Black Knight Sketch

I feel like I’ve been a bit lazy recently. I’ve started going to the gym again and that has taken up a lot of my time but that is just no excuse. So, in order to rectify this little problem I’ve decided I need to set myself the task of updating my blog once a day again. Whether I can achieve this or not is debatable but the intention is there so we’ll just have to see how I get on with it.

 So, on to todays post. I’ve decided that with all the watercolour work I’ve been doing recently I’ve been ignoring the grass roots of sitting down and sketching so that’s what I’ve done today. I’m rather proud of the result as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before I’m not usually happy with my male figures but this one has turned out quite well. The source photo was taken by a friend and the subject is a member of the Plantagenet Society, when this photo was taken I believe he was taking a moment to glower at the audience. If you live in England I highly recommend getting along to one of their shows (and not just because I’m a member!)

In the next couple of days I’m hoping to have a go working in two mediums I’ve never tried before, ink and acrylic. It is perhaps a lie to say I’ve never worked in ink before as I have always inked my Ratz cartoons (like the one below) using technical pens before scanning into the computer to add colour. What I’m going to do this time is use brush and ink (which I’ve been informed is not the easiest way to use ink) and then experiment with the different effects that can be created using different mediums to colour the resulting image. I may add my experimentation in acrylic into this mix too and re-work the same picture over and over in different styles to see what happens. I’m hoping that I enjoy using acrylics as I love the effects that you can get with oil and acrylic but after a short experiment using oils I decided that I just didn’t enjoy using them not least because the smell made me feel ill and made poor old Peanut the rat sneeze!