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...