Hello and welcome to part two of my blog posts of the mountain drawing that I started last week to honor Bob Ross. Overall it is not too bad, but I am not overly happy with the final result. Now, I can’t say the drawing was a failure, because I believe if you look at it you can tell that the subject is of a mountain in the background, forest in the middle ground and a waterfall in the foreground. At least that is what I hope people see. Anyway, I am going to take this week and talk about what went right and what did not in this drawing. I find I learn as much from drawings that did not go well as I do from ones that I call a success. Let’s get started. Now, I think the main problem I ran into was not having a clear plan from the start. If you remember from last week’s blog, I ran into kind of a drawing block after completing the Barn Pencil Drawing for Deb Tucker. To get through that I just started drawing without a real goal in mind except to do something that resembled a Bob Ross p

  For this week’s blog, I am going to write about a drawing that is still in progress. Coming off vacation last week, I just seemed to run out of time to get it completed. Truth to be told, after finishing up the barn drawing, I could not figure out what I wanted to draw next. While still in the hotel in Raleigh NC, I literally sat and stared at a blank piece of paper for 30 to 40 minutes on Sunday morning. It like having writers’ block but for drawing.   Anyway, after a long while I decided to just start experimenting to see what would happen.   My inspirations came from a magazine. While I was in Raleigh NC, I had visited the local Barns and Nobel Book store looking for additional art reference books, (You can never have too many). Anyway, I was really disappointed on their selection of art references. However, I did find a magazine featuring the life of Bob Ross. Now I am a huge fan the “Joy of Painting” show and have watched it since it was originally on PBS back in the 80’s.   I

  Hello, I hope everyone is having a good week. Myself, I am on vacation from my real job as an IT Help Desk Manager and sitting in a hotel with my drawing supplies. Currently my wife Tina is attending a Studio I80 Design Tool conference in Raleigh North Carolina. I came along to get some quiet time to practice my drawing. The drawing I decided to work on is one I have done a couple of time in different versions. It is a drawing of a Quilt Barn using one of the quilting blocks used in one of the many quilt designs done by wife. The actual layout comes from a combination of references that I have utilized over the years. The left side comes from a pencil drawing by Mike Sibley, a British pencil artist. Mike Sibley has a teaching blog at https://sibleyfineart.com/ and I would recommend checking it out if you have not seen it. His work is stunning. For the barn reference I used a couple of drawing done by Diane Wright an American pencil artist. Her work can be seen at http://www.dianew

  I have heard from a lot of people over the years that they can’t draw or that they wish they could draw. In thinking about this, I wonder if they know how to write? I do not mean getting on a computer and typing a paragraph, but simply getting a pencil and paper and writing their name or any words. Could they always write or is this something that they learned by having a parent or teacher teach them? My point is that writing is something that is learned and taught. Then it is practiced over and over until muscle memory takes over and it can be done without conscious thought. If you think about it, basic drawing is the same thing. Writing is nothing more than a drawing that conveys a meaning or idea. Take any letter in the  alphabet. As you write them, you are creating a drawing in essence. You are making marks on paper that someone else recognizes. That is what drawing really is. So, I laugh to myself when people say they can’t draw when they have actually been doing it almost all