08/16/07 - Life Drawing

Here are two, 30-minute pose ink drawings from the Thursday night open life drawing session at UK. These were drawn direct (without a pencil sketch) onto a 14 x 17" Borders and Riley Bleedproof Board (a cheap alternative to Bristol) with a Series Seven #2 and Koh-I-Noor Universal Ink. I have been drawing with the comics inking tools for several weeks now in Thursday night sessions and I believe I am seeing some improvement.

James Montgomery Flagg's (see links in right sidebar: Illustrators) style is an inspiration for my rendering - it is amazing how he could develop skin tones with such ease and economy of line hatching.

PS: I was pretty proud of this drawing until I put it up next to the Flagg! Boy, do I have a lot to learn!! And, boy, was he ever good!

08/12/07 - Sketchbook - Animals for Clara to Color

Last Sunday I started doing some animal sketches from Jack Hamm's How to Draw Animals book and the Famous Artists equivalent. The first few were pretty shaky but I started getting into it and then went on to draw this gorilla in ink directly (no pencil sketch) from a Cincinatti Zoo flier. The colors are by Clara. She likes to cut each animal out before painting them with watercolors. Except where noted these were drawn over a pencil sketch with Micron Brush pen and Staedtler Pigment Liners.

This was fun and followed our trip to Lousiville zoo a couple of weeks ago (may later post those very rough sketches drawn from life in the heat...had to wipe the sweat from the pages!). I need to spend more time learning about and drawing our fellow creatures here on earth.