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I’ve uploaded a few new pictures to my sketchbook and of course I wanted to post them here on the blog because on a blog you can never have enough content.  I’ve always been a fan of doing more tonal rendering in my drawings even though it takes more time.  I just love the way it looks.  All those beautiful gray scale tones.

People labor on to no end about the beautiful world of color and there are plenty of those follows of black and white line work but the tone people seem to be a forgotten lot.  I would say that tone is more important than all of them.  Color is dependent on tone and really, when you get down to it, black and white line drawing are just shorthand for tone.  Tone is king I say.  King.

Here is the Domino commission I’m working on after the first painting session.  I’ve probably got 3-4 hours into the whole thing so far.  I’d probably be a lot faster if I wasn’t trying to watch “Weeds” season 4 on DVD at the same time I’m painting.  I have to apologize for the pictures.   They are photos taken in low light so they are not the best.  I can’t scan wet oil paint.  I’ll take some good ones of it presently as I have some daylight left.

I’ve been trying to get into the habit of sketching from life and reference instead of my head all the time.  Over the years I’ve gotten too caught up in drawing strictly from my imagination.  That’s not a bad thing in and of itself but I think doing that exclusively leads to stagnation and a bit of a lull in one’s artistic progress.  Without reference or life studies and putting in new visual information into your brain you start to draw, paint and produce the same things you’ve done before.   The above sketch is from an image I found online.

I’ve been really happy lately as I’ve taken a different approach to how I draw.  More mass drawing or drawing the silhouette instead of your normal building up the figure from stick figure to full figure.  I need to do a post on this as it’s something that’s really helped my work a great deal and has really freed up my approach to drawing, not to mention my speed.