Practice, Practice, Practice

After watching a video on YouTube from Toni Burt - Artist

I love the smaller bunny

Drew this yesterday from an ad in Vanity Fair

All of my NeoColor II's. I have 9 duplicates! Crap!

Gracie with her ears up. Still won't look at the phone.

I have a spiral watercolor pad that I made color swatches on years ago. I took watercolor lessons in 2002 or 2003. Not knowing a lot about anything, I had purchased Winsor Newton Cotman, the student grade, and Grumbacher's student grade. Whatever was sold at Hobby Lobby in Terre Haute and went on sale. As I've started to accumulate more products, I have been adding to this spiral pad. Yeah. Not soon enough obviously. Yesterday after a discussion with Cathy, I decided to sit down and do the Caran d'Ache NeoColors. Found out I have 9 duplicates. No idea how that happened. So I sent Cathy a text, and she has 8 duplicates. We are hopeless. The good news is hers don't all match mine, and we are going to trade colors today.

Watching other artists on YouTube is a mini art course in your home. Cathy just discovered Toni Burt, an Australian woman who uses collage as a basis. Toni draws with an 8B graphite pencil. So of course we both went through our stash and neither one of us had an 8B. I had 6B and 9B, Cathy had nothing like that. Does it make a difference? Yes, but it's hard to explain. You just have to try it for yourself. In the samples above, the first woman and the rabbits were done with a 9B pencil, which is thick lead and very dark. The 3/4 profile of the man was done with my PaperMate mechanical .05 lead pencil that I love, because I knew I would be using an eraser a lot. This is one of my self challenges, doing 3/4 or profile. I suck at both. Ain't gonna get any better just complaining about it, you have to do the work.

So I am working on art every day, just not anything that has lots of color and is complete. I consider this all to be a warm up and necessary. Something good will come.
Linda