Pen Sketch Giraffe

What if all you drew on the giraffe were its dark spots? I tried this and it was pretty cool. I stopped looking at the outline of the animal and just put the dots in the position they seemed to go. Not bad.

Pen Sketch Rocks

Cross hatching with the V7 pen was interesting; using the side of the point was almost like using a pencil. The only interesting element on the page of my travel guide prompter was a pile of rocks.

I decided to use a pen in these sketches to force myself to not think about erasing. When I draw with pencil, I tend to be very timid and tentative.

Pen Sketch Elephant

So I have to add these pics in some order.

I've been watching Alex with her sketchbook in her lap, busily sketching away while she sort of watches television. I decided to try this myself.

I used a V7 Precise pen from Pilot, and a AAA travel guide for prompts, vowing to take some element from each page for sketching.

A White Sketch

This morning, I was thumbing through a National Geographic and saw an ad that had a picture of a polar bear.

The Bogus unbleached drawing pad seemed to lend itself to attempting a sketch (it always does, but it also almost always disappoints me -- not enough "tooth" or roughness) so off I went with a very limited palette: white, cobalt blue, light gray, dark turquoise, cool dark brown, and a touch of black.

I started out with pastel pencils, which are fairly hard, and then shifted to soft pastels for the blue. For the first time, I used a foam make-up wedge to smooth the colors of the background... and hated the result.

Switching back to the pencils, I intensified the color of the foreground and background with crosshatching and no smoothing, and I liked the result much better. Hours later, i can see where I could have added a touch more blue on the bear's fur. 

And this is the other day's work, with a little bit of mistiness added.

The above mentioned foam makeup triangles did well for adding a touch of mist.

So many of these sketches are less than stellar, but I'm having a good time playing with them.