inktober: a challenge to create an ink drawing every day in October and post it.

Tried a cat again. The whimsical nature of the photo caught my eye and I just had to try drawing it.

This was from a photo by Karina Vorozheeva on Unsplash.

As the month goes on I am finding it easier to do each drawing. It is still difficult to get the level of shading right, and how do you distinguish dark colours from dark shadow? You have to depend on viewers’ interpretation of the picture – that they can recognize colour from shadow by the structure of the picture.

Temari Ball

I made this ball several years ago. It is a Canada Goose.

This is a non-traditional design that I created. It uses segments of the kiku stitch circle for the wings and two embroidery stitches: stem stitch for the body and satin stitch for the head.

There is a strong tradition of using crane designs on Japanese temari.  The crane does not hold as much meaning to me as it does to the Japanese. I wanted to make a similar ball that was distinctly Canadian. There is nothing more Canadian than these geese.

Painting

This is a more recent portrait than the last one.  I think that there has been an improvement in my painting.

This is the same young friend of mine as the last painted portrait. It looks much more like her. I am still using reds and blues in the shadows of the face, and yellows in the light sides.

Portrait painting is more difficult than landscape or still life in that you can’t take as much artistic license with it. Though you can change the background, the clothing, and the colours you use, the structure of the face has to be right. Just a small change in the line of the eye, for example, can change the whole expression of the face and increase or diminish how much it actually looks like the subject.

Fortunately for me acrylic paint is very forgiving. I can paint and repaint a feature until I get it as close to right as I can. I find that in ink drawing the underlying pencil drawing is the best time for defining the structures of the subject. Get it right at the stage where you can still use an eraser and half the difficulty of the ink drawing is tamed.