Drawing Practice And Inktense Experimentation

To practice my drawing, I tried drawing my right hand (a classic drawing exercise).  Today was about contour drawing, looking at the subject more than the drawing and imagining drawing along all the edges of the shapes in the subject while letting my pencil move around on the paper.  And then doing the odd correction at the end.  You can’t really tell from the photo of the final result but things didn’t come out too badly.  I think I moved my hand a few times, which meant I had to make a few corrections.  The only think I’m not happy about is the ball of the thumb, which matched the subject in one pose but not in the pose that I ended up with.  In other words I should have corrected the ball of the thumb when my hand moved.

With the inktense pencils, my main planned experiment was to repeat yesterday’s methodology of applying lots of colours quite densely and to wet them by dabbing with wet kitchen paper before creating hard edges in a second coat.  Fuchsia worked out well yesterday as an edging colour, so I tried it again on all the left facing edges with apple green on all the right facing edges.  At the same time as adding the edges, I added more blue to the wrist and the ball of the thumb where at thought I needed to cool things down.  Then I pained over with a water brush and was shocked about what a mess I’d created.  One big lesson for this is that apple green is a very powerful colour and shouldn’t be let out without a lead.  You can see I’ve also overdone the blue and the red but that’s just poor execution on my part.  The initial dabbed colours weren’t too bad but they’ve all disappeared now.

One final experiment was to give the ink black a rare outing, today as a background colour.  I wet the pencil parks with damp kitchen roll and found it surprisingly easy to paint around the edges of the subject this way.  But I really don’t like the black background.  It just looks dirty in a charcoal way.  Putting this on a wall would make the whole house feel dirty.  Maybe I need to put in black much more thickly so it ends up as a jet black but I’m not sure I can really be bothered with that.

I’m starting to think that there are three dead men walking in this 24-colour inktense set: the black, the white and the liner (which seems to just be a pencil that’s hard to erase).  In which case I should be thinking about potential replacements at some point but that’s a job for another day.

Right, I’m going to put my feet up for the afternoon and read a book.