Goodbye comfort zone

Today I did my first real exercise for Deb Weiers's class, "Wonky Friends and Critters." At moments I looked back with nostalgia to three weeks ago, when I thought I was leaving my comfort zone by drawing with a brush-tipped pen instead of my Uniball for the "Draw with Me" sixpacks! As Joey said to Chandler when Chandler kissed his girlfriend:

Deb is a genius of imagination, and my effort pales next to her original creations, but this is so far over that line for me that I'm gonna say we're in a whole new country. I bought a bunch of new materials and tools—India ink, acrylic inks, gesso, gel pens—and applied them to paper in ways I have never tried before. I really had to screw up my courage at each step: What if I ruin it? What if I hate it? But Deb takes a pretty casual attitude to most of that, saying "Oh, just gesso over it and do it again!" As more of a "purist" watercolorist up until now, I'm not used to being able to use white so freely, but it definitely comes in handy at moments.

This was a blind contour drawing, which is to say that you look at your reference photo and draw without ever looking down at your paper. It results in things like eyes at two different levels, crooked noses,  mouths that sometimes end up over by an ear. I actually did pretty well in terms of locating my features on this one, and I don't know if that pleases or disappoints me, because weird placement is part of the fun.

I started out drawing way too big for the piece of paper, so I worked out to the edges and didn't have room for a border or even for some writing (which Deb adds to most of her pictures). Next time. But here is my "Portrait of Lisa," Weiers-style.

Pencil, Uniball, Daler-Rowney Acrylic Inks, India ink, white gesso, gel pens, watercolor (lips only), on 140-lb. Fluid watercolor paper.



                                                                                                                     

Draw with Me—Royals

The subject of today's "Draw with Me" six-pack was royals. Danny called them "kings," but since one is an emperor and a couple of the others have alternate titles, I changed the name.

I was so focused on catching the likeness of these guys that I went too big in almost all cases, meaning I captured their faces but not the fancy-dress uniforms on the two of them who had such. Not all of them get to play dress-up—as Danny said, Holland's king looks more like your friendly neighborhood banker—but Norway and Thailand had awesome uniforms covered with gold braid and buttons and lots of colorful medals, and I was only able to render a peek at them. I do think I caught the likenesses pretty well, though, in most cases.

Again, drawn with a Pitt artist pen (brush), so with a pretty heavy line, and colored after with watercolors. In my Bee sketchbook.

On to today's homework in my class! I'll post some later.

New class

A friend I met at SketchCon is always taking new classes, but she's not just a class junkie, she actually puts everything she learns to work, and as a result has discovered several exciting new ways to make art. I decided to follow her example and step outside of my comfort zone, so I signed up for an online class at Kara Bullock Art School (the physical school is in Orange County) with an artist named Deb Weiers.

I was intrigued by her technique of putting together drawing, painting, gesso, gel pens, collage, and apparently whatever other art supplies she has lying around, and coming up with something completely out of the ordinary. I have never done collage (except for some extremely puerile flowery mod-podged wooden plaques in my teenage years), so I'm a little wary, since her collage isn't finding things and incorporating them, it's making things and incorporating them.

Our warm-up exercise for the class, which started today, was to draw "wonky critters," whose purpose is to be photocopied, cut out, and used in "other work," which I am sensing will be in the other three modules of the class. She urged us to "just have fun," and then proceeded to draw some exceedingly wonky critters, all apparently from within her head (although she did say she looked at a photo for one of them).

I tried my best to be wonky, but since I do not have the physiognomy of these critters firmly in my brain, I looked at photos, and my addiction to verisimilitude occasionally got the best of me.

I drew with a Pentel EnerGel pen, which has liquid gel ink that is slightly water soluble, and then went in after with a wet paintbrush to use the ink to do some coloration and shading.

Here are my examples. The shih tzu, the donkey, and the jackrabbit probably have the most character. Well, and maybe the crow.

I may try this again tomorrow before moving on into the main lesson, to see if I can get a little less realistic and infuse a little more personality into my "characters." Looking at them all here, I see I have a ways to go.

Here, by comparison, are some of the teacher's:

But...this is fun so far!

EnerGel Pen in Bee sketchbook.