Drawing tigers

From time to time I like to watch tutorials “how to paint or draw” something. It gives me a base and more confidence to try new options. I also get a lot of inspiration from watching others doing great things.

A few years ago I joined DA community, where a huge number of people from all over the world exhibit their art and share their artistic experiences. Since life on social media is not a daily need for me, I am more or less a passive member there, happy with all the inspiration around.

I recently participated in a crazy crowd drawing of a tiger based on a tutorial posted by one of the DA artists. It was a great experience to see that when a thousand people do the same thing, it definitely doesn’t come out the same. And I believe there were more than a thousand. Digital or traditional, drawing or painting, in vibrant colors or black and white. Tigers of any kind.

It was a time when I was full of color palettes, so I wanted to apply one of them and place my orange tiger on a blue and turquoise background. I am quite satisfied with the result, except that I underestimated quality of the paper.

Since I still have trouble drawing figures, I challenged myself to draw another tiger in full body. I also wanted to give him an expression, an emotion. Most people see the tiger as a symbol of courage. My tarot reading experience says, that its presence often means fear. So I chose fear as the emotion for my tiger sketch. What do you say?

I have enjoyed participating in the tiger drawing craze, but I cannot wait to do my own projects. Where to start? I have so many ideas, lack of skills and time to improve them. But I keep trying.

With love and hugs,

Ivana

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One hand, different styles

When it comes to painting, I am still looking for myself. One and half years of experience ranks me as a pure beginner, so I need to work on basic techniques and test various supplies.

According to the comments on my personal art challenge I agree to see a tendency towards illustrations. I have a lot of ideas, most of which are stopped by lack of skills.

A great example from the past few days is a painting of lantern. Immediately, I imagined a scene from an old fairy tale, which I listened to as a child. The story tells about daily life of beetles that fly with lanterns to bring the light to people at night. Because of audio version I had no pictorial prejudices.

Full of joy, I sketched the basic idea on a scrap paper easily. Then I produced a problem in my head – mainly because of figural drawings. Although I reduced the number of beetles from five to three, the result lacks the poetics and simple lightness of the original sketch. Painted in watercolor with black liner and with the final touch by colored pencils.

Conclusion – I need more practice with figural drawings and courage to do it. My wise inner voice adds – maybe start with simple silhouettes like in the sketch, don’t push yourself into a real figural drawing. They won’t look real anyway.

In the shadow of Campanula

I made this drawing with silhouettes a few years ago by colored pencils only, maybe it looks better than actual beetles with lantern, what do you think?

There are also two of non-figural painting, covering topics of my personal challenge – document and butterfly. In these dark days I couldn’t paint a summer butterfly, so I decided for a night moth, specifically army green moth. I took a reference photo from wikipedia, hopefully it is free to use.

I would appreciate your comments, especially on the figural drawing. Some advice how to combine my lack of skills and experience with my desire to paint all the ideas and imaginations I have?

Thanks for reading and stopping by!

With love and hugs,

Ivana

Painting animals

After revealing my blindness to perspective, I felt to challenge myself and paint a four-legged animal.

The first animal that came to my mind was a hippopotamus! A weird choice for someone, who lives in Central Europe and loves walking in local forests, where are a lot of wild animals but certainly no hippo.

It took me time to realize that this choice was made by inner coward. He accepted the challenge, but cut most of its thorns. So I painted a four-legged animal, hidden deep in the water.

In fact, it is more like a sketchbook illustration, a hippo in two versions. Don’t ask how much graphite and eraser it cost before I could use the paint, although the legs and body are hidden 🙂

How I love the kingdom of plants!

But the challenge must go on. My next topic belongs also to the animals, and it is a bird!

Btw. Which of the two hippos do you prefer? Personally, I vote for the open mouth. I consider him safer even though I don’t know if he is screaming or yawning. What do you think?

Love and hugs,

Ivana

Fighting with nightmare

I like to draw. I like the moment with pencils when my imagination blows out. Sometimes I have a precise intention, and sometimes I let things go to be surprised by the result. Playing with the subconscious is fun and deep at the same time.

But drawing isn’t my hobby since childhood. Of course I did draw at that time, perhaps only until school. Then the system was trying to form my skills, telling me how much wrong I was. And believe me, I was!

Luckily I had other skills to develop, so I didn’t suffer much because of drawing bad. I had other things to enjoy and erased my need to draw from the mind. Before 40, the suppressed need woke up and started to fill my hungry hole.

Sounds the story is done, right?

But I quickly discovered that although I draw happily and felt free, in fact I had avoided drawing people all the time. And if I did it, it was a real nightmare. Finally I decided to fight with it!

Since January, I have been engaged in learning how to do it. My goal is not to reach professional skills, I just want to overcome my fear and remove the obstacle of the free self-expression.

The drawing above is the last practice and I believe that the head finally got the right proportions! What do you think?

With love, Ivana