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...

  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.di...

  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 a...