Manzanillo Beach - Landscape Complete!

Here is my completed Colour Pencil Landscape of Manzanillo Beach on A5 Sketchbook Paper.  

I am pretty pleased with how this has turned out, although of course there are areas I would like to improve.  My rock drawing skills are not the best, so I think they let it down - especially at the bottom edge of the land mass we see in the distance.  I struggled with that!  However, I love the water and how I managed to get a reflection of the light down the middle, and I rather like the leaves (especially the main one with yellow veins) in the bottom left of the picture.  I also had fun discovering a way to show trees growing on the hills in the distance - by drawing tiny circles with a blue pencil on green shaded hills.  It worked really well I think! 

So my Landscape skills are steadily improving, and no doubt the more I practice them, the more they will improve.  I just find them so challenging! 

Thanks for looking, and please feel to leave and tips and suggestions for improvement in the comments below!

T-Shirt Design

My Final T-Shirt Design, I tried to sum up the essence of what the U101 Design Thinking course is all about, and I hope I managed that. 

New Sketch - Car Battery Charger

I am currently studying an Open University course in Design, called U101 Design Thinking: Creativity for the 21st Century. This is my latest piece of work on the course, where I have to produce a detailed sketch of an old work tool. I chose an old car battery charger my Dad has, Dad's are great for keeping old bits of junk! I think I may have stumbled across a minefield of old and unusual bits of junk to draw! Here is a photo of the item for comparison:


After this initial drawing, my next task is to do two more drawings of this object, but to make them less detailed and more abstract each time, so as to create my own design from this object. This will be an interesting challenge for me! In the next few weeks I will be practicing this technique further, by designing my own T-Shirt for this module!

Trees Landscape - Complete!

I finally completed my landscape! It's been difficult working on this one, but I am so glad I finally completed it. It was worth finishing as now I am proud of it! There are still areas I need to improve on, I am a fledgling landscape artist, I do need to improve the contrast and make the picture darker in some areas. But this is a good start I think with a difficult reference image (see previous post). Thanks so much to Retha for offering me so much help and support - without you and would not have completed it!

It just goes to show that it is worth finishing your pictures, no matter how badly you think they are going - they do improve once completed, and you have something to be proud of!

A Happy Little Shieldbug!

Finally we have colour! I really had to push myself today to have a go at something. I haven't done any drawing for a while, and I guess the insecurities start to creep in. Can I still do this? But thankfully, once I chose a picture I liked, and looked simple enough for me to have a go at, this is what I came up with - A Happy Little Shieldbug!

I've seen these creatures in my back garden, I think they're really cute! Tiny, but they seem able to just leap from one plant leaf to another. Love them! :)

New Sketch - ''Glamorous Singer''

Here's a new sketch I did today of a singer. I'm trying to improve my figure drawing skills, I think my figures are improving slowly, I just need to challenge myself more with these - I fear doing figures because I know I struggle with them!

I'd happily welcome any constructive criticism!

Triffid - Finished?

Here's what I have now! I have darkened it a lot, and it does look more improved. I'm wondering if I should call this finished or do some more work on it? So I'm going to allow it to sit for a bit while I figure out what to do next! Besides, I find when I've just finished working on something I never think it's that good - then after a while, I look back and think it's turned out much better than I thought it had!

Please let me know what you think! Constructive Criticism very welcome! :)

Art - Teaching Myself

"Frozen in the Moonlight"

I am a self-taught artist, and still in the process of improving my skills. You can see a sample of my art in the header of this blog, plus some of my works I have uploaded here. Just click on an image to see a larger version of it.

"Gargoyle"

"House"

"Spider"

I haven't done much drawing in a while, I like pencil and colour pencil art - that's what I do best. I'm just not skilled with a paintbrush, probably due to a little too much playing and paint fights in school for me to learn much!

I want to be a fantasy art, I was first inspired by Boris Vallejo, I got a calendar of his back in the 90's, and it kicked off the fantasy art bug in me. I've since sought out new fantasy artists to add to my inspiration, I moved on to the works of Chris Achilleos, Luis Royo, Clyde Caldwell and Greg Horn. I would love for my meagre art talents to reach these standards, then I would be so proud of my work!

So what do I need to do to improve? All the above artists tend to focus on people in their artwork, very realistic figures. My figure drawing leaves a lot to be desired (in my humble opinion), and I want to be able to do amazing and realistic figures. I also don't have a lot of experience doing fantastic creatures, monsters or dragons. I would also love to do more backgrounds to my images, so landscape, and most especially cityscape, I would love to improve on. The simple answer to this - Practice! Now I've figured out what I want to imrove upon, I need to find reference images for these types of images, and practice them over and over again until I improve! So here's a simplified list of what I want to improve:

- Figure Drawing
- Fantastic Creatures, Monsters & Dragons
- Landscapes (Greenery)
- Cityscapes (Buildings & Architecture)
- Still Life (Weapons, Fantasy Objects)

For the fantastic creatures, monsters and dragons, I will need to collect reference images of animals, both furry and reptile animals, to be able to draw fantasy creatures. Once you can draw realistic normal animals, you can learn to draw fantasy animals really well. I've added still life as it occurred to me I don't have hardly any practice of drawing weapons, and the few I have done, have not been very good at all. So it's time to improve on them as well.

If I stick to this plan with my art, and work on these various subjects, by the end of this year I should be able to do these subjects with much greater ease, and be much more able to produce high quality fantasy art of my own. Wish me Luck!