Sketches: Seven Days of Art

Hello again! Today we’ll be taking a peak into one of the recently completed projects in my sketchbook.

A week or so ago, I found a course on Craftsy that looked interesting. It was called Seven Days of Drawing, and it involved watching a short video everyday (well, in theory. Due to some busy days, I didn’t actually finish the course in seven days) and sketching various objects.

Seven Days of Art:

The first day we were supposed to draw our breakfast. I had already eaten by the time I started the course, so I used an assortment of mugs instead. I wasn’t quite as careful about shaping and situating the mugs as the artist teaching the course, but it was still an enjoyable process. Trying to add dimension to a flat page is always interesting. 😉

Day two involved heading outside and finding natural materials to sketch. I chose three different varieties of leaves. If I could go back and do this one over again, I would have drawn the leaves much closer together than I did. We were also supposed to add a little color to the drawing using watercolors, which I did, using the supplies you saw two weeks ago.

The third day involved learning how to create a value step scale, and sketching a piece of fruit. In the course, the artist drew a pear. As you can see, I decided on a lemon instead. 😉

Day four’s exercise was probably my least favorite. I usually like to draw things that have some kind of connection with each other, and collages don’t always fit that description. I outlined my hand with a pencil and sketched in the dogwood flowers to look as if I were holding them.

Day five was much more my style. It was interesting, in that I was instructed to shade in the page, then bring the objects out of the page using an eraser. Usually it works the opposite way. 😉 I used some pottery jars that I had set on my bookshelves as models.

Day six was all about finding art in the ordinary objects of everyday life. I raided my brother’s workbench for most of these items. 😉 I don’t usually think of trying to sketch things like this, but it was actually fun to try and fit the pieces together and draw them in an appealing way.

The Finishing Touch:

Day seven I was instructed to use my imagination and create a Mandela drawing. The color you can see in the base of the drawing is a circle I had drawn a few days earlier and filled in with pink and yellow watercolor. The instructions were to look at the colors and draw what it made you think of. For some reason, something about the delicate pink and yellow made me think of a butterfly. Flowers are an old standby for me, too, so those were an obvious choice to use for filler. What do you think? 🙂

And Finally…

…you may remember how month or so ago I shared a paint by number I was working on. Well, I finally finished it!

And there you have it! I hope you enjoyed this post. Have you been working on anything artsy lately? Painting? Drawing? ~ Emily