Something that Ian Roberts (artist) wrote in one of his books was that you should expect to produce bad art. If you go to museums you can see some of the really bad to mediocre art of very famous painters because when you’re that famous people dig up everything you’ve ever done and ship it off to a museum, even if it’s something you would have left hidden in your garage forever. Having a success rate of 50%, or even 10% is still good!
Because I’m relatively new to this, and because I don’t expect anyone to ever read this blog, I’m sharing a lot of my ‘clearly learning how this works’ and ‘didn’t work’ art. Enjoy! I’m hoping I can look back at this in 3 years and see a clear improvement.
Meanwhile! I’ve been trying to sketch a little bit whenever I can and have been sharing the results as part of “Inktober”. There might be some sort of official rules about that but I’m doing what suits me. Usually this means an ink sketch with a bit of watercolor over it or more of my grayscale sketches. None of these took more than an hour or so.
To be fair: none of these are my total failures. I’m not sharing the times I made big mistakes or I got halfway through and realize that I couldn’t tell what I’d drawn and it looked like some abstract design when it wasn’t. If you look back at images I posted of entire sketchbook pages you can see some.
Watercolors are all on a 5.5×8.5 Canson mixed media pad with a micron pen sketch. Grayscale are Micron pen, blick marker, and Sakura white gel pens on Strathmore toned gray sketch paper. Nothing is bigger than 5 or 6 inches in any dimension.
