Clearly I Can't Keep Track of What Day It Is

 It is 4:42pm, and I have just now realized that it is Monday, and that I was supposed to write something here today.  Oh, well. This is pretty typical behavior now, and I suspect it isn't only me who has this issue in this particular year.

So, what did I do this past week?  Well, I drew another portrait of Aziraphale, and one of Crowley, from Good Omens, because, hey, why not?  

Above is a photo of my working area -- I have a white board on which I've taped the drawing-in-progress, and it has a magnet for holding the reference photo.  The photo is from a scene set in 1601, thus the Elizabethan ruff, which was ever so much fun to draw.  The ref photo is 8x10 inches but I decided to do the drawing smaller -- it came out 5 x 6 inches, and I also altered the expression to make him less perplexed and more wistful.  Or at least, that was my intent. Regardless, I love the result -- it's my favorite so far of all the portraits I've done.

Next, I did Crowley, using one of the promotional pics, which isn't ideal, but it's the only reference I've found that shows his wings really well.  And I liked drawing that golden decorative bit of architecture and the reddish orange background a lot.

One of the most irksome tasks, when doing a drawing, is taking a photograph of it when it's done.  Because it's never done!!  Here's what happens:  I think the drawing is finished, so I take a pic of it, upload it, and pop it into Photoshop to adjust the cropping and the brightness/contrast.  And in Photoshop, it always looks different from the original, and I always notice tiny flaws.  So I go back and fix the tiny flaws, take another photo, upload it, adjust the lighting etc., and notice another flaw...repeat ad infinitum.

Here are two examples, of drawings I did earlier this month -- these are screen shots of the photo storage Trash Bin, where all of the pics I uploaded and found flaws in wound up:

Each of the photos above (except for the last two) represents a "finished" drawing that I found a flaw in, which necessitated a fix.  There are 23 of them.  Which was 23 times I took a photo, uploaded it, fixed the flaw on the drawing...yadda yadda yadda...I believe that I sometimes spend more hours on these final details which no one else would likely notice than on the original art.

The one below wasn't quite as bad -- only 20 of the pics represent failed attempts.  I had a lot of trouble with one of Aziraphale's eyebrows.  Often, fixing the flaw means erasing a line that's about an eighth of an inch long, and redrawing it slightly higher or lower.  Maybe no one else would notice, but I would!

Anyway, just thought you might enjoy seeing what a crazed perfectionist I can be at times.  

Not all of my week was devoted to Good Omens -- I went on lots of dog walks in the sunny, mid-70s weather!

Here are a few pics from one of our favorite places, Leslie Groves Park, which runs along the Columbia River.

It has a section of sandy beach, which Pippin loves.

And there is plenty of grass for them to romp around in.

I also did several Zoom sketching sessions with my Seattle friends, where we look at photos that Tina has collected of all sorts of things, and choose one to practice on.  She has photos of pretty much anything and everything.  We did these starfish:

And this French street:

And a Japanese garden:

And that was it!

I hope to post on Monday morning next time.  Until then, have a great week!

Eight Days A Week

 The Air Quality Index (AQI) tells you when it's healthy to go outside.  For eight days last week, here in the Columbia Basin, which is called a "basin" because it's basically a big geological bowl into which air can settle (and under the right conditions--such as an inversion layer and no wind--stay put), the AQI was often off the scale.

This does not work well when the air in question is full of smoke from Pacific Northwest wildfires.

Here is what a normal sky over Richland looks like:

And this is what it looked like for eight solid days in a row this past week:

The AQI informed me every day that it was either "Very Unhealthy" or "Hazardous", both of which meant "DO NOT GO OUTSIDE."  There were no dog walks.  Except for one quick trip to the grocery store, there were no outings of any kind.  It was so bad that I put on my facemask with the special microparticle filter just to open the door to let the dogs run in and out to do their duty.

It was clearly a good week to draw chainmail.

Aziraphale, the angel character from Good Omens, turns up in medieval armor during a flashback scene (all the back to 537 AD...he's an angel.  He's immortal, and has been on Earth for quite a while).  Naturally, a fun historical costume called out to me as a drawing challenge.  Could I draw chainmail?  

Or at least, enough of a semblance of chainmail to make it look like medieval armor, more or less?

I'm not sure what I was thinking.  I mean, look at how complex it is!

And how much of it there is!  Not only that, his outfit has lots of shiny metal, and a feathery fur cloak.  

So it was a good thing that I had oodles and oodles of time, stuck indoors day after day after day, to work on this piece.  

Somewhere around the third day, I lost track of where I was in all that chainmail, and wound up having to just make it up as I went along.  By that time, I was slightly boggle-eyed anyway, and much of it became a little blurry around the edges.  

But hey, I drew nifty feathery fur, and the shiny metal turned out okay, and all in all, it was worth the effort.  And I'm sure my eyes will get back into normal focus any day now.

After that, I drew a picture of Crowley in about two hours.  It was quite relaxing.

Also, during one of our Zoom sketch sessions, I drew this Hornbill eye:

And then I spent the next 48 hours checking and rechecking the AQI for our area.  

At last, on Saturday morning, I awoke to clear blue skies!  The air was healthy again, so I tossed the Hounds in the car and off we went, hither and yon, on more than one walk, to make up for all that idle time.   (Yes, I did try to exercise during the Big Smoke -- I put on some rocking blues music and danced around the living room...and discovered how much my knees have changed since my twenties).

During one of our walks along the riverfront, I spotted a bunch of painted rocks.  The one above said "Mountains on My Mind" on the back.

This one was hiding on a kiosk:

Pippin was not impressed by the rocks...

Truman showed a distinct lack of interest as well....

During a half-mile or so stretch of the trail, I spotted all of these lovely rocks -- obviously, other people get creative when stuck indoors, too.  

Well, that was certainly a different kind of week.  

Hope you have a smoke-free week, wherever you are!

Some of the art isn't "Good Omens"...but most of it is. Plus, dragonfly!

 One morning this week when I went into the yard with the Hounds, I spotted this dragonfly just hanging on the utility pole:

It stayed very still for the ten minutes or that it took me to find the good camera and snap the pics.  Taking a wee nap, perhaps.  After the Lawn Guy turned up to mow, it flew off.

Otherwise, not much happened other than drawing.  We've had horrid air quality here for several days due to wildfire smoke blowing in from Oregon and California, trapped in an inversion layer.  The pollution index went into the "danger" zone (basically, don't go outside at all, even for healthy people) for a couple of days.  So I stayed inside and drew stuff!

Pretty much as I always do, except for dog walks.  The dogs did not get walked.

This window with a wisteria vine was one of our weekly Zoom sketch meeting practice pieces.  I added some colored pencil to it after drawing it in ink.

Here's another practice piece.  I overdid the details, but it was fun, and rather meditative to draw.

I did a little better on this one, which is ink pen and ink brush pen (I have a lot of brush pens in various shades of gray).  Delightful building.  No idea where/what it is -- Tina just finds these pictures on the Web and collects them for us.

But of course, you know by now that I also drew the main characters from Good Omens again, because they're attractive and I like them a whole lot, and there are several historical scenes with fun stuff in them to try depicting in colored pencils.  These scenes are excellent for learning how to use the pencils in various new and fun ways.

Here is a portrait of the angel, Aziraphale, before adding a dark background:

The reference photo came from a nighttime scene, and certainly this drawing needed a nice dark background to set off the portrait.  I experimented with several color combinations, and came up with Dark Indigo and Walnut Brown as a good dark mix.  I worked a LOT of those two colored pencils over the background, working in one direction for the first color, and then laying the second on top in a different direction, which helps blend the two.  Then I added solvent to blend even more, and then added more color, and more solvent, until it got nighttime dark.  Looks quite smooth, too. 

That was hard work (lots of pressing the pencils hard into the paper), so next I took a little break by doing a quick and fairly easy drawing that is just a copy of one of the show's promo posters.  The fun challenge for this piece was the sky -- I had not tried clouds before.  I used two blue shades plus ivory for the clouds, and used a lot of solvent to blend them.  After that dried, I went back and added light blue/light gray to the inside of most clouds, and put more ivory and white into most of the blue areas, and then blended those using a burnishing tool (a colorless blending pencil).  Finally, I erased a few areas down to the white of the paper.  I like the results.

My biggest project of the week was a portrait of the demon Crowley from one of the historical scenes.  It's set in an ancient Roman tavern, with plenty of interesting objects, clothing, and textures to draw.

There was a little oil lamp with a flame:

He's wearing a silver wreath:

He has a pin in the form of a snake to hold the toga:

I love trying to draw details that are really small -- this eye is 1/4" across!  It's amazing what you can do with an extremely sharp pencil.

Here is the finished piece.  Another dark background, though not as dark as the nighttime one above.  For this one I used Walnut Brown with areas of lighter browns (mostly Burnt Umber and Raw Umber).  The cloak was a challenge with all the folds, and it was an odd color.  First (as you can see in the first pic above), I did a value study of the cloak using gray shades.  Then I used Mauve as the first layer, lightly, before adding Indigo and a dark gray on top, more heavily.  

I couldn't use the solvent to do as much blending as usual on this piece, as it requires ventilation, and I couldn't open the windows due to the smoke haze.  So this is blended mostly with simple pressure, and multiple layers, and the colorless blending pencil.

That was my favorite piece to work on this past week, and I'm pretty happy with it all in all.

So that's it from here.  They are saying the smoke will clear off today -- my fingers are duly crossed. Have a great week, and stay safe out there!

More of the Same

 Yes, I drew another Good Omens picture.  What can I say -- I'm a fan. The show's visuals are quite fun, and a lot different from drawing Yet Another Tree (which is what we often do in our group Zoom sketch get-togethers).  Not that there's anything wrong with trees, mind.  It's just sometimes I like to try something more challenging.

This past week's challenge was really dark values.  The reference photo comes from a scene in which Crowley tries to think of somewhere to go in order to escape the coming Apocalypse.  He holds a globe miraculously in midair, and looks rather unhappy as he realizes that no place on Earth will be safe.

I decided it might be easier to fill in all that background color if I put watercolor washes down first as a base layer before putting the colored pencil on top, and that was indeed a time-saver.  After laying down the watercolor, everywhere except the face, I tackled the portrait with pencils.

ABOVE is the face before adding solvent to blend the colored pencils, and BELOW is after adding solvent.

Then I worked colored pencil over the entire piece.  That blue-gray wall color required three different colors blended together.  Fairly successful, all in all.

The only other things I drew last week were...trees.

This doesn't look a lot like a tree, which is because it's a close-up of bark.  I found it very meditative to draw.

The other photo we chose to work from during our Zoom group sketch meetup was of a "Quiver Tree" from Africa, shot at a foreshortened angle.

Even though I am a bit tired of drawing trees, this one was really cool, and fun to draw.  

That's all from here.  Have a great week wherever you are!