Oh boy what have I done?

I left you so long ago and never returned that was bad on my part although I know I am still typing only to myself that is not something I want to do when I have actual readers so, lesson learned.

I have discovered a website, I think it was originally for artists and writers but has morphed into a little something more http://gather.com/ it is a good site to read other peoples ads, blogs, opinions and stories and I really enjoy it, I have posted some of my artwork there also.

 Not only did I post artwork I got up the nerve to post some of my poetry, yeah I know it was my little secret I do do poetry and some short stories and I love it but it all comes down to the same story, I am too shy to share. I am stingy and self absorbed and sometimes that is where I like to be, I have learned that by posting some of my work and allowing comments I have actually pleased the eyes of some viewers, so I guess here too my blog will morph into a bigger thing than I originally thought, being an artist does not mean only drawing or painting, but poetry and literature, writing novels and short stories, illustration and cartooning, all of this is art and all of it deserves equal time, I am sure I'm not the only artisit out there who dabbles in different types of art.

 So sit back and enjoy and I promise to return more often with something witty to say or another picture to share. See you when I see you.

Moving on to greener pastures

Now that I have my very first "real" portrait under my belt I am going to freshen up a bit and do some study on shading and texture. I believe this will help me in my overall performance in working on the portraits, next I will try to do a nature picture and see how that goes for me, I seem to have a very bad eye when it comes to proportions, and this will be a way to help myself and get my eye to tell my hands what to draw, You have to train the eye if you want to do realism pictures. That just gave me an idea maybe I should just work on abstract art then it can look out of proportion and people will think I did it on purpose.... So hi ho hi ho its off to surf I go (the internet that is)

Are you for real?

I can't believe it! he loved it, I gave him the portrait as he sat next to my husband with a cup of coffee and ran from the room, I waited outside the door, surely he was going to hate it, all I could hear was wallah, wallah, wallah, I swear, I swear, I swear, he was telling my husband that the likeness was uncanny. He has a brother that I must tell you looks just like him and is only a couple of years older so my husband went into the other room and showed the portrait to his mother. "Who is this man"? he asked, as he held up my 22 hour project and he told me her face went white, "Why that is my son"! she said, "Oh yes and which son is it"? my husband asked her again, she said "this is my son Hatem, where did you get this picture"? He explained to her that it was me who did this work and all the women in the room began to giggle, not as a mocking of me but because they were in disbelief, "She did this"? "how"?" she can draw"? well they all loved it and I must say it was a wonderful stroke to the ego. I am happy I went through with it, now it may get easier to show my stuff instead of hiding it in a portfolio in my room. Thanks to the work I am doing on this blog I took one great step forward last night and that step was actually showing off what I do to people we love.

revision of portrait

After some great pointers from family (thanks guys) I made a few changes, remember it is a picture from a cam so it leaves some to be desired, some of the shades fade out because of the flash but I think it was improved upon a good deal after another hour something, here it is the finish product thanks for checking it out and I am going to move on to my next project, an artists work is never done.

My friends portrait

Here it is after 20 hours of hard labor my very first, real life, trying to be an artist portrait, what I need now are some good critics, you don't have to be an artist to point out where I'm missing out or going wrong, I am my own worst critic anyway. I had to stop before I tossed the buggger in the trash. This picture is done with cam of course because the almighty scanner is a bit out of my budget range, along with a work space, pencils, erasers etc. etc. but none the less here it is and I feel like a proud mama, I know its not perfect but remeber the portrait I did of my husband... After a little research and study on my weak spots I came up with this one, I think it is a far cry from my first and it will be a far cry from my last but it sure is a good step in the right direction don't you think???  Please give me some feedback and let me know what you see are my weaknesses I will truly take your comments to heart. By the way he is coming to dinner tonight, think it's ready for the presentation??? let me know and I'll talk to you later....ooh I have my fingers and toes crossed on this one, I'm as nervous as a horse looking at a 150 kilo rider!! btw I do see some of the shading is lost due to the flash of the camera but the rest seems to look alright to me, what do you think of the eyes? Am I getting close? well thanks for looking at it and plz don't forget to comment.

Inspiration is the key

I search the web and find all of these inspiring pictures, this is how good I want to be, this is a mural by Jack English, can you believe it is painted? Its awesome and it gives me goosebumps, I know I have it in me too, There is an artist somewhere deep inside me that is ready to move on from doing animals and the sort, I want to be well rounded and good at everything art. I usually can accomplish what I want to do but it takes me a long time to get there, take it from me, don't give up, hang in there and in your downtime, surfs up so hang ten!

PENCIL ART

 my list can go on for days http://www.janefraserstudio.com/index.htm  here is another site and this woman does some amazing work, I am not even close but just to be inspired by these artisits is giving someone like me hope, now all I have to do is train my crazy, think for themself fingers to put on the paper what my eye is looking at. http://www.robotnine.com/2009/03/incredible-pencil-drawings-animals-look.html This is my style of art I love to see it I love to draw it , i feel like I am there with it WOW these sites are great for inspiration.

Dancing on air

Ok so I had a meltdown a bit yesterday, so now Im over it and plan to move forward, so what I only blog to myself, I never did this thinking it was going to be easy I did this knowing there would be some work involved, I am happy to get the meltdown out of my system and move on to better days. Yesterday a friend from Belgium came by and saw my worked and begged for a portrait of himself, I told him the best I could do was try and he was happy to pose for me and I will get started on it today.

Coming out of the closet

Well I am starting to feel a bit like a big boob, I try this blogging thing and go to look at other blogs and mine seems so juvenile and silly, I want to show my work online, I want people to be interested but I am afraid I do not know what I am doing or where I am going with this. This is my passion and I want to leave my pencil print on the world but how do I get started? The internet is full of everyone telling you how to do it, and even bloggers themselves, then you check out their sites and they have no followers..... So how do I do it and make myself a household name? I want to learn to do pertraits, I am good at the wild life, I have no great income or possibilities of it and feel like I will always be living in the closet. I might as well grab a pillow and blanket and just lie there but I can't I need to find the answers. Do you think if I leave e-mails and questions they will answer me? I want to be the best. NO no no no no I will be the best, I spend literally hours in front of my computer, I sketch, I show you and I move on and try to learn, Whose bright idea was this???? I will get back to you in a couple days and hopefully I will have some more ideas. Phew I am tired and homesick, It is tough living in a new country with new language and no friends, maybe I will fail, this will be up to me we will see if I come back, I posted my blog on my fb page but still no-one has come to see it so I am lost and confused and out of ideas, I hope if your a blogger you have better luck at this than I do. I will still work on my art and maybe post a couple of pieces I have done, we will see but in the meantime I need a nap, so off to the closet and I'll catch you later!

Some cool places to check out

I went to a few sites over the past couple days and there really is a lot of information out there to sift through, I look for the sites with the most content for my needs ( I hate to page through a site with so many ads you get lost looking for the content.) http://www.portrait-artist.org/basics/newbie.html here is a nice site for the novice drawer, go ahead and check it out, it gives information that you will need to start drawing. http://www.artgraphica.net/free-art-lessons/drawing-pencil-tutorial.html  I like this site it gives you different choices of tutorials you can do on your own time and its written in nice plain english you do not need all the lingo of the artworld yet to just sit back and give it a try. Here is a page I went into and it talks about negative drawing http://www.artgraphica.net/free-art-lessons/free-art-tutorials/mike-sibley-negative-drawing.htm Its an interesting bit and I enjoyed it, I guess being an artist is not just about taking a pencil and drawing, for me any way, but learning a bit of how composition and textures work into the sketch and how to get my sketches to look real, I am trying to give you the sites of interest to me that offer nice free lessons, try them out yourself and let me know how it goes for you.

The next step

I feel pretty good with the outcome of my eyes I did and I think I will do another project the same, just he eyes and a different picture so I will post it when I finish and you can tell me how you think I am progressing. It is imporant for me too keep in mind the different shades and planes and try too keep the proportions in the correct volume, I love to draw it is an amazing feeling when you get someting that looks so close to the subjec matter. See you in a while with my new post, go and try it for yourself, share it with me I would be happy to see what you have done and if you have any commens or suggestions for me I would appreciate them too.

my hubbies eyes FIN

Well here is the finished product, I really tried to work on the shading and trying to get the different planes of the brow and lids etc. to look more 3 dimensional and it was really hard for me so we will see how it goes in the future, I am going to go and look for some sites that will give me more details on how to get it looking more 3 dimensional. Over all I am happy with my finished product considering the first portrait I tried (don't forget to peek at it if you can't remember). So now I'm off to search yet once again and we will see what I can find. Your comments would be greatly appreciated, you know family tends to try to save your feelings and they say everything looks good, I could scribble on the paper and they would tell me it looks great I need some constructive critisism or how else do I improve?

My hubbies eyes IV

So here I added more shading and some more detail, now I will finish it off and try to get it as close as i can to looking like the real thing. it looks a bit crossed eyed to me but wait and lets see the finished product.

my hubbies eyes III

I have now added some of the shading and a few of the details around the eyes, I will work on more shades and detail for the next photo and you can see my progress from there, so far I am happy with the results considering the first portrait I did of him was like a childs drawing, lets see how we do with the next step and move along from there, I had to try to pay attention to the shading and details, I am discovering my paper has a lot of texture and might not be the right type for the sketch but I will do my best, even if it is not right, if I get it to look good here imagine what I could do with the right stuff!

my hubbies eyes II

Well, here it is, I placed the eyelids and tried to get a feel of where the brows will go, I set a small spot on each eye where the highlight from the light will be and i will start to do some shading of the areas that I know are in the shadow, that is the tough part at the moment for me, I want to work both eyes at the same time to get them to stay as close to real as I can but have a tendency to work one at a time, that means it may take me the 90 hours just to finish these buggers, really it is fun and a good training lesson and I can only get better right? so I will post the next photo and we will go from there.

My hubbies eyes

This is where I started, blocking out the image and the size of the actual eyeball, trying to place them in the correct spot on either side of the bridge of the nose, it is true its hard to draw a perfect circle by hand and especially hard to get them both to look the same but I did the grafting, parallels and so forth, next I will try to draw the lids and try to keep it as real to the picture as possible, I can see now why another fellow artist says she can easily spend up to 90 hours on a portrait, it feels like I will spend that long just on my first pair of eyes, training the eye to see the shadows and and small details will be the key for me.

Here is the photo I decided to work with, out of all the photos I took (I think about 10) this one shows him with good shadowing,contrasts, good lines and some good textures and planes I will have to try to figure out. Now with the use of the sites I already gave you I am going to try to apply what I have learned to see how I get his eyes to look on my paper, I will be using  5" by 7" paper with just a number 2 pencil and a regular eraser. I told it was going to be nothing fancy here, I'm not the richest person in the world and can't afford alot of the supplies artists use and I know I'm not the only one out there so here we go , I hope I get the same look on my paper.

The eye, the eye, the eye

I am now spending my second day just researching the eye, it is the most important feature of the face when doing the portrait, everyone will notice any mistake or flaw in the eye, this is the part of the face that gives it the character, spirit and life in your portrait. http://www.portrait-artist.org/face/eyes2.html here is another nice site to learn about the eye,yesterday I took a photo of my husbands eyes, I am still having trouble finding a site that will show you the work for both eyes, I guess they figure if you know one you know it all http://drawsketch.about.com/od/drawingportraits/ss/draweyes.htm here is another site that gives good information and if you have a lot of time to study and take notes go here http://www.ndoylefineart.com/mechanics4.html  these are all good sites and there are many more out there but I tried to get the most helpful sites that will explain technique, shapes and shading, now I will try to apply this to the picture I have of my husbands eyes, I will come back later and show you my progress.

Wow, information overload

This one is a tough assignment, there is so much information out there, from oils to pastels, everyone thinks they have the answer, I have to do a bit more research on this eye subject and get back to you, I did not plan on taking a whole day to find the site I am happy with, dont get me wrong, there is just something special I'm looking for, I want to work with two eyes, I can make one eye look great, I need to work with the two eyes and get them to look like they both belong to the same face. When you think about it, it's a tough thing to do, mine look cross eyed, dead eyed even sometims they look like someone from the 3rd grade walked up to my pictures and just slapped a couple eyes on with their big boy or big girl crayons. Just look at the portrait of my husband, hahaha, what a joke, its looking to me more abstract than it does real, I should have put his nose on his forhead and an eye on his chin then it might be considered a work of art. Oh well showing you the bad stuff is all a part of growing with you then when we get to the good stuff, it will be more exciting, don't give up its tough work but well worth the wait, you will see.... http://drawinghowtodraw.com/drawing-lessons/drawing-faces-lessons/howtodraw-ears-tutorials here is a site for very basic facial features the eyes are included so it's a pretty good place to get a start, it does have some step by step tutorials, so go here try it out and tell me what you think, I will have more in my nxt post so stay tuned. C out..

sketching the EYE

I think it was the day before I started this blog, I decided to go online and check out what I could find to teach myself better technique and work on my eyes, as I told you before they always look dead on my portraits well here is the first try it is on a 3" by 5" card and took me about an hour, go ahead and tell me what you think or what I can improve on. I know it will take much more than drawing one silly eye to be perfect but this is what i did so far, today the chore will be to draw two eyes and try to proportion them properly. This will take much more than one hour I'm sure but the benefits will be priceless, so let me get searching for the site and get it done and I will document my progress in a little bit. I hope these tips will be helpful for you guys too I'll try to do my step by step process for you again, if thats not working just let me know and we can change it up.

portraits

Before you critisize too heavy don't forget I do wild life, It is east for me to do animal prints and charcoals but I really want to try to get into portraits and people I am very bad at, especially the eyes, I never get them to look like my subject and they always seem to look dead with no spirit or passion, I want to able to look at someone and do their sketch and have them look on paper like they do to me in person. This is a sketch I did of my husband and I know it needs alot of work, it sits in storage and that is where I think it will stay, part of the reason for doing this blog is to see if there are others out there like me, I want to be the best at everything I do and it takes a lot of hard work, dont let people fool you, some of us need to practice alot every day and others it comes more naturally but you will see in a couple of months this sketch will just be a memory and I will do some rocking sketches of people, but in the mean time my animals are cool too so I wont put them on the back burner I will keep doing them also.

Ok so here is the final result let me know what you think of my picture compared to the subject photo. All in all I think I had a pretty productive day and I may have helped someone out and I brushed up on some of my technique, it can be a challenge but you really have to love what you do, all in all I have worked on this part of the blog for 7 hours now so it is a good days work, I'm going to go for dinner then I will be back and share more with you all. thanks for taking the lesson with me I hope you enjoyed it

Step 6 is adding all of the details of the subject I am working on a 3" by 5" card so I had a little more trouble with this but I am still happy with the results.

Step 5: this is the easiest of them all just make the dark spots darker.

Step 3: this is a fun one, it's
getting the contours this is
where you
make the
shapes a bit more
outstanding
and the lines

right its fun

and not a
difficult step to
do at all, I put
some shade around the
deeper
contours and
this is my final
result, for me this step was fun if you have a good eye its pretty easy to
do.

Step 4: this is where you put the shade into all of the drawing trying to keep it real remember the light source and where its coming from this gets a little more difficult but her is the result I got on this step

My figure sketch step by step

I went to a site in the morning http://www.creativespotlite.com/drawing-lessons.htm  here I found a tutorial on figures, I decided how can I post something for you to do if I don't try it out myself? so that is exactly what I  did, now a couple things you might want to keep in mind before you start, this is not a novices tutorial, you may want to know a bit about anatomy before you get started, it does not mean run out and go take a class in anatomy and phisiology, but a bisc knowledge of the muscles and the placement might be a good idea, it will help you out in the long run anyway if figures are what you enjoy doing. so here it is step 1 , that is basically just blocking the shape with cylinders and placement on the page this is so your picture doesnt drift, and you know what I'm talking about if you have ever done drawings before.

Step 2: This is the step where you work on the structure of the subject, find parallels and common lines to keep your form real, this is my photo of this step it was not hard, the hard part is to think of your subject as shapes and shadows, later it becomes more habit but it is just the training you have to give your eyes, forget its a person sitting there just look at the shapes, the way the light reflects off different parts of the body, that is the difficult part

My day so far

Today I decided will be a good day to work on some research (all internet of course) and find some sites that offer free lessons and technique training http://drawsketch.about.com/od/learntodraw/ss/wiredrawing.htm So I started out here this is a great site for beginners and the offer some lessons lets try it out and see how it goes, Well I will try it out anyway and see how I do. The great thing about pencil drawing and sketching is you have an eraser. I will see you in a couple hours and we will see the lesson I took and the progress I made..... bye bye

Ok so here's the thing, I do wildlife sketches like their going out of style but I would love to do portraits so here is my first challenge for myself, turn my father-in-law sketch into a work of art. I know it can happen I have seen other artists work http://www.here2see.com/ , this site is awesome and quite inspiring if you get a chance you should go check it out, this is my goal to make my sketch look like her works of art, lets see how long it takes because the possibilities will be endless if I can accomplish that.

My father-in-law

I wish I could get better looking pics of my work up on here but it is still the first day so I will keep trying. This is a sketch I did of my father-in-law do you think it looks like him? have any ideas for me? the darn flash from my cam puts an odd spin on the photo but I think I am on my way... What do you think?

here is one more of my sketches of the camel and her mama this is not an unusual site here, I did see one in a small truck sitting in the bed one day, that was an unusual site. So tell me what you think I am sorry that the quality of my pics is not the best but I will work on it to see if I can get these pictures a bit more clear.

My journey begins

This blog is all about my journey into the art world, I have been doing sketches since I was in junior high but am so scared of critisism I never took the chance to let someone see it or to compete or anything. You will follow me on my journey to see where it takes me, how long it takes me to get there and what I do along the way, welcome to my world of sketch artistry the trials, tribulations and excitement of it all, I hope we all come out the other side with more information, techniques and ideas for future works of art.

Please be gentle this is one of my first sketches that I have done in many years, I wish I had a scanner but at this point I am waiting to see if it will be worth the cost, I would like to see if I get followers or not,  so this is what I do tell me what you think, in the next few weeks I will start adding sites that teach technique or help you brush up on you skills, as a pencil artist you will see that you just get better in time, it is a tough hobby to perfect but you will see how good you can get in upcoming links and posts. please enjoy and tell me what you think. 

mouthwideshut thats me!

I love what I do but this is new to me, I have been an artist (in my own mind) since I was in junior high school, I love it loved it and will die loving it it is an awesome life changing experience to see someone view you art with their eyes.I do sketch pencil art mostly of wild life I will start posting for you in a bit. I have been away from it for a while and recently got back into it, unfortunately I have to brush up on some technique but you will see I will get better as I go along. welcome to my brains point of view I speak through my art so I hope you enjoy it as much as my family says they do.

mouthwideshut thats me!