Day 199: I hope my readers will indulge me in these breaks from my customary subject matter. Believe me, drawing takes up only a very small portion of my pandemic routine, and most of my day is filled currently with spinning, weaving, quilting and (weather permitting) gardening. That said, I am trying to do at least one sketch per day as I try to find my style. The White-Crowned Sparrow shown above was first done in pencil, then inked before being coloured in with Prismacolor pencils. It was an experiment to see whether I preferrred the pencils to watercolours, and now I can't decide. Each medium has its advantages and disadvantages. I find I have more control over where the colour goes with pencils, but I prefer the way watercolours blend. Of course, watercolours sometimes blend when you don't mean them to, so that can also be a disadvantage to a novice watercolourist like me. Pencils, on the other hand, tend to accumulate more heavily on any textural bumps in the paper, but I understand this issue can be reduced by using a "blending stump." I don't happen to have one handy, but YouTube is full of videos on how to make your own. For this illustration, I used the basic sketching instructions (circles, ovals and lines) in "Laws Guide to Drawing Birds" and changed it up a bit to individualize the "racing-stripe" sparrow by altering the position of the legs and feet and adding a branch.
No comments:
Post a Comment