Things that make me wanna

PAINT! Tim Gagnon. I love the colors he uses.




I spent a lot of time with my kiddo today painting and drawing with watercolor pencils. He had a blast but all I achieved was frustration. I really want watercolors to work for me. Partly because I love what Amy Brown and Kelly McKernan can do with them. I'll just have to keep at it, though probably without watercolor pencils. Time to look into tubes of it or something.

Le sigh. On another note, here's a "Person I Know (PIK)"! Check her out:
Allison Wilson Photography

Project Inside the Pain

I'm working on another drawing.  Hoping to finish it today.

I simply cannot use the blogger app for posting on here. It is not easy at all to place or size photos on it and there's no dealing with the HTML so I can remove the right click and save image capability. It would be nice to find a good blogging app on my tablet since I've pretty much figured out how to get everything else on there that I need to post copies for sale in my store. Do you know of any good blogging apps for android?

Solace in Observation

I had a wild hair earlier and decided to rummage through my son's construction paper for a black sheet. I have a single white pastel pencil (chalk type) and I wanted to experiment with lightening instead of darkening. I drew out an outline of a face and some hair, a little bit of shoulder and the neck. Ooooh, it was fun! I think I found what type of paper I'll use for my Narcoleptic inspired drawings. Maybe something a little higher in quality. Perhaps even black matboard. I haven't finished this drawing yet, but it's close.

As you can see, I have a tendency to change things around as I work. Her eyes were terribly annoying to do. Part of my problem is that I am working at a regular old table, not anything I can tilt up to get a better view of what I'm doing. In fact, I wind up having to completely change a drawing because I will see it just fine from the angle I'm drawing in, but as soon as I stand up to stare straight down or pick it up to hold it in front of my face, I'm all streaming profanity and violently crinkled features. Just, no. One of these days I'll have a drafting table!

Overall, I'm happy with how she's turned out so far. I will definitely be exploring this way of drawing further. May just have to ask for pastels for Christmas.

I like posting these progressions of my artwork. It's crazy to see how something starts and how completely different it winds up by the finish. I like to watch others as well and because of my experiment today I searched youtube to find videos of just that. This soothed me as I watched:



It's interesting how at first, it's all just basic shapes and seemingly random lines and squiggles. I spent a lot of my time in the past focusing so much on the end result that I couldn't wrap my head around what goes into it to give it the depth I needed to produce the intended result. Nothing but frustration. Obsessing about how you think it should look can impede the whole process. Let it evolve if it wants to evolve! You'll be surprised by what you wind up with. 

Watercolor! >:(

Watercolor is not my friend. I'm not sure if it was the paper, or maybe I used too much water but I was halfway through with this person I was painting when half of her face peeled off! See? Heartbreak!

I'm so very irritated right now. I suppose in the morning I'll have to draw something else. 3 hours wasted unless I can scan her later and try to salvage her digitally. I won't be able to do that until my printer/scanner comes in, though. Thanks to my father, I can stop using my crappy tablet camera to transfer my drawings to Gimp.

I am terribly excited despite this hiccup! With the printer coming in that means I can start planning for physical prints of my art. I have a drawing that's dying to be seen in the Etsy shop. Oh, you just wait and see!