Hiding out in the shelves of my books, I discovered a mysterious sketchbook that I never scanned! Probably because it was started 3 months before my baby was born, and thus existed in a very tertiary time. A bit of everything; some lifedrawing, some monsters, some animals, etc.

“Cuncant that another would finish his sentences for him, he druider would smilabit eggways.” Drawing brainstorm technique: pick a line at random from Finnegan’s Wake, and try to draw it. http://finwake.com/

Camera notes: photos taken in kitchen w/ light above them, settings : shutter speed 1/40, Fstops 5.6, ISO 800, WB tungsten light. Sketchbook’s white pages and reflective graphite is probably to blame, so the toned books I’ve been using are probably a lil different.

Come July, I was feeling stagnant in my sketchery, so I mixed it up with a toned sketchbook. It was slow going, and I was swimming in uncharted waters, but by the end I felt like I’d worked out lots of the kinks. Here’s the best stuff!

A lot of this was trying to figure out new mediums. Case in point, my beloved mechanical drafting pencils show up too light against the gray paper 😦  I still love ’em…time to experiment with cracking open some black watercolor pencils and sticking their pigment tube in a mechanical drafting pencil.

Black watercolor pencil plus a water brush work pretty good.

Life drawing. Mental note: I shouldn’t be wasting expensive sketchbook paper on 1-minute gesture drawings.

This guy was one of my fellow presenters at SeaGL this year.  I’m looking forward to the next one!

Dino toys from the Burke Museum.

Breakthrough! With this guy I finally figured out Uniball white gel pens, which are super-annoying if you use ’em like a normal pen. Their ink flow is conspicuously cantankerous, but if you draw lightly in lil circles it flows out. You can do that until you have a lil pool of pigment, then smear it with a finger to get a gradient. Once I figured this out, it was my go-to white over charcoal and pencil. You can really stack the layers; white over black, over white over black overwhiteoverblackoverwhite. Goes on opaque, sticks around.

Ever wanna hang and draw with other Seattleites? Seth Goodkind runs the awesome Ballard Sketch Team. Good for the artistic humors; my last 3 weeks of sketching were better than my previous 3 months, and I gotta put the blame on BST.

Lee Marvin

My baby Susan, figuring this walking thingy out.

More stuff from Sketch Team. The guy with the computer hair was our most excellent server.

Learning from my watercolor exploits, I filled a second water brush with india ink. Awesomee!!! Blocks blacks (say that 10 times fast) right quick, but it lacks the nice gradients of the watercolor blacks.

That’s all. I photographed these rather than scanning it, saved a lot of work on processing time. Mental note: photos taken in kitchen w/ light above them, settings : shutter speed 1/40, Fstops 5.6, ISO 800, WB tungsten light,