered two very important things: one being that I don't like drawing reptiles.  At all.  And two, Gerard knows his business and should always be heeded lest brain sucking aliens who feed on the unwary and under-researched find you and . . . well, eat your brains.

What I'm trying to say is that despite my distaste for two-dimensional reptile reproduction, I learned a lot.  And I know my dragons are better for it.

I sat myself down and drew a bunch of lizards and crocodiles and eels.  That was more frustrating than I anticipated and might have added to my general dislike of the species.  I leaned a bit too heavily on my reference and the first few came out too . . . crocodile-ish.

I kept at it, hated everything, and finally just put all the reference away, listening to Gerard's advice despite my doubts of being able to pull something like this off without guidelines.  Then I put in too much turtle - which was odd because I hadn't been looking at any turtle reference.  Then because owls are always on the brain, they decided to jump in at one point and I had to call everyone to order.  But by then, my youngest sister had tossed in some seahorses and that yanked all of us down a completely new path.  Out of nowhere, some real horses joined up with a komodo dragon or two and by that point I really had no idea where we were going and was just along for the ride.

After I had the rough idea of what to sculpt (the word sculpt being used here in a very general rough vague sort of way) I attempted several times to start . . . and restart.  And restart.  Then I brought out the tin foil and everything started working a little better.  A not to those who are masochistic enough to try this in the future: armatures make Sculpey much more bearable.  And usable.  

I did the head separate because it was a nightmare trying to shape it while it was on the body.  And it kept coming out looking like the lizard from Rescuers Down Under.  No joke.  

Finally I cooked the darn thing and hung it up between two chairs to photograph.

The problem that I ran into after that is I tend to lean too heavily on my reference and the lack of detail 1. was making my drawing look half-assed and 2. was good because it made me see that about myself.

So.  A general outline of how I made the little dragon guy.  Hopefully some pitfalls identified to avoid in the future.