Messing around with thick strokes. Keep in mind this is a very small painting (~5x10cm).

I really like watching Will Kemp’s tutorials and thought I’d try a recent one he did because the colors and style really appealed to me. I ended up not to happy with the above at first. I lean towards realism so it’s hard for me to be loose with details. Also my canvas was smaller than it should have been looking back now.

I was going to give it another try and got halfway through:

But then I left the paintings sitting for a bit and I ended up liking the first more so I left the second alone. I’m posting it because it’s interesting seeing that in-between step.

I’ve moved rooms which means I’ll be organizing and redoing furniture, etc, and I thought it was the perfect way to start the blog. I’ve tried several times, unsuccessfully, to keep some sort of blog or social media account, but I never quite got the hang of it. I also didn’t have enough energy at the time to keep up with one because of some medical issues, but lately I’ve improved and wanted to start up again.

I also started keeping a sort of log notebook. Keeping a journal never did it for me, but sometimes it’s hard to do something just because (e.g. sketches just for practice that will never be seen) and then have nothing to show for it. It created the strange illusion that even though I was feeling better, I hadn’t gotten anything done, when in fact I just went through a series of “invisible” (e.g. learning how to program, etc.) and/or failed projects. So I dug out this old Moleskine I’d never truly found a use. For years I couldn’t get myself to use it. I finally decided to hell with it and started using it almost a year ago to record ideas when I went out, but it’s sat mostly unfilled. But anyways I took it and just started to write down everything I did each day. It’s been two months, which is dozens of times longer than I’ve managed to stay with any other sort of journal like thing, and it’s evolved quite nicely. I’ve added a small to-do list in the back and there’s a series of symbols so I can also write down notes, ideas, and supply places/prices. The last one might sound kind of strange, but it serves two purposes. First, where I live there’s super high inflation and it’s very hard to find art related supplies. Just in the time I’ve started using the thing for notes which is less than a year, there’s evidence in there of colored pencil prices doubling. Second, some of the names for materials/tools are very different, they might go by the technical name, by a brand specific to my country, or the translation might just seem illogical to me, and in a lot of places, everything is behind the counter, something which I wasn’t used to, so you have to know what to ask for.

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I take my notebook everywhere, mostly for writing, but occasionally there will a nice view from wherever I’m waiting.

I was fooling around with MyPaint and this just sort of happened. It might look pretty rough because I drew it very small. It’s more the size you see in the sketchbook thumb. The infinite canvas in MyPaint is really cool, but it also makes it hard to judge at what resolution you’re sketching so when you export drawings they might be bigger at 72-300 ppi than you were expecting.

I don’t remember which Croquis Cafe number it was, sorry. If you’ve never heard of Croquis Cafe it’s a youtube channel that films live models so people at home can practice “live” figure drawing.

I wasn’t using any reference so some might look odd. I was just practicing drawing them from memory. …and then got a bit carried away and started painting one.

Fooling around in Photoshop.

I love doing exercises like this where it’s just about painting and getting the colors right (I did not use the included color picks) and I don’t really have to think about the drawing part. I find it very relaxing. You can download the file here if you want to try it yourself.