March ‘21 Check-in: Sketches & Studies
Edit: Reading this back a few days later and it was painfully rambling and word-heavy, so I’ve deleted a bunch of it. Still word-heavy but slightly less so.
March was an odd one! Lots of ups and downs - days where I was super motivated and excited to work, followed by days where I had no energy or focus at all.
Still, it felt like an improvement on the first two months of the year - some motivated days are better than none. I’m just happy to be feeling creative and excited to make art again, even if that creative energy is coming in bits and dribbles!
Recent sketchbook pages:
Stuff from observation - started to venture into colour and that shit is HARD. I’m probably gonna stick to Procreate for a little while with these; trying to mix the right colour with real paint sounds way too intimidating right now!
So - sidenote - one of my favourite YouTube channels is Our Painted Lives, which is the home of the incredible oil painter Nicolas Uribe. He has weekly themes and posts painting videos every single weekday - and not only is it a joy to watch him paint and be so open about his process on such a ridiculously regular basis, (and with ad-free videos!) but he has such a passion for painting and such a unique and interesting way of looking at art & painting and life in general, and listening to him express his thoughts is an absolute gift. I can’t recommend it enough.
Why am I mentioning this? Way back at the start of the channel, Nicolas posted three videos (One — Two — Three) showing an exercise where he splits the value range into 11 values (0-10), and then creates three paintings with very limited value ranges from different parts of that scale (so a very dark, a mid-range and a very light painting).
I’ve been wanting to give this a try since I saw the videos and I figured, why not now? And it was such a fun exercise! Definitely challenging, learnt lots. I only managed to get the first painting done - values 7-10 - but the next two are already drawn up and primed, ready to go & hopefully I can squeeze them out before I go back to work.
And to round off - some drapery studies and some master studies; first looking at composition in classical paintings (I included my notes on that if anyone was curious!) and then some messy lil sketches studying the way some of my favourite artists draw faces, to explore different ways faces can be stylised, how changing proportion and shape can affect character etc. Fun stuff.
Artists referenced in the image on the right. in (roughly) clockwise order: Lois Van Baarle, Charlie Bowater, Sam Hogg, Wylie Beckert.
All in all, a fairly decent month - it’s nice to see/feel progress, both artistically and just generally mentally to be honest. I think knowing that there’s a light at the end of the lockdown tunnel has helped a bunch with that too.
So this is probably the last chonky check-in post for a while. The lockdown rules are (very likely to be) easing in the UK on 12th April, so I’ll be returning to tattooing full time; and my time to create art that isn’t for clients is going to be very limited, so I’m expecting the next few month’s check-in posts to be a fair bit skinnier than these! But on the flip side, I’m gonna be making more posts about tattoos and tattoo design processes - it’s another huge reason I was so eager to have a place to post outside of a social media algorithm. I can share so much more when I’m not trying to shoe-horn it into fitting instagram’s/twitter’s particular format. So, lots to look forward to!
If you made it this far, thanks again for showing an interest, and I hope you have a wonderful April!