A friend and I recently decided to do an art swap. She makes beautiful crochet blankets and she said she would make one for me in in exchange for a painting of tulips. Good deal! She likes red ones, so I bought a bouquet of red tulips and took several reference photos for her painting (which I'm doing in watercolor).
I had two other commissions I was working on though, before I was able to start her painting. By the time they were finished, the red tulips had died, but I really had wanted to practice some more drawing straight from life, so I bought another bouquet of multicolored tulips for sketching (and decorative purposes, of course!).
Here are my life drawings of tulips.
I just bought myself a little Moleskine watercolor journal and I was so excited to start painting in it. This is my first entry.
Quick pen and ink sketches. This sketch and the one below were both done in my 5"x7" sketchbook.
Getting detailed in pencil.
The tulips were starting to wilt and die, and I always find drawing wilting flowers a good exercise. This one is a bit larger, done in my 9"x12" sketchbook.
These ones were really falling apart! 9"x12".
I just finished my latest self portrait, what I call a random experiment in drawing completely from life. I sat and stared at myself in a mirror, sometimes a large full length one, sometimes using my little handheld mirror, and drew. This is the first project I've ever done completely from life, aside from some small studies of fruit and veggies.
This is called "Self Portrait with Dragon". The dragon is a little plush toy I've been wanting to draw for a while because it's so friggen' cute ;) My hair isn't really that color, but I kind of wish it was! My facial expression is very serious, and that's about the only real problem I have with the finished product. I wanted to be smiling a little without looking too much like I'm posing for a picture but I kind of got the opposite result. Oh well. For this I used pencil, colored pencil, micron pens, acrylic pearlescent ink and silver ink pen.
I've done two other self portraits previously. Every now and then I get the urge to draw the figure, and what better figure to use than yourself? Rembrandt did it all the time! So much easier than bribing friends or family into posing for you and trying to get them to stay still and stop whining "are you done yet"? ;) I've always used photos though, and it's much easier. But I really felt I needed to challenge myself with the new one by not only drawing the figure and face (my weakest subject matter) but doing it from life instead of a photo.
Anyway, here are my other two previous portraits done from photos to compare.
This one I did two years ago using only Caran D'Ache watercolor crayons. (And a pencil obviously to sketch the outline).
This one I've posted on here before, I just did it this winter. I only did this one for the hair. I came across this picture my boyfriend took of me and thought my hair looked like a lot of fun to draw. So this is more of a portrait of my hair ;)
