My lofty goal today was to spend 8 hours on art. I didn’t spend a total of 8 hours doing art but between the videos, reading and drawing I think I may have done around 8 hours worth. Great news is that I spent a total of 4 hours drawing today, this is huge for me! Weeks ago it was difficult for me to get through half an hour of work, now I’m super motivated and feel like there is not enough time in the day.
I working through the very basics of the Watts Atelier online courses and learning a lot. I have to constantly remind myself that these seemingly simple projects can still be very challenging and I can always learn something. “The true wise man knows that he knows nothing”, not sure where that quote is from but it is very poignant here.
Warmup, this is a procedure that I”m going to follow every time I begin to draw or paint. Just like warming up before working out, I’m going to get my hand and arm ready before I start. First is ovals, and my oval flower. The goal is to make clean ovals in a flower formation which forces me to switch hand and arm position to get the movement correct. Then I repeat the ovals inside the flower pedals to work on accuracy and dexterity.
Here I’m warming up with clean lines. The goal is to start at a particular point and end at a particular point. Then go over the same line and trying to match its shape almost exactly. Here I also do a flower of flowing lines to train my hand and arm to move fluidly in different directions.
Here I warm up with value scales. This is much harder than I thought, its very hard to get a nice transition of values on with the charcoal pencil and newsprint.
Next is drawing of basic shapes throughout the day. Here I’m working from print outs from the Watts Atelier.
I’m waiting for the smooth newsprint to come in the mail, plus more charcoal pencils. I’ve almost used up one pencil already! Unfortunately they won’t be here until Friday.
