I drew a fish!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mzdial/8429357116/

I drew some fish. Recently, I’ve been working on learning how to work tonally with pens. It has been as hard and frustrating as I remember learning any new technique is, drawing things over and over , things not coming out like I wanted. The thing is, it’s especially annoying since I thought that I already knew how to do this.

Now, however , I think I am getting somewhere.
More coming later, no doubt.

While this technique isn’t directly applicable to my ultimate goal of tattooing, I figure that all the work I do improves my basic artistic skill, which will eventually make me better overall. All experience becomes useful eventually.

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.

A gruesome thing

I don’t know what it is, and I don’t think it’s anything really. Just made a rough sketch and laid on some watercolours, decided to play with skin tones. I hope it intrigues you.

Winged quadruped

My commission drags on. Well, actually that’s a bit strong. I’m having fun with it, I’m enjoying using the medium, especially the texture of the oils. It’s like painting with butter. Dear jeebus, if you haven’t played with some oil paints yet, you really ought to give it a shot – yes there are practical issues, like the drying times and the smell. But seriously, they feel good – I use W&N Artisan water soluble oils, which some purists think are not ‘real’ oils, but I think such purists can go and fuck themselves. I don’t agree with purism at all – it’s just a thin justification for being a condescending prick.

Anyway, I thought that you all would appreciate another picture from my sketchbook so that everyone knows I’m not neglecting the blag. I was going for something a bit like a giraffe, feeling a bit like ripping off inspired by Greg ‘Craola’ Simkins and really just mucking about with pencil and watercolour. Funnily enough, when I posted an image of it on my Facebook page, a friend of a friend thought that it would be totally awesome to comment ‘it’s a giraffe without spots….’

Yes, I fucking know, I painted the fucking thing and I got distracted and the paper was getting beaten up before I got around the the fucking spots.

Fucking purists.

Waste no time

He’s a wee drawing I’ve been working slowly on amid many, many other personal projects, including but not limited to: learning how to make lattes, bathing the dog (still haven’t gotten around to it), making DIY decorations for my upcoming wedding, remembering to eat, learning how to make bread and pizza, working on my big commission, and working out.

I’ve been using biro on this sketch pad a lot more, since I got tired of friable media like pencil smudging on my page, and because, like every political and religious group, every now and then I like to get back to basics.

Tea demon

Today has been a quiet day; it’s a bank holiday in the UK and there’s not much doing. So I’ve had time to sit down, and when I sit down, I end up sketching.