Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays to all.

Thank you for stopping by my little corner of the world.

 

                                                                            

Virtual Paint Out - Rome

This month's Virtual Paint Out location is Rome. So much to see and choose from here.

If you want to see what I was working from click here.

I pushed my Bienfang sketchbook paper well beyond its water media capabilities and ended up overworking it.

But while my perspective is not perfect, I was quite pleased over all with the drawing, which took about 15 minutes to complete. I do wish I had scanned it before adding in colour though.

I really need to do a value study of the original and compare it to mine so I can see where I would need to fix it if the paper were to tolerate it. I know in my heart and mind that value studies are a key tool to being happy with the finished product but my lack of patience always gets in my way. 

ETA- In the meantime, I put this into drafts while I searched out how to do a screencapture - easy, peasy in the end. So here are the images in grayscale. This really does help me to see the value and perspective lines better and not get caught up in the details, which is what usually happens.

 

Okay, definitely need to add routinely doing value studies to my New Year's art resolutions LOL!
 

Another post

Nothing posted for a couple of weeks and then two in one day. This is one of the sketches I did when we were studying contour drawings a number of weeks ago in Sketchbook Skool.

I wasn't sure how I felt about it at first but now, after not seeing it for awhile, I'm quite taken with the results. Gotta love complimentary colours!

It was done using a photo reference from a class I took years ago where we all brought items in according to the theme of the week - fruit, vegetables, glass, metallic etc and then spent the afternoon putting together still life setups to photograph for our own reference libraries.

Bird's eye view II

Several months ago, I had done a small watercolour sketch of Abbeydale for Nan and Tom's summer party. That led to a request for a bigger version incorporating part of the hamlet surrounding them.

It took me awhile for my brain to get the perspective right when working only from satellite photos but I'm finally happy with the outcome. The preliminary sketch looked like this-
 

I've scrubbed the name out since it didn't make the final cut anyway and for privacy sake because it includes friends' names. The final piece is a combination of pen, watercolour and watercolour pencil work.