Bio-organic part III

This is the finished image. I’ve worked in the shades and highlights, which took a while.

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And here's a detail shot.

Bio-Organic part II

Here’s some progress on Bio-Organic

And here’s more. As you can see, I’ve worked out where the masses and shades are going to be.

And here’s a detail shot of the foreground :

Bio-Organic

Today I’m going to work on this drawing:

It’s going to be a bio-organic piece in monochrome pencil (4B on Daler Rowney Simple Cartridge paper), and I’m going to take my slow, sweet time with it. One of my favourite things to do is to make light, barely-there marks, and build them up slowly and carefully into a picture that is barely planned beforehand.

Next try

So my attempt yesterday ended up like this:

I am greatly displeased with this. I’m putting it on the blog as an effort
towards artistic transparency – even basic works of art are often revised and redone completely. Also, I wanted to show that I don’t always just chuck ideas that aren’t working, I also try to finish ideas to see if I can learn something from the effort – in this case I learned a little more about using markers (better ventilation, also using like you’re cell shading).
Personally, a good 90% of my work is tests, experiments, half-baked ideas that I play with, revisions, reworking and totally starting again. I don’t think I am alone in this, judging from the similar sentiments I have heard from other artists. For me, a sketchbook is often a graveyard of dead and aborted ideas that never quite became something, as well as a hardcopy record of old spare parts of ideas that I can recycle. It’s why I don’t throw away used up sketchbooks – if I get stuck for ideas I can mine my offcuts and old parts for the germ of an idea, and rework it with my since-improved skills.
Anyway, this morning I am starting again, with a fresh page and some pencils – the old-fashioned way. Here’s what I have already: