Drawing Classes

I did a portrait class at the weekends at Santa Monica College in West Los Angeles years ago, and it really helped me to see differently. As soon as you look at a subject as a series of shapes and tones rather that what it actually is, it helps you to become a better artist. I’d always struggled with faces before taking this class, but the instructor for this 8 week class was amazing.

Up until this point I’d been going to a weekly life drawing class, and I was ok on the bodies, but my sketches were all headless, and the ones that weren’t—well, they should have been, because the faces were scary. Hence my desire to learn how to draw faces.

I wish I’d kept up the habit up, because I’m completely out of practice with sketching now. I’ve been doing pen drawings during my travels (see: Sketching in your Travel Journal), and that’s really ignited my fire to get creative again.

Bob Marley Sketch

It was exciting to stumble across my old Bob Marley sketch, as it’s a reminder that I used to do portraits and some of them turned out ok!

I spent weeks working on a sketch of Bob Marley, that I copied from a calendar.

The Original Image

The Work in Progress

I vividly remember getting to this point and wanting to stop, because I was so happy with his eye that I didn’t want to mess the picture up and ruining the image.

What I loved about sketching project was the attempt to capture the expression in his eyes and draw a realistic hand. Eyes and hands are both really challenging. So I wanted to use the excuse of TBT (Throw Back Thursday) to post these images here, to remind me of the art I’ve done in the past, and to inspire the art I want to do in the future.

Bob Marley Eye

It’s not perfect, but it was the first realistic eye I’d sketch, and so I was really proud that it had life and expression in it.

Bob Marley Hand

Admittedly the hand is a little twisted, but I still love it, and I really loved the way I achieved realistic fingernails. They don’t look flat, they also have shape and life.

My finished Bob Marley sketch

So how come this Bob Marley has surfaced now?

iPhoto Libraries

I am in the process of moving my iPhoto libraries over to my new Photo libraries on my Mac, because Apple are no longer supporting iPhoto. To be honest, my whole photo management process is a bit of a mess. I have photos on different computers and hard drives, and I really should centralize them and migrate them all to iCloud, but it needs a serious amount of effort to sort it out, and even though we all have time on our hands right now, I just can’t face the challenge.

But during the process of migrating the libraries I haven’t accessed in a while, I came across an artwork library that contained photos of sketches I’d forgotten I’d taken and saved. I was really pleased to get reintroduced to Bob again after so many years.

I have so many art supplies at our home in Turkey, and if we were there I’d root around the boxes in the basement to find a sketch pad and charcoal, but because I’m marooned in the UK at the moment, the only option is to order supplies off Amazon and give sketching another go.

I really shouldn’t.

But when you get that creative itch … it has to be scratched.