Yesterday Sktchy held a Sktchy Live drawing session on YouTube with Sktchy teacher and crosshatching wizard France van Stone. I didn’t get to catch it live but I watched it today and drew along. France drew Jordan Melnick, the founder of Sktchy – so now you know what he looks like!
I drew Jordan in a Moleskine sketchbook with a Rotring mechanical pencil with an HB lead and Mitsubishi 2 colour pencil using the Prussian Blue end.
I love the inspiration photo for this portrait of Olivia. There are lots of photos of people hugging on Sktchy (I know, I searched for them and found loads) but this is my favourite. It just feels so authentic. I can’t say the green lighting was easy to capture but I don’t have the confidence to change it to something different so I stuck with the colour in the original.
Anyway, the reason for choosing this is that today I want to send a virtual hug to everyone reading this who is, like me, living under a lockdown due to COVID-19. I hope you’re safe, have access to enough food and some outdoor space and someone to support you (online or over the phone if not in person) when you’re scared or anxious.
I drew this portrait on my iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil using the Procreate app.
If you’ve been following this blog for a while you probably didn’t know a month ago that I have a history of mental health problems. It’s not that I hide it, I don’t. I may we’ll have mentioned here before, I’m not sure. It’s just that it’s generally not that relevant to my drawing. But that all changed with the C-19 lockdown.
Drawing, painting, any kind of art, has been an essential therapeutic activity for me since I started to draw 5 or 6 years ago. But it’s only in the last week or so that I’ve actually used my choice of portrait to process my emotions. I tried to write about how I was feeling last week but it was too difficult.
I think many people don’t understand how triggering this situation is for people with a history of mental health problems. I had severe depression and anxiety which left me agoraphobic for a long time. Learning to leave the house again regularly and relatively easily was a long slow difficult process. Not being able to triggers very difficult memories and the fear of a relapse. It’s hard to write about all the feelings I have without provoking intense anxiety, it’s much easier to draw a portrait that reflects my feelings, and doing that reduces my anxiety.
Today this is the image that best fits my mood because I want to roar. Not in anger, this is more of a shout-out, a roar-out, for all those amazing people in my online mental health community who are managing those difficulties in this lockdown with minimal help, if any, from mental health services AND supporting each other. Yes, healthcare workers and delivery drivers are amazing but so is someone who has ever had OCD who is coping with all the public health messages about a virus and handwashing. I’m so grateful to my mental health community both on and offline for being there for me and for everyone else who needs them right now.
Thanks to Sktchy muse Adamo for being inspiration for today’s portrait, which I painted with watercolours in a Moleskine watercolour sketchbook.
I had a mental breakdown many years ago and for a long time afterwards I had a mild form of agoraphobia and found it hard to leave the house. This period of quarantine reminds me very much of that time. I think that perhaps that is partly why I’m feeling so much anxiety – I’m reminded of a time in my life that I’d rather forget.
The inspiration photo for this portrait from Sktchy artist and muse Cecile captures that feeling of wanting to go out but not being able to very well indeed. The world outside looked so bright and colourful while my indoor world felt so washed out and sad in comparison. I have to keep reminding myself that this is not the same for me – I’m not experiencing agoraphobia, its not my mind that’s keeping me inside, it’s a pandemic. And this time I’m not alone in this situation like I was last time, it is the same for everyone who is not a key worker. Everything is different this time, but it still feels frighteningly familiar.
I drew this portrait in my Midori Cotton sketchbook with Copic markers and coloured pencils.
No angst today, just a straightforward portrait of Sktchy muse Cabot. I painted this in my Moleskine watercolour sketchbook with my Zecchi watercolours and finished it with Prismacolor coloured pencils.
It seems that the best (only?) way I can process my emotions at the moment is through my art. My response to anxiety is to just keep drawing…. Anyway my husband is an NHS resuscitation practitioner (and has asthma) and so it should be no surprise that the lack of sufficient adequate personal protective equipment in the NHS to deal with the Covid-19 crisis is causing me some anxiety.
So my response today has been to turn a Sktchy inspiration photo I found of Anna in surgical scrubs into a protest poster. I made a number of protest poster style portraits a year or so ago so it was great to revisit this style for a day.
I drew this portrait on my iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil using the Procreate app.
I’m feeling very anxious at the moment. Who isn’t, right? But I have a long history of mental illness and I’ve been trying really hard to ignore my rising anxiety these past few days but it’s refusing to be ignored. It’s waking me up,in the early hours and affecting me physiologically now. So I’m having to pay it some attention.
I’ve become very good at managing my day-to-day anxiety over the past few years but it’s obvious that those management techniques aren’t going to be enough in this new lockdown world, I have to adapt and find something more rigorous to help me through this. So I’ve started by simply admitting that, not only to myself but publicly, I think he way I know best, drawing. And I’m sharing this with #MadCovidDiaries, a project for people with mental health issues to share diaries of their experiences of the lockdown in the UK.
I drew this portrait on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil and the Procreate app.
This is Scout Penelope, everyone’s favourite child model on Sktchy. I drew this portrait for this weeks Old School Sktchy “childhood “ challenge because in my house childhood was all about dressing up. I made so many costumes for my daughter, who was constantly challenging me to turn her into a mermaid, a dinosaur hunter or Nancy Drew. And she grew up to be her own version of Wonder Woman, as I’ve no doubt Scout will do too.
I drew the portrait in my Midori Cotton sketchbook with Copic markers, Prismacolor coloured pencils and Posca pens.
I’ve drawn Lykke before and I’m sure I’ll draw her again – she’s one of maybe two dozen Sktchy muses who have everything I want in a model and who post new inspiration photos regularly. I love the contrast between the blue hair and the light and shadows in the inspiration photo and worked on reflecting that in my portrait.
I drew this portrait in my Midori Cotton sketchbook with Copic markers and Prismacolor coloured pencils.
This is a portrait of Sktchy muse Lucrezia for Sktchy’s Dark Portrait Party. I drew it on my iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil using the Procreate app.
drawing faces 