drawing trouble

Making Art Everyday 2022 No. 1: Orange

I’m back and doing Lisa Bardot’s Making Art Everyday prompts, at least for the very first day. We’ll see how it goes.

January’s theme is FOOD, and the first prompt is:

ORANGE

I followed along with the tutorial Lisa made, though I added some color to my leaves. It was surprisingly quick to do this. I like quick!

#makingarteveryday
#makingarteveryday2022

Tools used:
- iPad Pro 12.9"
- Procreate
- Apple Pencil

Making Art Everyday 2022 prompts

Boxing Day 2021

I have no idea what the malls were like today. With snow on the ground, the high temperature of the day being -6C and the Omicron variant of COVID-19 doing a variation of Oprah’s “You get a car and you get a car and you get a car!” with the entire general population, it seems unlikely the stores were packed.

But people do love a good bargain.

I went for a walk but otherwise stayed inside, warm and content to avoid crowds, plague and things.

I did a quick drawing to celebrate Boxing Day, though. In hindsight, I wished I had put flaps on the box. I mean, I still could, but maybe I should just move onto bigger, better boxes.

I’m also thinking about restarting some art lessons, to better ground myself in the basics. I’m a bit rusty.

Tools used: iPad Pro 12.9″, Procreate, sketching pencil from Bardot Brush Pencil Box set

Ancient art, modern fun

When I look back at the art I did as a kid, I’ll sometimes draw (ho ho) inspiration from it, thinking, “That was pretty good.” As I developed my mad sketching skills, I did a copious amount of copying, which is a pretty good way to learn how to draw.

Speaking of copying (such a clever segue), here’s a sketch I did based on the Newsweek cover story from June 18, 1979, “Hollywood’s scary summer”:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yhWRyPJ9G54/UIyuDVMQbzI/AAAAAAAACa4/KSVozUl6h9s/s1600/Newsweek-Alien.jpeg

The story cataloged the horror movies of summer 1979, with Alien featuring prominently, and an included shot of the alien (which was a spoiler at the time, I suppose) formed the basis of my sketch, done on a 5×7″ sketchpad using a 2B pencil:

I pulled this sketch into Affinity Photo and played around with the exposure, brightness and a few other settings. The end result is an interesting example of how you can change the feel of a drawing without actually altering the drawing itself (ie. no erasing, drawing over existing lines or adding new elements).

The modified version pops more, and I like the more dramatic look to the glowing mist. I think the 14-year-old version of me would have approved. The not-14 year old version of me is still not crazy about how the ribs look.

To Inktober or not Inktober

Inktober 2021 starts mere hours from now, 31 days of prompts that are meant to be done in ink or ink-like media. I have participated the last two years, but strangely am still uncertain whether I want to take part again this year.

Part of my ambivalence is the first few prompts are rather uninspiring to me. Another part is feeling I should be devoting more time to structured learning on my drawing instead of doing a bunch of goofy prompts, which can help, but are maybe a better way to “cut loose” than to hone my skills.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens tomorrow!

Here’s the list for 2021: