I spent alot of time this week on WetCanvas.com, gleaning everything I could about how people paint. Meanwhile, I kept up with my sketchbook pretty well. HOWEVER, I now sit here and wonder what I was thinking. I mean, sketching daily is all well and good, but POSTING them for the world to see? I will not necessarily have much worthwhile to show every week, but in the long run I think it will give me a great deal of satisfaction to see how I've grown. In the meantime though, I must reveal the less than ideal sketches.
This week's sketches were primarily realistic studies of various insects as prep for illustrating a web header for an environmental website. What sheer pleasure! Usually I jump right onto the computer first thing, but no more! My new approach is to sketch these studies, then turn to the illustration with enough background to work loosely from memory, to keep the illustration fluid and somewhat naive. Of course, this is just a theory, time will tell if it really works like that!
So, lately I've been feeling unsatisfied with making computer illustrations. That's part of what prompted me to start a daily sketch journal. Yesterday I make a quick and dirty little pencil sketch from a Googled photo, and it gave me so much more happiness than any of the computer illustrations which I've lovingly spent so much more time and energy on. There is something so immediate, so personal, about drawing something with your own hand, applying pressure for a darker stroke, using a light touch to shade, feeling the tooth of the paper under the pencil tip. I just love this simple, unfinished little drawing!
Greetings, and welcome to my daily sketchbook. The title is a little misleading as, though I will be sketching daily, I'll only be posting my favorite sketches of the week here, so the updates will be weekly rather than daily. Nevertheless, this blog should help keep me accountable in my quest for daily sketching.
