Practising a fish

The other day, I realised I was terrible at drawing koi fish. Not thy I haven’t tried before – just that trial and error wasn’t teaching me fast enough. I googled for ‘koi fish scales drawing tutorial’, and found a few videos. I watched a couple to get the idea, but I didn’t copy what the video was doing.

So that’s what I came up with. The important thing to note to make the shape believable is that fish are, essentially, cylinders. When drawing cylinders, you always need shade on both edges of the cylinder, and an off-centre highlight. If anyone’s interested, I’ll do a post on how I constructed the fish body in much more detail.

Hands and Skulls

Hands are hard to draw, but they’re an important part of a common subject, so you have to do it sooner or later. I’m terrible at forgetting to practise them, so here’s a quick outline from the memory.

Also very interesting is drawing the paws and feet of other mammals and birds. Count the bones and joints, and you’ll see for yourself the amazing similarities between us and them.

Also:

I dunno what it is about skulls, but for me and a lot of other artists, they’re a go-to subject for all kinds of drawing, and especially when we’re experimenting. I don’t think it’s anything special about skulls per se, but that it’s memetic in artistic circles to use skulls as a subject.

Music and words

Like many people, I like music. I like a lot of different things – one of those things are American Country and Western like Tex Beneke . Like many people, I play a lot of instruments, and I like stringed instruments and I like to play Scottish Traditional music.

One day I’d like to practise up the fiddle, (my mum’s a violinist who also does Scottish Traditional music, so I’ve got a leaning) and combine with a guitarist to make a fusion duo of American Country and Western, Bluegrass and Scottish Traditional music. I don’t know what we’d call it, but it would be something sad.

Some words occurred to me that I thought would be a magnificent song/album title:

Text reads :”I’d trade ten bottles of whisky for a heart of gold”