Good Enough is Enough

The August drawesome prompt is a squiggle swap where you take someone else's squiggle and turn it into a drawing.

I used this squiggle by goss by tracing it into my sketchbook.
highlight of prompt squiggle(s):





It's a slight cheat by rotating the orientation of the squiggle (and in the case of the butterfly, mirroring it as well).

(There was also a bird in the bottom half of the drawing, but I didn't like how it came out so I cropped it out.)

I'm thinking of trying another one based on this squiggle because after struggling with the bird, I decided it could have made a cool fish instead.

Have I ranted about my "lay-flat" Crescent RendR sketchbook? (These first two photos are from April, but I don't think I've posted them before.)

This is the 3½" by 5½" size. (I've got a blank 8½" by 11" still on the shelf that I'm hoping won't be this bad.) This does not lay flat by any definition. I have to clamp it open with a binder clip just to take a picture. And obviously, I can't draw on the whole surface with a binder clip in the way so to draw on it, I'm awkwardly forcing the sketchbook open with my left hand while drawing with my right. I wouldn't even be that annoyed if the description of the product didn't have "lay flat" in the title.

(supplies: the only Copic markers I have are the flesh-tone set, the grays and colors are Blick markers)


I like the paper in the RendR sketchbooks (so far they have held up to the claim of being bleed-proof — I've even used alcohol markers in them without a hint of marker showing through on the reverse side), but the binding is driving me bonkers.

Does anyone have a favorite sketchbook? (I think my Tales Art Creations one is my favorite so far, except it's a bit small so I'm planning to size up the next time I make a purchase.)

At any rate, I'm still having fun with my brown ("caramel") Pilot pen. It gives such a fun sepia effect when I wash it out with water on a brush.

Latest frivolous purchase: "caramel" ink (Pilot pen).

Another impulse purchase. I couldn't pass up a box of crayons for only $1.25 even though I don't really like crayons.




I played with it for a bit longer...


And then remembered why I don't like crayons and got bored and switched over to ink. (I'll post that one separately in a moment.) Ink is just so much faster than either crayon or colored pencil. I still think it's super cool that there's a set of 24 different shades of skin tone, but ... I'm not sure I'll be doing that much with it just because I'm lazy.

I have a scribble-art entry that I'm really happy with. Original side-by-side with the ditigal cleaned-up version.

If I were better at photography, I might not need to do the digital clean-up (which I'm not 100% happy with because I feel detail got lost). Although this page also suffers from a little bit of marker bleed-through from the previous page. (If it looks a bit speckled and muddy at the top of the skull, that's why.)

Here's another candidate to post for two different drawesome prompts. I've got another skull in my other sketchbook though (post coming soon) and I can't decide which one I like better. And there's still plenty of time to make another attempt before the end of the month. (Skulls are a bit of an obsession because I never quite feel like I've got it right, but even when they come out wrong they still look kind of cool.)

And apples are just my classic "I can't think of what to draw" object.

I'm also in the process of cleaning up the tags in my old posts so that things will be a little more organized when I want to refer back to something else. (You can imagine how unhelpful it was when I was labeling everything "art" or "sketchbook 2022".)

These are all drawn from the same photo reference.



Still claiming this for drawesome's "scribble art" prompt, but can I claim double points for revisiting last month's "negative space" prompt? Scribble art and negative space go really well together.

The July prompt for drawesome is "Scribble Art" so you can expect a lot of posts from me this month. Scribbling is totally my thing.




Also, I just rediscovered a sketchbook I'd misplaced after only filling up a handful of pages and I'm in love with it. Why did I set this sketchbook aside? I'd sort of dismissed it as being too small and had only planned to use it as a "travel" sketchbook (except I'm terrible about putting things in my bag and forgetting I have them and never using them). Somehow I hadn't even noticed how this sketchbook opens up flat so I can draw across two pages effectively doubling the size of each page.

Yet another drawing for the "Fresh Eyes" practice from Love Life Drawing (which I will again co-opt and claim counts toward the "negative space" prompt for drawesome.)

Here's the photo of the paper model compared to the finished marker drawing.

I don't know why, but I'm enjoying messing around with the cheapest art supplies. I've got a handful of Copic markers and quite a few more Blick (basically Copic knock-offs) and I stress out about using up too much of the expensive ink. I do not stress out at all about ruining my Mr. Sketch markers. So even though they are objectively worse markers, I enjoy the process of using them more.



As you can see, it's very easy to knock the paper model out of alignment, so it's kind of a pain. If I planned to do this much longer, I'd think about gluing the pieces to a rougher cardstock (like I could even see the benefit of having them backed with rubber or felt or something else that didn't slide easily). However, I think the whole point of this practice is that when I've done a few (ten?) practice sessions, I'm supposed to just see the proportions in my head without messing with the fiddly bits anymore.

Anyway, I'm still on day "one" because I'm lazy and also I keep getting distracted wasting unnecessary time with digital edits.



As usual, I can never quite decide which of these is my favorite, but I'm kind of fond of...( this annoying blinking version that I'll hide behind a cut )

Perhaps for full "negative space" credit, I need to remove the skeletal frame.


I should probably mention that the original photograph that I was trying to reproduce was a normal human man stretching to the side. But I did something with the neck that made the shoulders look all hunched up and the bend in the torso is weird and what I ended up with just screamed "alien zombie" to me.

For all the time I spent playing around with digital edits, I'm still kind of fond of the plain original marker drawing.