Digital earth and moon

This was an old drawing I did online a few years ago. It was at the website called Sketchfu (closed about five years ago). I’ve always loved astronomy and this was a good challenge to try and get a reasonably accurate drawing using very simple tools. The hardest thing was getting the image blurred enough to feel realistic. Colours were chosen from a couple of hundred choices. There were only five sized circular pens and a slider to alter the opacity. Plus an eraser to clear away mistakes. You could add layers so you could show your progress, or do a collaboration with other artists, the only real problem was the images took ages to load.

Abstract Christmas tree?

Art is complex, it can mean anything. Art can be good and bad, but one person’s good art is something someone else might loathe. I just edited this image to crop a smaller area and add a circular frame. Now I look at it I can see a series of stacked triangles that look like graffiti. It could represent a Christmas tree, or a forest, or rain on a window distorting an image outside it. It could also be a Christmas tree bauble. The digital filter distorts my linework, and adds textures and pattern to my drawing. The colours were originally felt pens but they to have been altered by the digital filters.

Bust doodle

Doodle in gold and silver pen. Originally a contoured drawing in three quarter position, I added chequered squares to fill in the spaces. That left the image surrounded by blank paper, so I added silver triangles. The gold ink had covered some of the original drawing so I added black pen shadows. I thought this was a fun idea.

Date

Sundays #bandofsketchers prompt was ‘date’ I was going to draw an old mechanical calendar  (one that you turn round to change the date) but I can’t find it. So then I decided to sketch a log, cut in half, to represent tree rings (dendrochronology) you can count the rings to find out the age of the tree and as the widths of the rings change with the weather you can also work out the years it was growing.

Fish..

Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was fish. I drew a Sixty Seven pound goldfish caught in a lake in the UK this week. It was the largest one ever caught. I think it was a world record weight. It was released back after it was weighed. Quite difficult to draw in felt pen, the colours are a bit off and I should have done a better job of the background.

Dog drawing

Sketch I did of a friends dog. He’s a cross between a Husky and a Spaniel. He looks like a giant Corgi, because his legs are a little short in relationship to his body and he has a curly tail. He’s a real personality and is called Rassie or Rasputin. He’s very handsome and dark grey and white. I drew the outline when we met him on the back of an envelope then redid it and added shading at home.

David

Tuesdays #bandofsketchers prompt was Marble. I thought of drawing glass marbles but then saw a programme about Michealangelo last night. It had information about the rivalry between Davinci and Michealangelo. I didn’t know both had Sculpted David. So I drew the bust of David that I found on the Internet. I used felt pens so it’s not really smooth enough. Fifteen minute sketch.

Blue rose

Digital drawing done about ten years ago. I just came across this and it brings back memories of challenges I used to do on a now closed website called Sketchfu. The site was overwhelmed by art and Young people writing stories. The site owners couldn’t keep up with all the activity and a few of us users were asked to moderate the site. Eventually they stopped working on the site and the moderators were no longer able to contact them. The site was taken down, but many people downloaded their images, like this one, before it closed.