By: Koosje Koene,
on 6/9/2016
Draw Tip: Do you have no idea what to draw? Draw people! It’s a great exercise on drawing features, hands, gestures, postures and shadows, and to try out all kinds of art tools. And: you will never run out of subjects because they are everywhere.
The post Drawing People appeared first on Make Awesome Art.
By: Koosje Koene,
on 5/27/2016
I am lucky to live with someone who doesn’t mind me drawing him. It’s not like I make him sit and pose for me as a life drawing model, but I do draw him when he practices playing one of his instruments, sits reading, or gaming for example.
Sometimes I study just details and come really close by, staring like a maniac at him until I filled a whole page with gestures, features, details.
It’s quite hard to capture ‘him’ though. Maybe because he is so close to me, that makes it harder to draw him? Anyway; this might be a good thing because it’s such a reat exercise and fun to do. And practice does help. The third drawing below, the one where I drew him while he was playing a game; it kind of looks like him!
The post Trying to capture it appeared first on Make Awesome Art.
.jpg?picon=925)
By: Sarah McIntyre,
on 5/19/2016
If you're in Scotland, look out for a copy of today's Herald, I have an article in it! You can also read it online here: 
Yesterday's #PortraitChallenge got me fired up to do some more pictures with actual paint. I've been doing a lot of digital work, and sometimes digital works best for me, but then I miss working with real paper in front of me the whole time. Here's a not-very-accurate self portrait, painted in watercolour, and when it was just pencil linework. 
By: Sarah McIntyre,
on 5/18/2016
Here's my #PortraitChallenge for today! It's a 1750s portrait of Ignatius Sancho, painted by Allan Ramsay. (You can find out more about it here.) Check @StudioTeaBreak to see other people's drawings!
By: Sarah McIntyre,
on 4/22/2016
Thursday's #PortraitChallenge was Thomas Gainsborough's famous portrait of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (which I've seen on a visit to Chatsworth House). Mine's a Pegasus-wrangling cowgirl because why not. :) You can find out more about portraits and #PortraitChallenge here on my earlier blog post.
Visit @StudioTeaBreak on Twitter to see a gallery of everyone's drawings! We're back to the #ShapeChallenge today. Do jump in, all ages and drawing abilities are very welcome! It's fun seeing whole families get involved. I love seeing all the variations! 
By: Sarah McIntyre,
on 4/14/2016
Today's Portrait Challenge drawing for @StudioTeaBreak, based on a photo tweeted by @castledublin. 
I don't think the sculptor is known, but you can find out more about Brian Boru here, and see how other people have gone about drawing him on the #PortraitChallenge hashtag! 
By: Sarah McIntyre,
on 4/6/2016
.png.jpg?picon=3640)
By: Sara Burrier,
on 1/11/2016
I have started a new project, Huzzah! I must be crazy. @_@
Every day until I feel I have enough, I am going to draw out a fun mermaid portrait. In the end, there will be enough beautiful mermaids for a pocket coloring book! I know, I'm so excited I just want to hide and draw for days to get it done!
On top of that, each drawing will be available for purchase. She will come matted in white ready for an 8x10 frame. You may visit here ↣ Mermaid Portrait #1 Original ↢ to place your sale.
Here is the first one!
By: Hannah Paget,
on 10/28/2015
Johannes Kepler, the astronomer who famously discovered that planets move in ellipses, presents an exceptional case we can reconstruct. Kepler got his assistant to paint an image of himself for a friend. This was just before Kepler stored up all his belongings to move his family back from Austria to Germany. His aged mother had been accused of witchcraft.
The post Thinking of Kepler on the beach appeared first on OUPblog.
By: nicole,
on 10/22/2015
By: Koosje Koene,
on 10/22/2015
Sometimes you just don't know what to draw.
Here's a tip: Grab a book with photos in it and draw from its pictures!
For these unfamiliar faces I randomly opened a book about Bluegrass musicians in the Netherlands and started to play around with brown ink.
By: Koosje Koene,
on 10/8/2015
By: Thomas James,
on 8/25/2015
Submitted by Emily Traynor for the Illustration Friday topic PEOPLE.
In class this week we created bakery art, learned about the profession of Baker and the yummy creations they make. Our Scribble Kids created collage portraits of Bakers holding their wares.
First we learned all about proportion and how to correctly place features when drawing the face. The students were to place their eyes half-way down the face, with the eyebrows slightly above them. It’s amazing what placement can do to make things look more realistic! We also added a ‘connecting shape’ to our circle faces to create the jaw.
Then we added chef hats and bodies for our characters. The kids had great fun creating textured eyebrows. I was surprised there were no mustaches in this class.
After gluing the head and shoulders down on 12×18″ paper, we added arms to the characters. Then there was a hand drawing demo that was challenging for some children, but they will get it with practice! Finally we added plates with hand drawn delicious baked goods.
Here are our final artworks!
Baker by Sophie, age 7
Baker by Connor, age 6
Baker by Lexi, age 5
Baker by Owen, age 9
Baker by Ruby, age 8
The post Bakery Art appeared first on Scribble Kids.
Add a Comment
By: Thomas James,
on 6/3/2015
Check out this beautiful portrait illustration of Taylor Swift by Alice Zhang.
Good news! You can even get this illustration as a print or tons of other products here!
By: Thomas James,
on 5/15/2015
By: Koosje Koene,
on 5/13/2015
By: Brian Bowes,
on 3/4/2015
.jpg?picon=572)
By: andrea joseph,
on 1/14/2015
By: andrea joseph,
on 1/3/2015
By: Sarah McIntyre,
on 10/4/2014
Here's another portrait drawing, this time of photographer Sarah Reeve. (Sarah took some ace photo portraits of Philip and me a couple weekends ago in our space suits and I thought I'd do one of her in return.)
I didn't used to work much in pencil, I always thought my work looked better in ink. But David O'Connell and I drew all of our Jampires picture book in pencil, so I thought I'd try it again. 
By: Sarah McIntyre,
on 10/3/2014
Last night I felt so scatter-brained and weepy and depressed, that I knew I had to take stock of things and try to figure out what to do. 
I've just finished one picture book, which I should have kept simple, but I ended up making it incredibly detailed, and took the full amount of time I'd been allotted, and then some. My lovely designer, Rebecca Essilifie, is racing around now getting it ready to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair, in the absolute minimum time I possibly could have given her. (Sorry, Rebecca! You are wonderful!) Actually, take a moment to stop and think of all the book designers absolutely FREAKING OUT right now, in the run up to Frankfurt. My designer at Oxford University Press, Jo Cameron, was doing a very late working night and ordering in pizza supplies. (I know this from Facebook.)
But ANYWAY... When I posted updates that I'd finished my picture book, people said 'Hooray! Now I hope you can take a break!' and I knew I couldn't. Pushing to the final extended-extended deadline on the Scholastic picture book meant I was late in starting up my chapter book with OUP. So I didn't have any time to get my head in gear, it was straight to character design and thumbnails. ...Oh, except there were two weekends of festivals, and lots of dressing up in silly wigs and performing and coaching kids in their own creativity. And I was exhausted.
I got home and the house was a mess with all my paper, letters I don't know where to file, stacks of books, craft stuff, those little canvas bags one gets at conferences, and random computer cables making the floor look like spaghetti. I knew that this mess was all my fault, too. Fifteen years ago, I moved in with a very tidy minimalist, and he puts up with so much, but there's always pressure for me to keep my stuff under control. Or not even pressure, he just gets glummer and glummer and then I feel terrible and try to make giant tidying sweeps. These cleaning rampages usually end very quickly, when I find some form I needed to fill out, or something that needs an e-mail answer, and Stuart comes into the room to find me in front of the computer, not tidying. He looks at me working on the computer, and the untidy room, and doesn't see how the two tasks go together. And you know what... they really don't.
Doing things on the Internet does not mean stuff is happening in real life. But it's so easy to forget that.
I feel like I'm living inside a computer right now. All the e-mails I need to answer, all my connections with work people and friends, my digital artwork, news updates, all of it comes through the screen of my laptop and my phone. I keep in touch with my American family through Skype, but even then, I don't Skype often enough and they rely on my blog to know what's happening with me. I find myself getting twitchy if I'm away from the Internet for very long. When I used to go to cafes, I would sit and draw; now I go online and see what everyone else is doing. Or I post an only-vaguely-interesting photo and wait for people to validate my existence. I get overwhelmed with things people are asking me to do and sort of shut down, and then feel horrible because I feel like I'm letting everyone down, all of the time, including myself. This is the feeling that gets me most depressed.
I feel like I've fallen out of love with drawing.
I can't believe I'm saying this.
I used to draw in any spare moment I got, play drawing games, make comics. And now I'm supposed to be drawing so much for work (and doing a zillion other non-drawing admin tasks) that I've neglected the fun stuff. I'm finding it takes me three times as long to draw things for work; everything looks tight and tense and crabbed, and I find myself scrubbing it out and starting over again, and over, and over, and procrastinating with cups of tea and snacks (and getting chubby) because I'm hating every minute of it. I get a sore neck from craning around at my desk to look over at my computer to see what's going on everywhere else.
This is ALL WRONG. But I'm going to fight back.
Here's a silly drawing I did last night, to try to cheer myself up, based on a portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger (from 1532-ish). I didn't let myself do any pre-sketching or erase, just went straight into the drawing and allowed the mistakes to make it more interesting. (It's not something I ever feel I can do with my 'professional' work.)
I know that haven't lost my love of drawing forever, it's in there somewhere, but I need to weed some space around it, to let it grow. I need to stop feeling guilty for drawing things that aren't work-based. I need, somehow, to stop letting the Internet give me self-worth. I used to write this blog completely for myself, as a diary, and I need to get back to doing that, and stop seeing it as some sort of marketing tool. I need to stop worrying it if gets any 'likes', or whatever. I need to get back into playing. And I need to come back to the physical world. 
What does this mean? Well, exercise. Argh, I hate it so much, but when I get fat and ungainly, it makes my brain go all slow and fuzzy. It means talking with real people. I'm so glad for my studio mate, Elissa Elwick, who's been in a lot the past couple weeks and is there for real conversation, and cups of tea, and having a laugh. It means getting rid of some of the clutter in my flat. The last time Philip Reeve stayed with us (on his way back from the Manx Lit Fest), he helped me get rid of some of my book pile. Gosh, was he MERCILESS!
Him: 'NO, you do NOT need this book. It goes OUT!'
Me: 'But I haven't read that one yet! But my friend wrote it! But it's about a mermaid!'
Him: 'You're never going to read it, are you.'
Me: 'But I might! Some day!'
Him: 'If you really want to read it, you can buy it again.'
Me: 'ARGGGHHH!'
Him: 'This is really upsetting you, isn't it.'
I plead the case for keeping too many of the books, but I had three huge bags full for the charity shop when we'd finished. (Thanks, Philip.)
It means I need to set Internet limits for myself. Not answering e-mails between certain hours, setting exact times when I'm allowed to look at Twitter. (I've been doing that a bit already, telling people not to let me back on until 5pm or so. It really helps.) I somehow need to stop making the Internet and ever-present part of my life. It's hard, though; the lines are so blurred; I use the Internet for image research, I sometimes need to contact colleagues during the day, I have tea breaks where I think, I could surf Twitter while I drink this cup of tea. Maybe I need to set myself a challenge on certain days, that every single time I get the urge to go online, I have to make a doodle instead. That could be interesting. Here's today's Morning Sketch. (I love the way dry shampoo gives me awesome Gibson Girl hair.)
Anyway, I'm fighting back. (I'm going to keep saying this phrase, in my head, over and over.) I used to make Morning Sketches, and that helped get my head in gear for the day. I hate, hate, HATE routine, I'm not a routine kind of person at all. But I think I need to force myself to do a daily Morning Sketch and go for a run. Otherwise I think I might fall apart. Here's today's Morning Sketch. And blogging about it is making me run late again, but I'm not going to use that as an excuse to avoid exercise, like I have done for the last two months or so. Argh.
FIGHTING BACK. YES.
By: sandygrafik,
on 9/8/2014
By: andrea joseph,
on 7/26/2014
By: Koosje Koene,
on 5/22/2014
Phew, there's so much awesomeness going on.
The very first semester of Sketchbook Skool has just finished and it was a tremendous succes. We are now working on all the good stuff coming up in the second kourse, which has the theme 'Seeing'.
Just last weekend, Andrea Joseph (I know, she is an amazing illustrator!!) came over to Amsterdam, and she and I spent the weekend, filming the videos for her klass in the upcoming kourse. I got to see some (no, a lot) of her magic and I hope it rubbed off just a little on me.
