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.

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”

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.

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:

Semi traditional Dragon Face in progress

Like I say to my dog quite often, “I always come back”.

Sometimes I leave you for a little while , but I always come back. So it is with blogging.

Today I am drawing the initial phases of a Pseudo-Japanese Traditional dragon, and I thought you might like to see what I’m up to as I do it, so the next few posts will be the process of doing the rough work.

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.

Skulltopus

So here’s what I did today while wrangling with my phone provider. It’s watercolour over a biro sketch, by the way.

ButterflEye

Lately I’ve been noticing a sad lack in my work of what I think of as ‘Dark Traditional’. So I decided to do something about that.

After the line work was done over the newly dried tinted paper, I used Indian Ink to wash in some gradated tones.

Then I added some vein-like structures on the wings to make them more interesting.

Finally I add ink droplets to the painting, which I’ve been looking forward to doing since I started to think about the image

Want to see more like this? Subscribe! I post original art step by step on an irregular but frequent basis.

Rose

4B pencil on acrylic paper. I think this one’s going to be in my portfolio. I’m happy with a lot of the initial line work

Further along the line.

Benu Bird

Waiting for an oil painting to dry enough that you can do more to it can be a long process, it seems. In the meantime, I’m posting excerpts from my various sketches and ink drawings, for the amusement of subscribers, mainly.