My 10,000 Hours - Art (NSFW)

Just finished this morning. Charcoal pencil.

We took a small vacation to Maryland so that Laura could apply for a good job. I brought my art supplies but I felt kind of strange about pulling them out while staying with friends; pretentious, maybe? I don't know.

Either way, I lost about a week of time to practice.

I'm back to it now, though. I'm finding that I'm liking charcoal more and more for figure drawing; there's something about the way I hold it and the way it flows that just works well for me.

Pencil, done before going on vacation.

I really enjoy figure drawing and had a realization yesterday while going through models on Pixel Lovely's model tool: If I really want to draw something, it needs to inspire me.

That might seem silly to some and others might be thinking "well, duh" but either way it was a revelation to me. I need to be inspired by whatever it is that I'm drawing to really do a decent* job at it.

Mostly 30-second pose drawings, and Lois.

If I'm just flipping through doing 30-second poses, trying to capture as much as possible in as short a time as possible (example to the left) then it's okay if the image doesn't inspire me, though I do better on the ones that capture my attention.

But if I'm taking ten minutes to draw something I need it to capture my attention. I flip through the models, looking for something that makes me almost literally say "Oh!"

I'm back on track and now I know what to look for. I can't wait to see where this goes.

I'd like to try a few different mediums this week. Maybe pastels, or watercolor pencils. We'll see; I don't feel ready for them yet but the point is to do new things, learn new things, otherwise I'll never be ready.

*For some degree of decent, mostly being "as decent as I can do it right now."