Hello Everyone, It has been a long time since my last blog post. Last October was the last time I posted anything, and at that time, I was working on finishing up a portrait of my Grandma and Grandpa Dillard. Since that time, I have been doing some drawings and practicing some portrait techniques. However, most of my artistic endeavors have been devoted to practicing acrylic painting and I want to share what I have been working on over the last couple of months. I started this paining using the truck drawing that I did last summer. I really liked the look of that drawing and wanted to do it in a Fall Color Scheme. In preparing for the painting, I also decided to change the background to see if I could create a little more depth. I started the painting by priming a 16”x20” stretched canvas with a light tan coating of acrylic paint. Then using a white charcoal pencil, I sketch in the rough layout of what I wanted to paint. Once I had a basic layout, I started with the sky and...

  Wow how time flies by, we are now almost into the middle of October and Fall has arrived. When I started this portrait of my Grandma and Grandpa Dillard, it was the end of August. It has been a couple of weeks since I last posted on my progress, so I wanted to show where I am at and to give a brief recap of what I have done to get to this point. When I first started back in August, I began with a light outline. Once the outline was complete, I started adding the details of my Grandma’s facial features. Then working my way down the paper, I added the details of my Grandpa.   After I had the basics details complete, I started to refine and make corrections to the drawing. I have made a lot of progress over the last couple of weeks. The last time I posted, I was just starting to work on getting the clothing roughed in and still adjusting other areas. Now I have the clothing added and the details in and I will start the process of finishing the drawing. Moving forward, I nee...

  Hello, its hard to believe, but I am starting the fourth week working on the pencil portrait of my Grandma and Grandpa Dillard. I am now entering the finishing stages of the drawings. My objective moving forward will be to continue adjusting value of the lights and dark areas of the drawing to add a better sense of depth. Also, I want to ensure everything is even and does not look muddy. What I mean, is if an area that should be all one value and it actually is a mix of some lighter and darker values, it will look muddy. This can really be noticeable in the lighter areas of the portrait like the forehead, cheeks, and chin. One more thing that I want to work on is the gradients that go from dark to light to ensure I smooth transitions where I need them. Basically, I am looking at getting the details correct. This is a slow process, but I find it to be very relaxing. I want to give you a heads up that next week, I will be shifting gears a little. Tina and I are going to be taking...

Hello, it is hard to believe another week has gone by and we are almost halfway through September already. Fall is fast approaching, and I can’t wait for the cooler temperatures to come. With the change of seasons, I hope to have less lawn work to do and a little more time for drawing. Speaking of drawing, I am continuing the portrait of my Grandma and Grandpa Dillard. This week my focus has been on my Grandpa and getting the values established and correcting some areas that were off with my original outline. For my Grandpa, I started with an H Pencil and working from the top left began to build up the layers to get the skin tone. For the skin, I used mainly pencil, instead of relying on the blending stumps and makeup sponges to start. Then gently went back over the areas just to soften and blend the edges. When I did the skin for my Grandma, I think I relied too much on the blending stumps and sponges which almost makes it look blurry. I do not believe this will be a problem, becaus...

Hello and welcome to the start of the second week of my blog post series on drawing my Grandma and Grandpa Dillard. Last week I left off with the outline of the drawing being completed. This this week I have been concentrating on my Grandma. My first objective was to set the rang of values that I will be using and then build from there. This is a tip I have received watching several videos on drawings done by JB Hillberry. Anyway, for my Grandma, the darkest areas are the inside of her ear and the shadows from her glasses. The lightest areas are the highlights on her nose. At this time, I will be using a 6B pencil for the darkest values and the white of the paper for the lightest value. I began with a B pencil laying in the dark areas very softly. Then I transitioned to a 3B pencil, followed by a 6B pencil. In building the layers this way using light pressure, I can avoid some of the shine that is created when using graphite as a drawing media. The harder pencil leads, especially when ...

  Hello, last week I talked about accuracy in drawing and how I wanted to improve on that. To work on my accuracy, I am starting a portrait of my grandparents.  As I stated last week, I have always wanted to be able to draw portraits well and I will be devoting time to working on them. Because practice is the best way at improving on any task. Anyway, for the next several weeks I will be posting my progress on this portrait and the steps that I am taking to bring it to life. This portrait really started with a decision to do a drawing where I focus on every part of it from beginning to end. To be honest, many of my landscapes are only roughly planned and I will have only a general idea of the direction I want to go. Then there are normally several side routes I take along the way and I end up experimenting. For this drawing, I want to take what I have learned in the past and use that without experimenting too much. Sadly, my grandparents passed away many years ago so all I...

  Hello, over the last couple of months I have been blogging about several landscape pencil drawings I have finished and a high-level overview of how I completed them. I do a lot of landscape because I just love to draw them. Another reason that I like to draw landscapes is that they are actually very easy to do and make a great starting point for practicing and gaining confidence. This week I want to go a little different direction with my blog and talk about accuracy in drawing. I bring this up because there is another area of drawing that I would love to be able to do well and that is portrait drawing. However, to be good at portraits you must be able to draw accurately. Actually, it is more than that, you have to be able to accurately see, interpret what you see, and then correctly render that on paper. I have heard many artists say that portrait drawing is the hardest subject to master, and I would have to agree with them. Nevertheless, I also believe it to be one of the mos...

  Hello, for this week’s blog post, I decided to do a quick mountain scene with a waterfall to better demonstrate the technique that I have been using with the erasers. From start to finish the drawing only took a little over two hours. Which for me is very quick because many of the drawings I do will take me ten or more hours depending on the level detail. Anyway, I also filmed the drawing as it was progressing, and the video is attached to show exactly what I am doing. Sadly, I had an issue with my camera while I was filming the foreground rocks and water fall and I did not get that segment filmed. However, the technique I used was essentially the same as the background mountains. Because I wanted to do a quick drawing to film, I decided to do a vignette. A vignette is a type of drawing that fades out on one, two, three or all four corners of the paper. Meaning that the drawing does not cover the entire paper. This is often used to draw the view’s attention to the main focus of...

Hello, another week has gone by, and I wonder where the time has gone. This last week, my son Colton was home on leave from the Air Force. It was great to see him because with COVID-19 it has been around 20 months since the last time we were together. Anyway, while he was home, we were able to attend the replay of a wedding of a close family friend and get a camping trip in that included a visit to Gettysburg Pennsylvania. With all of that and returning to work on Thursday and Friday, I was surprised that I got this week’s drawing finished in time to get a blog post written. This week’s drawing is one I have planning for a little while. I love the ocean and the sounds of the waves crashing into the shore. There is raw power in the ocean that nothing on earth can match or stop. Then add a light house, which represents a beacon of hope and safety, and you get a balance between extremes. For this week’s drawing I wanted to show powerful waves crashing into the shore with a lighthouse ab...

Hello, last week, Tina and I were out camping at Cunningham Falls in Northern Maryland, and I had no internet service to post a blog. So I decided to give myself a week off. This week’s blog is a drawing that I did of a tree using erasers as the primary tool. The technique I used is very similar to what I did for the sky and mountain in the background of my last blog post. The reference I used was from a drawing named “Fairy Tree” by Kate Katarzyna-Kmiecik that I found on Deviant Art. Several years ago, I attempted to do a drawing similar by drawing the dark area using a negative space technique and did not get very far. I spent several hours trying to get the look and feel I wanted but was not happy with the result. After a while, I filed it as practice and moved on to other subjects. This time around, I decided to approach the drawing from a different direction. Instead of relying on pencils and blending stumps to get the darker values. I decided to use graphite power and a makeup ...

  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 ...

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...