How do you say "Bunny" in Polish?

I was commissioned by my best friend to make a special Christmas gift for the niece. She really loves her Bunny stuffy and they figured making an original piece of art celebrating it would make a great gift and more than likely last longer than the stuffed toy. I included my process below.

Sketching this a number of times, this piece gave me a surprising challenge, how to capture the essence of a simple stuffed toy. Once I got the sketch right I increased the design to fill the area to be painted.

I traced the design and transferred it with tracing paper and light grey chalk onto a Baltic birch panel.

I locked down the drawing and added a basic value map with a wash of warm Burnt Sienna paint.

I added middle value lights and darks in grey for my dead colour layer.

I then did some big form modelling in lighter and darker greys to create more form and coloured in the nose.

I knocked back the cool grey with a warm yellowish fur applied with thick strokes of paint to give the effect of the feeling of her soft plush toy.

I added details and brought back the outline with Burnt sienna to help pop the image off of the remaining wooden support. finally I signed and dated it on the back and added picture hanging supplies to the back, wrapped it and delivered it.  I heard she loved it and her mom was so appreciative she shed a tear. Win for the arts!!!

Never stop improving your technique

Practice does make perfect. With art you've got to practice, practice and practice some more.

I know I need to put in more quality time to get to where I want to go artistically. I am taking another 3 day workshop with Martinho Correria titled: Studying the figure through the Masters at the Calgary School of Art at Cactus Arts Supply store. Check out their respective website for more info. Its nice to see some familiar faces as well as many new ones for this intensive in classical atelier methods of instruction. I love the private training, you always get pushed beyond the levels and learn so much, making the price worth every penny. I highly recommend these courses and others like them at Swinton's Art Supply etc. if you really want to learn artistic skills and techniques directly form those in the craft every now and again I ma delegated at the opportunity to improve my skills as a student and devote some time to improving my practice.

After the first lecture we worked on tracing gesture type drawings from old masters works to get a feel for the essence of "gesture drawings". It is challenging to remove what you know and previous skills and learn to work a different way. These gesture drawings are meant to be simple ways of conveying the weight and feeling of a model and freezing it into a moment as models tend to move even when posing for a long time. This means you have to learn to capture the feeling behind the figure being drawn.  We traced a myriad of figures done by different artists for reference.

We learned how to properly prepare a pencil and how to hold it for this type of drawing. This one was plastic composite and not wood, I was fooled at first, until I got my exact blade in it, it shaved weird. Then you make a point in the lead with some sandpaper and use smooth wrist and arm movements to create soft and curved S and C curved lines.

We practiced on a small Brague drawing example. First doing a gesture drawing to capture the feeling of the form and then moving into getting the basic shapes and proportions of the figure in place. I took additional notes during the demos to add to the invaluable handouts our instructor Martinho provided.

After a lunch of a delicious "Manwich" at the Holy smoke Grill across the street, I felt groggy with so much meat and bun in my belly. I set up my drawing board on an easel and set up the reference next to the paper another student was kind to offer me to try and work on. This pose is a little intimidating given how much time we had left in the class.

We worked on drawing our figure larger using comparative proportions. I think my guy is a little thick, in places, there is some definite tweaking needed before continuing onto the next stage. But I did manage to get the majority of the figure blocked in in the time given. I look forward to learning more in the next few days, we will see how things develop, I hope this interests you and you come back to check it out.

Ciao for now = :D

IGUANADONATHON

I saw this picture of an iguana and wanted to draw it. The first step was to laid it out in HB pencil. I used my trusty Bic 0.5 mechanical pencil available at most dollar stores! This iguana is about 5 head units long, I used the head as the unit of all the relationships of scale. It was not gridded but drawn freehand using the same technique used to create my starter self-portrait.

The next step is inking. I didn't refer too much to the original photocopy by this point but generalized the tonality with my inking. I used a new Uni-ball Vision Needle. I found the ink a little runny with this tooth of paper, so I had to move quickly and not let the tip sit too long or the paper would soak up excess ink.

 Here I use small dots and cross hatching to create the line work. I also thickened the outline to give it more PuNcH!!!

I still have to add the shadow. However here is a scanned version with the whites, nice and sparkling white, with my website address.