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Presenting my first painting of 2006, a sneak preview of my bridal bouquet. Painted using watercolour pencils from Daler-Rowney and Lyra, and Derwent’s new Inktense pencil, on Saunders Waterford 140lb Not paper (bought as a ‘Fat Pad’ – 25 sheets in a spiral bound pad), using Pentel Aquash brushes.

While shopping for more silk flowers to add to my bouquet and headband at Hobbycraft yesterday, I happened across a selection of Daler Rowney’s new range of artists pencils, and bought a sketching set and watercolour set. Clicky linkies for reviews.

Last week Michael surprised me by reorganising my section of the office, finding homes for my brushes, paints and various art clutter, and creating a space for my Artsphere easel. He’s made me a studio! A proper little area for making art, which doesn’t involve having to prop my keyboard on the printer and wade through a jungle of cables. It’s there at the turn of my chair, and I’m ready to go. It’s great, and has been just the thing to finish off my creative slump – everything I want to do is possible now. Well, not everything. I’ve still got to go to work tomorrow.

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Another round-up of linkage…

• Dogsitting – caution, contains story of a dead dog, but very funny.
• Fruit helmet for cats – seen LimeCat? LimeCat was not pleased. Anyway, now you can make your own helmet for your cat, from commonly available fruit. Your cat may not be pleased.
• publicenergy on Podcasts – a few suggestions for podcasts you might like to try, including They Might Be Giants.
• Yo-yo, pet and MP3 player in one
• World’s Largest Pencil – at Faber-Castell‘s head office.

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Daler-Rowney have created a new range of artists’ pencils with a selection of sketching, watercolour, graphic and pastel pencils.

The sketching pencils come in a tin of 12, and consist of:

• HB Graphite
• Charcoal
• Sanguine Smooth
• Black Smooth
• Sepia Drawing Dark
• Sepia Drawing Light
• Sanguine Drawing
• White Drawing
• Black Drawing
• Watersoluble 8B
• Watersoluble 4B
• Watersoluble HB

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It’s a good selection of pencil types and colours, ideal for planning paintings and marking out areas of light and shade. Derwent do a collection of sketching pencils with a greater selection, but this set seems to be better quality. The pencils themselves work better on smooth paper – the sketch above was done on a sheet of white copy paper. They’re nice and light – with the exception of the graphite pencil which draws clear, hard HB lines.

As far as prices go, they’re quite reasonable – about £10.00 in the UK, about $8 in the US.

Latest Update: Moved a couple of step-by-step demos into a separate post – linked below.

Tutorials

• Jason Cheeseman-Meyer’s Perspective Tutorial – a walk-through drawing a boxing ring from the rafters, with a twist.
• Drawing People – another page on PigPog, with lots of tips and tutorials.
• Drawing folds in cloth from Jason Cheeseman-Meyer – starting with the basics of how cloth folds.
• Perspective – How to Draw It – the basics you need for drawing roads, buildings, etc.

Learning by Example

• An excellent animation – from skeleton to clothed woman reclining – it’s a Flash file, but doesn’t take too long to open, even over a modem. Starts with a drawing of a skeleton, then slowly builds up the layers until it’s a drawing of a woman fully dressed. Contains a nude step, if that sort of thing bothers you.

• See also our Painting Step-by-Step and Comics Step-by-Step pages.

Sharing the Experience

Online

• As we’re learning to draw, we’re uploading our attempts to Flickr, and tagging them with learningtodraw – if you do the same, your pics will show up there too.

Words of Wisdom

• Think Less. Draw More. – by Danny Gregory – inspiring words on the why of drawing, with some useful hints on the how.