Back to the Blarg

Well hello again.

As your resident artist, I am checking back in after what has been a far-too-long hiatus. Hopefully I am back for good since a writer friend told me that artists seem to all have blogs they abandon. And who wants to be another statistic?

After all, I have some new work to share anyways and I will hopefully be updating weekly at least from now on, but then again artists always say that. So I apologize in advance if life gets hectic and I do you wrong bloggers.

Until then, here are some sketchbook pages from Last winter when it snowed extensively here in Virginia and I had a lot of time to stay in the house and produce art.


I did several other watercolors over this time period but in this post I will focus on the environments since I was enamored with drawing the snow since it is a rare sight when living next to a beach on the east coast.

I was also infatuated with having ordered the latest "James Jean" pens which are the Korean S.K.B. 0.5mm ballpoint pens. They really are great for detail and shading. I have several fellow artists who complete full pieces with their line work only in ballpoint pen so I figured I would give it a whirl.

The first image is a study of our bathroom which has seen better days, but I was working in a sketchbook that was landscape format so that when you opened it up it was about 5"x16". While it proved to be a challenging format, it also gave way to some interesting compositions such as the bathroom sketch, I was able to leave a lot of pleasant negative space at the bottom of the image.

 
The next two are shorter studies of the colors of the snow and the surrounding buildings since they sky was pitch grey the entire week it snowed, and the third picture was a study of the damp wood left behind after the snow melted.

Lastly, one of my favorites is the last watercolor which I selectively used color in and faded the color out as the picture went on. The study is of a large, busy intersection while I sat in a fast food restaurant. The reason for the whole illustration was the large pile of dirty snow that had been piled right next to the fresh white patch surrounding the base of the fast food establishment's sign. The colors were so impossibly different, and the lavenders and cold blues int he fresh snow were beautiful and compelled me to capture them.