Over the summer, I did one of the things many artists dream of. Being able to travel and see amazing sites, meet up with wonderful friends and combine that with enough time to focus on creating art, learning new things, experimenting at will.
One more thing to any fellow artists. Sometimes it is good to restrict yourself and limit your materials. Go back to basics and fine tune, experiment with a simple medium. That is what I did a lot of... graphite and charcoal portraits on basic sketch book paper.
It feels a little limiting initially, but it does focus you on a series of things and hones your skills. Even though some of the portraits I did are a bit off, I feel like doing a lot of them helped me deepen my skills and learn to better capture the essence so important to create portraits.
Here is my summer of focus.
Portraits in Graphite
I enjoyed doing graphite and I am really happy to have done these five over the course of a few days.
Portraits in Red Charcoal
These next ones, as the title says are all in red charcoal. The same goal, doing five portraits in this medium. Here they are:
Now, the true final bit of portraiture I did is a bit of a funny one... I didn't actually plan this one, but on one of our trips this selfie - yes, he did this himself - showed up on my phone camera. And who can resist trying to draw this...?
As I said, while I was initially feeling a bit hamstrung by my lack of options, I am very happy with these portraits and feel that they really pushed me to focus and got me to do a whole series. It ended up being a fun and productive summer.
And, there is more to come from my summer. I also did do a few water colors from our trip showing off some fun and diverse landscapes.
Christine
Comments