Today is International Womens Day and the best way I know to honour it is with my drawings of women. I’ve drawn thousands of women from the Museum by Sktchy app over the years since I started drawing portraits – these are just a few of them. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to them all and especially to Jordan Melnick, the creator of the app, and his team at Sktchy.
I had surgery to implant both a spinal cord stimulator and dorsal root stimulator in my spine a week ago today. It’s been a rough first week of recovery and today is the first day I’ve felt able to art, but I’ve managed a whole portrait.
This is Lina from the Museum by Sktchy app painted in watercolour and finished with coloured pencils,
Just when I think I’ve finally got to grips with drawing hair a portrait shows me that I really haven’t. This portrait of Alondra from the Museum by Sktchy app was one of those. How I struggled to capture her beautiful hair and I’m a million miles away from where I want to be. I really can’t find any good online courses on drawing/painting hair either so if anyone reading this knows of any please let me know!
This is the lovely Amina from the Museum by Sktchy app, painted with watercolour and then finished off with coloured pencils in my Fabriano Venezia sketchbook.
This portrait of Victoria from the Museum by Sktchy app was a complete disaster at the watercolour stage. I’d applied the watercolour much more quickly than I usually do and it looked muddy, without much colour definition. So I left it overnight and came back to it the next day with fresh eyes,
Then I started working on it with coloured pencils and, without too much work, they transformed it into a portrait that I really like. I focused on adding more definition to the shadows and more yellow and pink to the areas where those had turned into mud at the watercolour stage. And I tried not to get too hung up over the hair, where I can often get very worked up about not really knowing what to do.
All in all I’m really happy with the portrait, especially considering where it was halfway through. And the moral of the story is to ever give up on a portrait because it always has something to teach you.
Drawing when I can at the moment. Took a couple of days drawing this portrait of Karina from the Museum by Sktchy app in snatched moments between work and everything else. Still searching for my drawing mojo but always happy to have actually completed a portrait.
My last few watercolours have been a complete disaster. I’m not sure why, I just seem to have been really struggling with technique, control, paper, everything. It goes that way sometimes. So it’s been a few weeks since I’ve opened my watercolour sketchbook. But today I painted this portrait and it came out so better than anything I’ve done recently and I’m so glad. I made plenty of mistakes, pilling the paper in a few places, but I’m still very happy with it. Hoping it means I’ve found my watercolour mojo again.
A little watercolour and pencil sketch of Isabel from Sktchy.
This is Ryan from Sktchy painted in my Fabriano Venezia sketchbook with Daniel Smith and Zecchi Toscana watercolours and finished with Prismacolor coloured pencils.
This is Kimiya from Sktchy and a straightforward watercolour and coloured pencil portrait in my Fabriano Venezia sketchbook.
drawing faces 