#study week 2

Today's post will be pretty short. You guessed it, I could not study properly this week. Due to health problems.. blah blah, you don't wanna hear it. It's quite a bummer. Still, I did make a couple of sketchbook drawing practice. I'm still in the process of relearning traditionals. It's taking a while.. And I'm struggling using mechanical pencils, I should really switch back to regular old wood pencils. I recently bought charcoal, a medium I have never tried, so I'm looking forward to it.

Here's the summary for this week, in visual form!

I'm working on a piece which features some water creatures. Can't say what it's for yet, but it's a pretty big deal to me. So I wanted to study some amphibian, preferably that of frog skin textures. The colorful one took me a while.. too much. Wanna hear my mistake? I was trying to use the mixer brush a LOT. It dulled the colors, dulled the rendering, it looked boring. I tried to use it just to experiment a little and see if my process could go faster, clearly it doesn't work for me. I do like the minimal usage of it, especially when trying to create smudged effects, which is most attractive to soft edges. But having to use it everywhere and relying on it to do the blending for you.. doesn't work. At least for me. I end up losing the colors then I try to reapply it, then blend it again, then lose it again. No wonder it took forever. I went back to the good old method of the manual 'labor' of splashing the colors in and taking the time to make gentle strokes and blend it myself. Voila! Looked nice and bright. Think I'll just stick with this method.