Pop Goes the Artist!

I got back from the beach earlier this evening, both happy to be home and very, very disappointed that the week was over. But! Miracles of miracles, I actually fulfilled my resolution to sketch every day, completing about 12 sketches in six days. It helped that I never ended up sketching in public, something I don’t really enjoy, and that there were plenty of pretty and interesting things around to inspire me. This first sketch is of either a small tree or a large bush, growing next to the house next to us. I used Prismacolor markers, and despite my awkwardness with markers and deep frustration with trees and foliage, I like the way it turned out. (I am fascinated by trees, visually, but they–and their accompanying leafy greenness–are pretty much the bane of my artistic existence.) I don’t have very many colors of markers, either–maybe 10. Probably a five to ten minute sketch.

My feet, in lovely sanguine Pitt artist pens. I don’t like pen and ink for finished works, but I really enjoying sketching in pen. Perhaps the fact that I cannot possibly erase frees me up from worrying about perfection? I don’t know. But I like it, and the sanguine color is a nice warm alternative to black. As for the subject, I seem to draw my feet a lot–mostly because they’re always there and sometimes the only thing around to sketch. People at the beach tend to move around too much to sketch, but my feet don’t. It’s not a perfect drawing, but it’s all right. The bunchy lines around my ankle, by the way, are meant to be the anklets I was wearing.

Finally, a colored pencil sketch of the path onto the beach, as seen from my porch. I almost never use my colored pencils (and these are watercolor pencils, actually), but I brought them along on a whim, and I’m glad I did. I don’t think I’d have the patience or desire to complete a finished work in them, but they do make for lovely color sketches. In the case of this particular sketch, I decided to focus more on colors than on the textures of ocean, sand, grass, and sky. I’ll definitely have to spend more time playing with these colored pencils (and maybe someday buy myself some more colors) and next time I go out sketching, I’ll bring some heavier paper so that I can experiment more with the watercolor aspect of them.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Sketches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.