Reading, 'Riting, and Ramblings

For our latest assignment in my drawing class, we took unflattering pictures of ourselves and scaled them up into charcoal drawings on Bristol vellum paper using the grid method. I'm not one of those people who feel comfortable making funny faces, so I photographed myself eating udon.

(Hey, I put a lot of effort into looking cute. After years of aggressive dental work, skin treatments, hair care, and silhouette maintenance, I am not going to take a picture of myself looking hideous. Eating lunch on a Sunday in my pajamas with no make-up is the best you're going to get out of me. Capisce?)

As always, you can click on the image to see a larger version.

You can't tell from this picture alone, but the drawing is very big. It's about 18" wide by 22" tall, which makes my head twice as large as it is in real life. While it was on the easel in our study, Sweetie asked me to please cover it up between drawing sessions because he kept glancing over and getting shocked by a giant Tamara slurping huge noodles.

Still life of a panther statue, decorative bowl, and slotted spoon on a patterned box (charcoal and white pastel on gray charcoal paper).

Maneki neko from four sources of light (graphite on Strathmore paper).

And finally, a watercolor of Pearl Fey from the Ace Attorney video game series.

It's been a month since I posted here because I've been dutifully studying to become a great and powerful artist. I'm practicing daily and taking an introductory drawing course at my college. The class is, in a word, brutal. My instructor is a sweet, supportive demon. She gives us incredibly difficult assignments and, while we quake in dread, chirps with a smile, "You can do it! I know you can!"

She's usually right, though. We can do it...after traveling a long road painted with sweat and tears. Thanks to her Spartan curriculum, I've improved a lot over the past eight weeks.

Here's a selection of pieces I've made recently. You can click any of the images to see a larger picture. Keep in mind that in December, I was drawing couches that look like fences.

The above was an in-class exercise that focused on negative space, using white colored pencil on Canson Mi-Teintes turqoise paper. The subject: my instructor's old keys.

This is a still life in charcoal on Strathmore 400 series drawing paper. Until this one I'd only done line drawings, but the point of this exercise was to imply edges using value (light/shadow) only. It looks more impressive in real life; when Sweetie saw it he said, "It looks like it was made by an actual art student!"

Above is an under-drawing for watercolor, which I've also been playing with in my free time. It's a copy (fancy-pants artists say "study") of Maya Fey from the Ace Attorney video game series. I darkened the lines intending to ink over them after painting, but later I changed my mind and left the pencil showing.

And here's the finished watercolor. The colors turned out strangely in the photo, so I adjusted the image to approximate how the painting looks in real life with middling results. Her face is a bit too wide and her eyes a bit too dark, but too late now!