Pencil attempts

For practice I did this bird one afternoon from a picture from the Birds and Blooms calendar. This bird was just begging to be drawn. I did the outline without a grid, I just compared proportions, and it came out pretty close.










Then I spent a few afternoons on a Ukrainian still life, well, about 5 hours all together. I drew from the actual objects set up on my table. I used a ruler to hold up and measure things, but I still had a hard time. The designs are off in places, and in the end I decided to skip a lot of the design on the candy dish. I guess any time I really need to be accurate, I need to use a photo and the grid method. I'm not sure what I will do with this drawing. I may paint it over on the computer later.

Squirrel

Over the last couple of weeks I worked on a painting of a squirrel. It was a bit challenging because the background in the photo was very blurry but I didn't want to paint it that way. I also haven't done very many animals, but I like the way it turned out. You can see it on my website. http://www.forest-of-dreams.com/squirrel.html

Now I plan to spend some time with my pencils. Perhaps I will do something for the Ukrainian festival in pencil this year.

Thai Eggplants-Flemish technique

Imprimatura (mid-tone wash)








Umber layer








Opaque highlights









Dead layer









Colour layer

These are the steps involved with the Flemish technique. This was really interesting for me and I enjoyed most of it, except for that jug.

Thank you to Maverick at wetcanvas.com for showing us this, and to 'mprince' for the photo.