Jamie's Sketchbook

Draw a stack of books is the exercise for drawing with volumes. Books and all those angles are a very challenging subject! Likely why I’ve only accomplished this assignment twice!

Since I chose D&D books two years ago, after I had just begun playing again. So I chose the same subject matter, only with the current campaign books I’m playing. This recording of life, and the sketches to reflect that make these pairings quite special. This is why I want to sketch and learn to sketch so much. To capture life in such special ways.

Learning tools like sketching using volumes to aid in tackling such hard subjects as stacks of books is why I keep at the classes. I am ever surprised that drawing really is such a skill that takes decades of practice to learn. People who are skilled at it make it look so easy and effortless!

I always seem to do much better with shapes as a drawing technique than any other method. A couple years ago I was shocked how nicely the sketch of the ruins turned out. So this year I decided to try the same technique on an old travel photo I took of Stonehenge back in 2000.

Loving how the blooms in the watercolor help add to the atmospheric nature of this sketch.

The paint is Daniel Smith Joseph Z’s Warm Grey. I had been testing grays a few days ago, and this paint was still in my palette, so I used it. I’m becoming obsessed with monochrome sketches, so I may be exploring that more in the future. What might this sketch look like in the toned Kuretake Gansai Tambi Sumi or Graphite or Blackish paints that I was swatching this weekend, for example?

I always love doing shapes. I swear I’m better at it than at drawing! I’ve only made it to this exercise in Foundations once before, so I’m doing pretty good this year!

In learning how to draw edges, this exercise is to draw three kitchen objects with a blind contour line, and a point to point drawing. Blind contour, continuous line drawings are always so much fun! They are always wildly distorted, but are so great for building that hand eye coordination!

I got a little experimental this year, decided to do the exercise with white lines on a dark painted background. That grey is Daniel Smith Joseph Z’s Warm Grey, and the white lines are done with Neocolor II.

The outdoor assignment for the materials lesson is to go out to a cafe and sketch with a couple different materials something on the table. The outdoor assignments always trip me up, because I don’t go out very often. Out of the four times I’ve done this exercise, I did go to a restaurant twice, and twice I sketched an item on my table at home. The objective is to see how sketching with different tools feels different, and it certainly does that!

I note that once again, I’m rather behind in class. January is always so rough! I remain determined to complete all exercises this time, however! Only a couple more exercises where I actually did them in previous years, though. Perhaps February is even more rough than January? Not this year!

I do love to test out my materials. This exercise, for lesson one of Foundations, is always so much fun. But it is also crazy time consuming! However, I find that no matter what, it always cheers me greatly whenever I play with colors and test materials. It really is a great way to learn about how the various pens, pencils, and paints perform. Seeing all these side by side gives me joy!

The third intro exercise is to practice thumbnails that explore composing a scene with different stories. This year I did the exercise using my own location, as opposed to the images provided in class.

The second intro exercise is to do a similarly colored set of items, and sketch them three ways–with edges, in shapes, and with volumes. Apparently sketching my glass and water bottle is my go to for this exercise!