Good Enough is Enough

It was about 2/3 of the way through sketchbook #3 that I really feel like I found my rhythm.


1. alcohol markers and colored pencil: "Donna Noble" Doctor Who


2. Pilot pen: (sketchbook #3 kinda doubled as a journal)


3. Pilot pen painted with water: I had just discovered this technique and instantly fell in love with it. (Frustratingly, this doesn't really work on the paper in my current journal.) I also rekindled my childhood love of secret codes ... which in the intervening years I had lost the key to so I had to decode this from scratch and, oy, not only is this written in German (a language I do not speak beyond a handful of Duolingo lessons), I misspelled at least one word.


4. Pilot pen painted with water: Also in German, also with at least one misspelling and probably not grammatical. (The only thing that helped me decode either of these was knowing that two of the words on this page were "David Tennant".)


5. Pilot pen painted with water: I helpfully gave myself the code on this one (the arrows in the corners). ("New code today ... Sam.")


6. Pilot pen painted with water: This is not the worst drawing of Jensen Ackles I have done (I thought better about uploading another one that's actually worse) but, man, it's not good.


7. (probably started with a Pilot pen) alcohol markers: I regret some of the color choices here, but I didn't own the right shades of markers (I was hoping for a paler green and a bolder purple), but overall, I'm fond of this one.


8. Pilot pen painted with water + alcohol markers: Whimsical drawings make the whiny journal entries less obnoxious.


9. Pilot pen painted with water + alcohol markers: This was not worth the effort of deciphering. It says "MMXIX October VIII. I am tired and lonely and sad. Where is my joy?"

As a follow-up to these 2019 Captain America drawings that I wasn't happy with (sketchbook #3), I did a couple of re-draws.



I like how the cross-hatching looked for the red stripes, but then I got it into my head to due stippling for the blue...and then was too lazy to fill it in enough, and I didn't like that first version well enough to bother coloring it. The proportions just weren't cute enough. So then I did the second smaller one. I'm mostly pleased by this one, though there is still a voice in my head going, "Not cute enough! You can make him cuter!" so I may or may not try another version.

More from sketchbook #3 (2018).

1 2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

10

Alcohol markers were still a new thing for me in this sketchbook so there's still a lot of experimentation. This was the first time it occurred to me to layer colored pencil on top of marker (I think I was inspired by the "Wood carving" tutorial that used that effect to get a marker drawing to look like wood grain).

Art spam!

This is just a fraction of the drawings in sketchbook #3, so more art spam will follow in the coming days.


This was a hardbound Blick sketchbook, 8.5x11 inch, 65 lb (98 gsm) paper, 110 sheets.

01 02 03
04 05 06
07 08 09
10 11 12
13 14 15
16

( random thoughts )

masterlist of all my sketchbooks

I forgot to include this one in my sketchbook #2 post.

This was for a character-creation challenge with the prompt "Queen of Magma".



I really liked how this turned out but when I took a picture of it, it just didn't seem dark enough to convey what I was going for, so I darkened it digitally and enhanced the magma in the eye.

Expect more of these in the coming days. Sorry, if you followed my old personal journal, there is literally nothing new here, I'm just consolidating things in one place.

( art spam: sketchbook #1 )

masterlist of all of my sketchbooks

This is my roommate's cat expressing her opinion of my sketching.



The Drawesome Prompt this month was "Draw What You See" and I had to cheat and give up and take a photograph of my still life of junk and finish sketching it in my room. (After the walking-on-sketchbook and sitting-on-sketchbook, there was an active attempt to eat my pencil which is when I gave up.) I did do all the initial sketching and outline in person at least.



I was really excited about this prompt and had fantasies of doing a daily drawing this month. Drawing what's in front of you seems perfect for that sort of thing.

However, as usual, I put it off and put it off until suddenly it was the end of the month and I hadn't done a thing so I sketched this out quickly.

I did a pencil test up in the corner comparing a Faber-Castell Pitt Graphite Matt #14B with a simple Blick #6B and I don't see that the "14" is darker as such, but the matt pencil definitely is less shiny than the standard one. (I also started to do this with a blue colored pencil and quickly abandoned that idea due to the lack of contrast.)

This still feels a bit unfinished, but I'm giving up on it. Everything is all out of proportion and wrong and so I'm not motivated to make it pretty.

I really do need to spend a whole month practicing drawing from real life. It's so much harder than drawing from a photograph or imagination.

I haven't really started sketchbook #15. This is just the inside of the front cover and a swatch page on the last page.



The Crayola markers look pretty crappy on this paper. (I mean it's also the markers because they're just Crayola children's markers, but they aren't quite as bad on other paper.)

I'm actually very happy about this sketchbook. Look how big it is! And it was only $10 at Target. The paper quality doesn't even look bad, I'll just have to remember to limit it to pencil and ink. I'm declaring this the new junk sketchbook and I'm looking forward to using it. (#10 is the current junk sketchbook and it has five pages left to fill up.)

"Junk" sketchbooks are those sketchbooks that don't have to be pretty or polished and I give myself permission to fill up with unoriginal copies of art tutorials, etc. It's always nice to have at least one crap sketchbook in process.

Anyway, current sketchbooks in process:


This is possibly too many sketchbooks to have in-process at one time, but, as I said, I've almost filled up #10 (the spiral-bound one with spirals scribbled on the cover).

Pictured above
• sketchbook 10 (Blick, spiral-bound, hardcover), not that great for water-based media or colored pencil, but good for pencil and ink
  
• sketchbook 12 (Talens Art Creations), small hardcover (the little blue one in the picture). This is my travel sketchbook and it's one of my favorites.
  
• sketchbook 13 (Strathmore, spiral-bound, softcover), designed for colored pencils, it's thicker paper and seems to work okay for watercolors too.
  
• sketchbook 14 (Crescent Rendr, softcover), works great with marker, even Sharpie doesn't bleed through the pages, but I hate the floppy soft binding and it's bound so tight, it's hard to hold open to draw.
  
• sketchbook 15 (Mondo Llama, hardcover), will probably be best for just pencil and ink (but let's be honest all of my sketchbooks end up being mixed media anyway).
  

(I did not skip #11. That was a small sketchbook that I filled up ages ago.)

And I have no less than THREE blank sketchbooks just waiting for me to finish filling up more of the above.

So ... like ... I'm fully aware that neither of these is good, but I'm weirdly pleased with them. I should not love crappy art supplies this much. I was gifted a super expensive boxed set of colored pencils for Christmas and I've only done a handful of things with them, so they're just sitting on the shelf while I play with my Posca pens and scented Mr. Sketch markers. (There are three shades of yellow--pineapple, banana, and buttered popcorn--and it amuses me to no end.) If I hadn't been so lazy, I could have also dug out my crayola markers as they have a few shades slightly closer to flesh tone than yellow, but then I might have felt more obligated to go with realistic colors all the way around and I kind of like how Mona Lisa turned out in hot pink (raspberry, I think).