Quiz night on Zoom

That was hard! After winning last time we could only come third this time with devilish questions.

Who knew a Cria is a baby Alpaca? Not a baby Llama by the way.

You had to know the scores on Scrabble tiles for heavens sake. I thought William Shakespeare had a score of 30? it was 32.

We came close, 43.5 against 48. Some inspired guesses, but who knew the train line across Australia is called the Gan, which in turn is based on the old name for camel trains?

These questions keep getting harder!

Eyes

I was just talking about drawing glasses and how eyes look behind them and decided to do a sketchy diagram. I am drawing with my finger so the pictures are a bit wobbly….

When you draw the eye behind the glasses, always look to see if the face and eye look bigger or smaller. You can tell if they are long sighted (bigger) or short sighted (smaller). It makes it more realistic if you notice this sort of thing. If the eyes are the same as normal it means the glass is flat in the lens, not curved!

There is a film staring James Stewart called flight of the phoenix. One of the characters wears glasses. But the lenses are flat and the light glints off them like window panes!

Layers

This picture was done using a photo of a cover if a colouring book, then duplicating and twisting and mirroringbit in the Layout app. Finally I changed the texture in photodirector, then added a background of starry nebulae and added a grunge layer to it (both in photodirector). The more you play, the more you learn!

Landscape

I love playing with things as you know. I add textures or add colours, mirror things or duplicate them. Art is exciting. Not every image is good, some work, others don’t. But playing with things helps you learn new things. Scientists experiment, that’s how they changed from Alchemists to chemist’s or physicists or biologists or mathematicians. They took things and learnt how they worked. That’s basically what I hope I do. Maybe not as logically or not done in an organised way, but I try.

Drawn wreath

Drawn in Sketch app

If you want to you can try and draw images with various tools on an app called Sketch. I used an ellipse tool and a symmetry tool to centre this drawing and guide the curves in it. I used leaf shapes and flowers shapes adjusted to different sizes and other pattern tools like stars for a bit of digital glitter. I used a spray gun tool to add shade, using the ellipse and symmetry to get the shadows under the leaves, then added a darker layer of leaves. I added a bow shape with a marker pen tool. Finally I added a circle around the wreath drawing to add a bit of definition and added Merry Christmas on top. I did this twice, first with a darker colour then white, slightly offsetting them to get a shadowed effect.

Drawing after Bob Ross

I was just watching a programme with the artist Bob Ross, he was painting a winter scene with autumnal colours and snowy highlights, so I decided to draw as I watched. I’m trying to get to understand my different drawing apps. I don’t think I did too badly, I just about managed to keep up and this took me about half an hour.

I am not sure I can get the whole image on the screen. Because I’m using a different device I seem to be into block editor mode….that’s better….

pink

Well its sort of finished….digital drawing on wacom tablet- oh Im out of practice….Random found pink objects with a green background for contrast and beige speaker and table top to show up the pink better…

a few years ago I would have been able to do better than this.. you know what practice does? It makes you do things better. In my case I used to do digital drawings virtually every day. I knew what buttons to press, what brushes to choose. So now I have to learn again and im definitly going to watch some videos on using photoshop and get a later version, this was done in Photoshop7… my very old version, I just don’t like the idea of paying a monthly fee to use the newer versions….

Doodled face

We have come to the end of the semester at college but have been asked to create a new way of illustration over the holidays. So what do I do? I’m thinking of boiling some spaghetti and trying to colour it then manipulate it? Or getting some play sand and drawing with that. It’s not something an illustration would normally be made of, but why not?