artist-stuff, lead and lazy-

Hum di da dum, la-li-lo. You know, im probably the laziest person on the earth. I really do need to get a life, right. And barely do I maintain my blog, shame on me! Im sorry, I should pay more attention to you guys!

Kind of a caricature thing going on here, the proportions are not in any way intended to be true to life. The important thing for me with this drawing was to incorporate some kind of emotion. Disgust maybe?

Today, dear boys and girls, I used a technique that is a little bit different from what im used to doing. I drew the base picture with a regular, traditional graphite pen (0.3mm HB mechanical, SHEESH 0.3mm HOW COOL IS THAT) and photographed that, slapped it into my PC, and drew over it digitally! Nothing fancy, just a few overlay layers for the colouring, and some extra stuff like adding highlights and just touching up the shading a bit.

Ive actually never tried this before, and that goes back to my initial statement about laziness. I prefer it all in one medium, no fiddling. Yes, 2 minutes of moving it over to the PC is way too much for me to handle on a regular basis. But it turned out nice, though. Sketching with traditional medium and a real pen is much easier than sketching with the drawing tablet. I cant tell why that is, I might just be more used to drawing on real paper. But who knows, maybe the tide will turn and ill get really good at sketching on the tablet down the line?

Anyhow, one thing that bothered me about this picture in particular was the skin tone. Man, I could just aswell be trying to... I dont even know, but this is like fucking rocket science! How can it be that hard, just getting the right colour for a face? I know a lot of digital artists use palettes, but Im not into that whole "download someone elses brushes/palette--> win"-mentality which surrounds digital painting, Photoshop in particular. If ill ever make use of a palette, I sure hope its a palette I composed on my own.



Myeah. I figured id make a more art-specific entry for today. I was supposed to make a second continuation on centrifugal force and the like, but ill just have to do that some other time...


Oh yeah, 0.3mm mechanical graphite pencil. Erh, no, thats not a lead pencil, btw. Lead is toxic, and not suitable for use in pencils. Its a common misconception, in swedish we say we theres "Bly" in our pencils, but im afraid thats not entirely correct... Its a sort of carbon, not lead.

Anyways, one thing I remember from when I applied for the art programme at Vasa Övningsskola is how everyone used some shitty 4b wooden pencils provided to us when we were doing our entry-exams-things-pass-juju. This meant everyone made smeary drawings. The graphite was all over the place for some of the applicants. Its like some people didnt sharpen their pens even once in those 2 hours we drew. I scrapped the  miserable excuse for an artists tool early on, and used my own mechanical 0.5mm pen instead. While favoring mechanical pens over traditional wooden pencils for drawing might seem an add choice, it was the pen I was best used to, and I knew exactly what to expect from it. No smeary edges, no blurry drawing, and my drawing turned out relatively cool, all things considered.

My point here is; You need to not only use soft edges, but also hard edges. Neither can be neglected. Many seem to have the belief that a painting consisting of thousands of gradiented shadings and not a single sharp line nor contour is a realistic painting. Well, its not. The real world around us consists of more lines than youd think. One thing that I believe is key to learning how to be a great artist is learning when to use hard and soft edges. You can go alot deeper with this subject than youd think, and there are many great tutorials and podcasts about this stuff that I can recommend you watch, if youre interested in art.



So yeah, another days work and a big block of text. Oh, and a jolly good day I wish you.