Fairies are what I am doing most it seems
This one is a bit scary.
I tried a nude its easy to see the errors once you post the picture haha
I am quite happy with this one however
All my drawing is done freehand. I may look at something, another picture or painting, a photo for an idea, but I draw without the use of anything else. When I took one watercolour class I was shocked to find some of the local artists (and good ones) trace or use a light box to project their chosen picture onto their paper. To me that seems like cheating. However, one person had a point......when doing a building, in order to get the proportions correct, one should use a light box. I have never yet done that. So these drawings that I show on this blog will unless I say otherwise me freehand.
We are our own worst critics :)
ReplyDeleteI especially like the last one too.
No worries about the comment thing.
Looks like I found one of your older posts :). I like these; the little one on the left looks like she has personality. About tracing: I know what you mean that it can seem like cheating. From where I'm at, however, I just consider it another tool at my disposal. The most important thing, when I'm working on an illustration, is to get things right and stop fudging. Even if I trace elements of a picture for basic proportion, it still takes a lot of work to integrate that into my painting. I often take reference photos of myself, for instance, but the book I'm working on has primarily male characters. The photo can be invaluable for getting one or two things to look how they need to, but if I'm adapting that to male proportions and integrating it into the value structure of an existing image, I don't think the amount of freehand work and artistic choice I'm making is diminished. The same is true if I've traced one small element of a complicated illustration, in which there many things coming together. Every time I "trace" something for an illustration, I spend a lot of time painting it while not looking at the source image at all, and the finished product always looks much, much different from the source photo. Also: if I use my own photographs, well, photography too is an art, so if I'm "copying" my own art... well that's just as good as starting from scratch, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteSorry for the rant. I used to feel similarly to you and think any tracing might be a form of cheating, but I've thought about it a lot as I've developed my working methods and artistic voice, and this is where I've arrived on the matter.