Alright, here we are! Week I-Wish-I-Knew-But-I’ve-Lost-All-Understanding-Of-Time!
It’s almost the end of Inktober, which honestly is a bit of a relief. My lovely perfectionist tendencies have me spending a frankly disgusting amount of time on each of these little doodles. And, despite the fact that they take up an unreasonable amount of my time, I have benefitted from the practice.
My sketches are more accurate now than when I started. It has, I admit, been a while since I’ve spent a lot of time working on prospective, and some of these projects (Stretch and through your window, specifically) have given me some time to practice angles I am not used to or haven’t used in a long time. Foreshortening, I admit, has never been one of my strong suits, but I did get to spend a few hours practicing on witchy figures.
My most recent project has been a series of ink and watercolor architecture sketches. I call them sketches because I don’t do much correcting or even an outline when I go into it. Mostly, when I’m doing these sketches, they are done in one of my smaller notebooks between my (few and far between) in-person classes. I’ve found that painting from life, something I haven’t done outside of simple anatomy studies since COVID started, really helps me get out of my head more.
I know this is kind of unexpected, everyone else that I’ve talked to, at least in my old art classes, has found drawing from life to be more accurate sure, but much more difficult and with greater stakes. Now for me, I get way too stressed out drawing alone in my room. Right now, this definitely is being affected by the whole social isolation thing, but even before this, I have always found it nicer to be outside, both among and withdrawn (get it?) from other people while I sketch whatever exists in front of me. Now these drawings in particular, while more fun to do than some of the other projects are getting a little harder to complete. I’ve drawn all the pretty buildings that I come across daily (The Millennium science building, almost all of West, Old Main, Ihlseng cottage, and the Pattee Library) and now I’m kind of running out of places to draw. There’s a lot of Brutalist Architecture along my daily path through the labs and quite honestly, it’s a little depressing. Do you know of any particularly nice buildings on Campus?
Next week sees multiple birthdays so my watercolor exploration will be temporarily on pause, or simply sidetracked, while I attempt to draw some cartoon frogs and, strangely, a rainbow of Warios. (for the record, these were direct requests, I did not assume that either of my friends would want these, but apparently, you really don’t know as much about people as you think you do.)
Drawing the buildings from the campus is such a cool idea! If you’re looking for more motivation, for one of my in person classes I walk past the Palmer Museum of Art. The actual building is so unique and pretty, and there are a couple cool statues near it too. It always makes my morning a little better passing by 🙂