Animal sketches and nature

 Gum Ball, Horse and Rooster Page pen and ink

Horse and Goat line drawings, pen on paper

Pigma micron pens and a small Pentalic wirebound journal in hand, yesterday I got in some good drawings. The first 3 1/2" x 5" page has a Gum Ball - seed head from a sweet gum tree - drawn carefully in pen and ink with stark black shading for its shadowed half. It looked really interesting. Same page I sketched a horse from a small plastic model Sascha lent me and a rooster from my own photo. The rooster's fairly detailed and recognizable, he's the sweet tame one who's not good for breeding because he's an odd mix instead of a pure Lavender Marin. 

Unfortunately, roosters can't be neutered without an operation harder than spaying a female cat, vets just can't do it with how they're built. So he's probably for the pot since he shouldn't breed. Sad really.

Second sketch page has a horse from life just in a clean contour drawing above a La Mancha goat buck also in contour drawing. I could paint either with any color or markings I wanted but kept those drawings simple. I'm still familiarizing myself with their anatomy. 

As I go out on horse shoeing trips with my daughter Kitten, I'll be doing more horse gestures and other farm animals. This is fun. Got a cool photo of our own goat Kara, the pretty horned one. She's black with pale gray-white ears and a slightly crooked horn, all the other goats are dehorned so I'll be basing goat horns mostly on Kara's. She's a different breed from the others too but I don't remember off hand, will post when I ask again since I forgot. Heh, fibro fog zaps my memory on too many things but the body proportions of the farm creatures are starting to become familiar!

Sketches of Ari Cat and Tree Scene

Eleven Dots 1

Abstract Art Exercise in red and black pen on paper.

Yesterday I caught up for the day before by doing an abstract art exercise from an ebook I downloaded. It looked fun and came out surprisingly well, though completing it needed repeating it in a second color. Fun to just get creative without worrying about what it is.

Eleven Dots 2

Tombow pen on sketch paper

Did the exercise again this time playing differently with the line and forms created by the line. Resulted in a completely different abstract pattern that also worked. It surprised me how well this works as a starting point, doing it twice generated such completely different results.

Then I sketched my cat from life but didn't snap a photo or post it anywhere, was sort of doing ahead for today in case I was tired. Today I finished that page with another tree demo - this time a contour drawing to show more clearly that trees thicken toward the base and narrow toward the tips, always branching smaller and smaller without bulges. Unless the tree has a tumor like an oak gall or something, but those have a particular look and aren't an upside down gradual swelling. I threw in a couple of landscape elements and more roots this time because the same principle applies to tree roots except sometimes they dive into the ground and come up again. Played with very obvious perspective diminishing cloud sizes as they moved toward the horizon and dong the waves by the sea very small to show how high the crag the tree's on is.

Worked rater well, I think. Might rearrange it a little but it's a cool design. I'm starting to just make things up and I like that.

Tree Scene and Ari Cat Page

Tombow pen on 8 1/2" x 11" sketch paper.