Apple and banana

I have been struggling to draw this particular cultivar of apple ("Royal Gala"- they are difficult to draw but absolutely delicious); all those intricate little patterns tend to confuse me. I always get hopelessly lost in detail, and after a while I cannot remember which particular little patch of red I am working on anymore. This one does look marginally better than some of my previous attempts, I think, so perhaps there is some progress. Anyway, one of the advantages of this sort of subject is that you get to eat your models after the drawing session, thus destroying all the evidence and ensuring that no one can come and claim that you got this or that little detail wrong.

Mug and light bulb

Battled a bit with this one, but I think I did learn the one and other. For example, if you want white objects to look like they are white in your drawing, put them against a dark background instead of on a sheet of white paper!

HB mechanical pencil; a bit smaller than A4.

Miniature bottle and egg shell

About A5 in size; HB mechanical pencil on printer paper:

Winter

I almost never have time to attend to this blog thing anymore. But here's a photo I took from my porch before sunrise this morning. Unfortunately came out a bit fuzzy and out of focus because of the low light. But one can still see the frost covering the fields in the distance. Winter is definitely here.

Self-portrait

Finally had time for drawing again, even if only a rather quick and rough sketch. As always with self-portraits, I hasten to note that I don't normally look that angry. It's just an effect of staring intently into a mirror!

About A4 size, pencil on printer paper (which is less than ideal for drawing, but has the advantage of being cheap.)

Weathered leaf

I visited the Austin Roberts Bird Sanctuary today. While sitting on a bench I noticed a weathered poplar leaf lying on the ground in front of me. I have a long-standing love affair with weathered leaves, so I picked it up and made a sketch of it. One could draw thousands of them, and never will any two ever look exactly alike. Weathered leaves, like (some) people, have character, and drawing a leaf is a bit like drawing a portrait, except that the model doesn't get impatient.

Here's my latest portrait; HB mechanical pencil on printer paper, about 14cm x 20cm:

Scavenger hunt

I recently went through one of my periodic artistic crises: I simply couldn't draw anymore. I seemed to have regressed to the point where I was ten years ago. It was partly perhaps simply that I had been busy and had not really drawn anything for several months. But I began to realize what the problem was: I had become lazy and instead of setting up simple still life arrangements or taking a sketchbook outside to draw from life, I had begun to rely on reference photos.

Some people can make beautiful art from reference photos. I can't. Whenever I try, the result is always the same: everything is out of proportion and flat and uninteresting, and looks less real than a stick figure. I learn this lesson about once every year, and then I forget it again. So here I once again promise myself to never draw from reference photos again. Not that I ever have time for more than rather rough sketches anyway.

As part of this New Years' resolution (and I thought I never make such resolutions!), I participated in a game on WetCanvas called "Scavenger hunt," in which one tries to draw one or more items from a somewhat random list, with basically the only rule being that they have to be drawn from direct observation, rather than from photos or memory.

So here's my scavenger hunt drawing, perhaps the first of many, of a yellow cling peach and a glass tot measure:

As often with my amateurish drawings, it is in common old HB pencil on equally common and cheap old printer paper, 18cm x 12cm.