Wednesday, April 24, 2013

It's Manatee Time!

As most right-thinking people are well aware, it just isn't Wednesday without a manatee. In the interest of full disclosure, I should confess that I drew this last night, making this more of a Tuesday manatee and introducing the possibility that I've violated the space-time-manatee continuum. I apologize for any black holes that may appear as a result.

Sunday, April 21, 2013

A Self Portrait and a Lesson Learned About Vine Charcoal

I've been using a lot of vine charcoal lately. You can't get the deep, rich blacks that you get with compressed charcoal, but it's really malleable and fun to work with. So malleable, in fact, that if you don't hit it with fixative you can pretty much wipe away an entire drawing with your fingers or, if you're as clumsy as I am, you might drop your drawing and send it sliding, face-down, across your kitchen floor and wipe out the bottom half of the face in a self-portrait that you were pretty happy with. It's possible that this resulted in a few phrases being uttered that were not entirely appropriate for younger readers. Being the fully-grown adult that I am, I then proceeded to throw a tantrum and put the drawing in the closet for abut two weeks before I worked up the gumption to pull it out and re-draw the mouth and the neck. From here on out, I vow to keep the fixative close at hand when working with vine.