Looking Through Old Sketchbooks

Along side eating, napping, and drawing, looking through old sketchbooks is one of my favorite pastimes! You get to uncover anew lost characters, creatures, or stories. As well as see how your style has changed. Sometimes I redraw these lost old sketches. Recently, I got a chance to look through my old sketchbooks when I started the illustrations for my sister's novel (those will be a future entry). In one of them, I found a colored-in-drawing I had done of the cruel elfin queen from the Tam Lin fairy tale.


Here's a close up. Just a tid bit: the day I drew this picture, on August 2nd, my mom told me to draw ugly things. Yep, this was the one that started it all.


Below is the original. I love the style of the Tam Lin illustrations. They are my favorite out of all of the illustrations in the Enchanted World : Fairies and Elves book. I'm particurally drawn to tall dark Queens, such as this one and the Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They are regal, cold, and awesome!



This book is beautiful and a treasure. My mom says she bought it in a used book store when we were very little so I've always remembered us having it. The illustrations include paintings by Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, J W. Waterhouse, John Anster Fitzgerald and others. The Enchanted World is a series of books each dedicated to different topics, such as fairies and elves, dwarves, giants, and even the fall of Camelot. I can tell you that I was surprised to find this series in our local public library. The fairies and elves book is the only one we have. I frown at the $7.50 marked on the inside because this book is priceless in my eyes.


Anyways. After looking at that drawing I did, I decided to do something in the same fashion (graphite with colored pencil). This faery maiden, whatever you like to call her, is not anyone in particular. She's probably one of many faeries glimpsed in their glimmering midnight procession.


The close up.

School is out for Summer!

I have finished my first year of college and summer has come almost not soon enough!!! The last project I worked on was a collaborative sculpture piece with my friend. We made wooden puppets; she designed a goat/frog prey creature and I designed its cat/bird-of-prey predator creature counter part. It was killer!!! Our puppets required sanding with drills, rasping, laminating plywood, getting gorilla glue all over our hands, and lots of other sweaty physical labor. My thumbs were cramped for two weeks!!!! In the end we didn't finish the projects by critic day because the puppets were way too ambitious for the amount of time we had to work. We still got good grades because all of the time we put into them.

I desperately need my summer now to recover from our intensive puppets and I hoped not to work with wood for a while. But alas! Mother dear is re-doing the kitchen and I had to help sand down all of the cabinets to remove the varnish. Once again, I find myself using power tools.

Moving out of the dorms gave me a chance to uncover some of my old and new drawings and I have selected a few to share with you:

This drawing was our second flayed muscle drawing, this time of a leg and arm. I like this flayed drawing the best!


This next drawing was our final assignment in my drawing studio class. We had to do a drawing of the nude figure. I drew mine with NuPastel on tainted paper.


This piece, neither a drawing nor a painting, was actually from my fall semester. Ever since my mom told me to draw more ugly things, I have been ...well... drawing more ugly things. This creature was inspired by a clock in my sister's living room. Okay, for those of you wondering, I used markers, my Prismacolor markers.


This final piece is an oil painting I did in my Project: Painting and Printmaking class. The assignment was to trade painting surfaces with someone else in the class, start a painting, trade back with that person, and then respond to what they had painted on your canvas or canvas board. The girl who traded with me painted something that looked like dreadlocks. Mom asked it she could have this painting the second I showed her it; I don't know where she will put it.

Value Drawings

We just finished our value drawings in Drawing Studio.  We did one in class and one at home.  I had never done a 'true' value drawing before; consequently, the process was very foreign to me (but I enjoyed it and would do another in my free time!).  First we did a line drawing of the objects or still life.  Then we toned the entire paper.  Basically, we took our graphite stick or our charcoal stick and put an even layer of graphite/charcoal on the entire page.  We made it fairly dark, too!  Then we started with the eraser and added values with it by erasing some of the tone and added darker values with more graphite/charcoal.  I used graphite on both of mine. 

This is my in-class value drawing.

This is my at home drawing.

So our value drawings are done and we started portraits followed shortly by figure drawings.  I'm really excited; I didn't expect myself to be.  We got to draw a model in class, my first model!!!  We didn't have that much time in class to draw because we critiqued our value drawings.  I wanted to make my drawing look like a Renaissance drawing, like one of Leonardo's, so I used cross-hatching rather than blending of graphite.

Can you guess which one is mine and which one is Leo's?