Too Many Directions

One of the problems with being a (mostly) self taught artist, is that when you’re feeling inspired to work on your art, it’s all to easy to try to do too much at once. Now, it’s all good stuff to learn and it’s all stuff I’d be happy to know, but trying to do it all at once can make it difficult to make progress in any one skill. Guess where I am.

My normal practice is to - not every day but more often than not - sketch in my sketchbook. I normally use photos as reference for those sketches, but not always. And I do one to four sketches in a day. If I take a pencil sketch and add digital color, the color version usually ends up counting as a second sketch. But I haven’t been doing as much digital work recently as it’s too easy to stress the tendons in my drawing hand. (It would be easier if I put the iPad on a flat surface, but I tend to use it on my lap. Imay need to rethink that.)

I’ve been wanting to learn to paint instead of trying to draw with a brush. I made some progress with that during my most recent staycation, doing still life paintings in acrylic. I still have a small set of water miscible oils I want to play with, but I was getting enough out of the acrylics, that I decided the oils could wait a little longer.

But while I’m learning to paint, I’m also wanting to sharpen up my drawing skills, so I started working my way through the lessons on drawabox.com. The lessons look deceptively simple, but I’m finding them very useful and I understand why the site was recommended. It was also a nice excuse to buy some additional fine liner pens as all the lessons are done using them. They’re also the sorts of lessons I can work on whenever I have the time and inclination. I’ve even set aside one of my sketchbooks specifically for these exercises to better track any progress I make.

Then Aaron Blaise out a new video course on sale. (You can find his stuff at creatureartteacher.com.) Back at the beginning of the lockdown, I picked his videos on drawing wolves, coyotes, and foxes for a very low price and worked my way through them. This one is on birds of prey. Watching the wolves video and sketching along with it didn’t make me anything like an expert and I don’t draw very many wolves, but I did pick up some anatomy tips that apply to dogs. And I now know enough about the specific anatomy of the feet of four-toed birds (including chickens) to handle drawing most of them, or at leas their feet.

The good news is that if I start to feel overwhelmed, or like I’m not enjoying myself, I can slack off on any one or all of these. Or I can rotate in another medium, such as watercolor, gouache, or hard pastel. I may never be a master in any of these, but I won’t be bored, and I only have to please myself.