Hello, for this week’s blog, I am going to share a drawing I just completed for my Father-In-Law, Pat. Around a month ago, he asked if I could do a drawing with an old truck in a field with a barn in the background. That is a drawing subject, I have always wanted to try, so I thought this would be a great time to do it and this is the result. For this drawing, I wanted to plan it out from beginning to end so I knew where I was going every step of the way. To start with, I jump on my computer and looked through images for references. I like to use a website called www.pixabay.com for researching drawing. This is a royalty free stock image page that has high resolution images of a very wide range of subjects. In searching, I located a photo of an old truck in the foreground, and I believe Mt Rainier in the background (not 100% sure). Over all I like the image as a reference, however there were some changes to the layout the I wanted to make for the drawing. To edit the image, I o...

Hello, last week’s I devoted my blog post to a charcoal drawing that I did of our dog Lucy. Just to be fair and so our other dog Anna would not be jealous, I am devoting this week’s blog to her. The charcoal drawing of Anna was done just after the one I did of Lucy. The goal of the two drawings were to practice and to get a get an idea on how to approach a drawing with both Anna and Lucy together. Hopefully, I will be working on that later this summer or next fall. In the meantime, I will give a short overview of the drawing of Anna. Like the drawing I did of Lucy, I started by taking several photos of Anna and then selected the pose that I liked best. The photos were taken all had a single light source. I bring this up because when doing a drawing from a reference photo, it is easier if there is only a single light source. A reference photo with multiple light sources or lighting either directly in front or behind the subject, makes it harder to get an  accurate  drawing. U...

  Hello and Happy 4 th of July for everyone in the United States. For this week’s blog, I am going to cover a drawing of my dog Lucy, that I did last winter. This one is one of my first attempts of using charcoal instead of graphite. Originally my goal was to try and mix charcoal and graphite, but I liked the look I was achieving with charcoal, so I just stayed with it. For each drawing, I like to start with a specific idea in mind for how I want the drawing to look. I also want to have a goal in mind on areas of my drawing skills I want to work on. For this drawing, I wanted to concentrate on rendering the fur and getting good contrast between the light and the dark areas.  I did not what to have to fight with the proportions as well. With this in mind, I started the drawing by transferring the basic outline instead of doing it free hand. Now many may think that is cheating or that it could take away from the finished work. Yes, even in the art community there is always ...