Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Albatross!

I'm going to dedicate this one to my dad, as he was so fond of the Monty Python skit with the albatross that he was prone to wandering around the house shouting "Albatross!" at random intervals. This one was done with the beloved brush pen and a couple of ink washes from a photo on the National Geographic web site.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Another Batch of Portraits. Consistency is For Chumps.

Here are three more recent entries from Julia Kay's Portrait Party (https://www.flickr.com/groups/portraitparty). I generally do these pretty quickly and use them as a way to play around with different materials. Pencil? Sure. Pen? You bet. Ink wash? Why not?

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Me Vs. Rubens

Rubens carries a lot of weight around our house, mainly because I am married to an art historian who has spent a sizable portion of her life studying his work. He also happens to be an immortal genius that anyone who has ever picked up a pencil should look at very closely. This was my attempt to copy one of his drawings, creatively entitled "Young Woman Holding a Tray." I should note that the right hand that seems to be fading off the side of the page was not, as usually happens, an artifact of me placing the drawing improperly on the page but was actually there in the original. It makes me feel a lot better to know that Rubens had some of the same problems with composition that I do.