‘Coffee at Gio Vintage’ - Daily Sketch

Lunch time today was spent having a cappuccino and biscotto. Luckily Gio Vintage (a great little vintage shop in Caloundra) had tables in the courtyard covered with paper and a supply of crayons. So after missing a few days of sketching as a result of travelling to the beautiful tropical North Queensland, I got to work on a quick 5 minute sketch. This was the result.

I highly recommend their coffee and biscotti I’m thinking it’s the best I’ve had so far in this part of town.

I decided a month ago that I should commit to a daily sketch or at least one every second day. This, I’m told, would be a great exercise in improving and developing drawing and observation skills - a good healthy regime for anybody in visual arts or design. I’m hoping some future sketches will lead to inspiration for developing characters or a specific body of work like Kevin Cornell’s Bearskinrug.

So to start, here is a recent quick sketch of…my foot.

This is another quick sketch from my journal that I found it a few days ago. Although this is an anthropomorphic rabbit, the traits and attitude of the character was probably influenced by a few people I went to school with - it’s amazing to think it was 17 years ago! Thought It might be fun to do a digital paint version. Will be up next week.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff study

Another natural media exercise. This one involves examining other artists techniques and using them to apply different rendering possibilities that you can apply to your own work. Lessons learnt here, and with any art exercise, crossover into the digital domain; especially the principles of colour, general composition and overall aesthetic appearance. I really recommend giving it a try, especially if you are a designer who has never tried anything other than digital media.

The image above is an acrylic study of expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s painting.

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Still life study - Stu Lawson 2008

I revisited the still life. Sitting on a PC can dull the skills, So it was time for some hands-on practice with real media again.

This painting was done in about 3 hours over a week. It was a test in completing a still life study within a limited time, whilst using a thinned down painting technique with acrylics.

I wasn’t completely happy with few things, but it turned out better than I expected after not having done a still life for a while.

'Making a statement?'- sketch

This was the initial sketch that ended up as a painting. It started out with a slightly different feel and was originally intended to be a digital illustration. I still really like the rough sketch, but I still might try and do a digital version.

'Making a statement?'- acrylic on canvas paper

The acrylic painting above started out as a concept sketch for a digital illustration (see the pencil sketch here), I then decided to experiment with acrylics using a dry brush technique.