Great white pelican
Will finish this one tomorrow
Sketches
Just some squares
They look simple but I tried masking these with sticky tape and cutting the square stencils from that, which was fiddly. Tore the paper a bit on lifting the masking though, which makes me wary of using sticky tape again in the future. Might just need some more practice or to use slightly different tape.
Upwards
Well, it’s taken me this long into the month to resort to old art, but I guess the floodgates are open now. Here’s a sketch I did while on our company retreat in Cancun, Mexico. It was drawn from the ground floor of the hacienda we were staying at, looking upwards at the first floor.
Blocks and lines
Planned to have a lot more of this done tonight but solving the placement of the tetrominoes proved to take much longer than I thought it would (the outline I initially drew up didn’t have the correct area so fixing things took a reasonable amount of time.)
Next time I’d probably mock this up digitally before launching into drawing it!
Captain
No idea who this is but… here they are, sketch of the day.
Bending Over Backwards
Just a little doodle for today.
Coy
Today’s sketch is of my kitty! He looks so inviting, like he wants you to scratch his tummy but it’s all a trap.
I updated yesterday’s placeholder post with another sketch, too.
[Placeholder]
Wasn’t able to get any drawing done today. In light of yesterday’s post about momentum, I’m making a placeholder post for now, will hopefully be able to do some kind of double post on Monday!
Edit: Here we go, another Piranha plant sketch. I was at a Smash tournament/Splatoon meetup yesterday so Planty seems like a reasonable subject.
Momentum
The most important element of most Blaugusts that I’ve “succeeded” at has been momentum. Last week our household was struck with illness. Woefully curled up in bed with an awful cold, I took last Monday off from blog posting, and that snowballed quickly – even though I worked from home on Tuesday and was back in the office on Wednesday, I was still moping around not feeling like putting a blog post up.
This topic ties into a meta-Blaugust post that I’ve been wanting to write, but I think I’ll keep that in the back pocket for just a bit longer because what I want to do today is get back into the swing of drawing on the daily.
I signed up to a a free online course run by the University of Newcastle, which started this week. The course is “Natural History Illustration 101” and is focused on the discipline of drawing subjects from nature. It’ll run for the next 6 weeks so I hope the course content dribbling in will give me some continued ideas to draw from. This week we’ve been given a bunch of introductory videos to understand what natural history illustration actually is, which has been a lovely source of cool inspiration (butterflies, birds and plants, oh my!)
In addition, registrants to the course have been offered a login to the Global Plants website, which is apparently a really huge repository for plants.
Today’s sketch is thus a Money Plant. The reference picture is actually from wikipedia, as I didn’t like any of the reference material on the global plants website. I had a recent conversation with John in which I mentioned this plant but he wasn’t familiar with it.
Rendering this was really difficult. For a start, I haven’t done any representational artwork in ages, so those skills are all rusty. But secondly, the tones and patterns on the actual seed pods of the plant made it really hard to convey them in a way that made sense. One seed pod in the photo was really shiny. Others were mottled. They’re actually really flat discs, and I don’t think that’s apparent from my sketch at all.
Anyway, it was good to draw just for the sake of it. Here’s to getting back a bit of momentum.
Mountain
I put John on the spot and asked him what I should draw tonight, and his answer was, “a mountain”.
So here’s a sketch of Mt Fuji.
