Aside from getting KraftyCats back online, that is!
Since my final exams in May/June, I’ve had some free time to play with, and since I couldn’t post here until I got it back online, I found myself at something of a loss.
I could read more books. But since I unwittingly got into the local newspaper in June for being the most prolific user of the college library, at apparently over 100 books taken out in a school year, I figured my brain wouldn’t rot if I didn’t read two novels a day. Did this stop me from taking up philosophy in my spare time? No, no it didn’t. I decided I at least wanted a rough overview of the main philospohical ideas more on a whim than anything, and began listening to Michael Sugrue lectures after working my way though Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly and a book on the philosophy of religion. I’ve almost finished Kierkegaard and understood a lot more than I thought I would, but Spinoza evades me and I’m not more than a sixth of the way in. That one will take some work to understand even a quarter of!
That doesn’t mean I’ve been bookworming the whole time though. I used to spend hours drawing and creating art (if it’s good enough to be considered such) with all kinds of mediums, but not so much for the past few years. As a result, I decided to take art back up again in my free time and start drawing practice sessions. I bought some decent sketching pencils, Faber-Castell 9000 Jumbo graphite, cheap charcoals and Faber-Castell soft pastels, then got to finding tutorials on YouTube.
I settled on one by Nina Blangstrup – her tutorials are beautifully clear and while my eye isn’t perfect, I’m very happy with it
I can never get those eyelashes just right…
After sketching a second eye, also in graphite but this time with the addition of a black Faber-Castell pencil for the eyelashes as instructed, I decided to draw the ‘frame’ of the eye then complete it in watercolour. I usually can’t draw or paint things directly from my head without a reference, so I’m surprised it turned out looking okay!
I want to gradually work my way up to drawing whole faces through drawing practice, so I’m essentially learning portraiture feature by feature. My ultimate goal is to be able to work from real life references and images I have in my head, rather than finding someone else’s art and imitating that. There’s nothing wrong with copying as long as you credit the original sketcher, but I’d like to be more versatile than a human photocopier!
So, in summary, my holiday has consisted of learning new things, and I’m hoping to keep up the drawing and maybe share some of it here, as well as posting some art supply reviews. Comment below if there’s anything you’d particularly like to see!
