A Short Break From Painting

The last couple of weeks I've been doing graphite drawings. Having decided that I can probably learn more and develop my skills faster by practicing my drawing techniques. The struggle has gotten less with painting the portraits but I still spend enormous amounts of time going over and over areas that have not been drawn correctly in the first place. My hope is that by producing the drawing first I will be faster at the painting.

For a short while I was feeling under pressure to keep trying to produce a weekly quota of portrait paintings. A schedule, will be good to maintain though as I have less than a year to accomplish my numbers for my portrait show in November 2015. I have decided that I can also frame and display these drawings and they should be a nice addition to the show overall.

I've been also drawing still life setups of my collectables. These I've been doing to practice my measuring of proportions working from life. I have been learning some new techniques for both working with edges and for measuring. The techniques for drawing edges are a little different with pencils vs paint but it has me looking and deciding where and what edges need to be worked. For measuring I've been using a plumb bob and angles I have a long off knitting needle for angles and triangulation. Ellipses still challenge me and I'll be trying to sketch a few hundred in the next couple of weeks for practice. 

I sure love to learn new things as I move on the developing my skills to become a most excellent painter. The learning will never end I'm sure. As I find new things to challenge my skill level and new techniques to practice my hope is to share some of my perspective on what makes an above average picture so that you can see art differently and why you may find one you love and another not so much.

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