Weird Art Habits (Part 1- Staring at Stuff)

Since taking drawing more seriously, I’ve picked up a few strange habits, that I didn’t have before. The main one being, staring at art and intently studying the artist’s brush strokes, linework, shading, colour palette and how they captured light. It’s a bit on the weird side I know, but you’d be surprised by what you can learn from just looking closely at a piece of art.
It was while doing this that I discovered a few techniques, that looked incredibly fun to try out. So, in this post I will try out one of these techniques. One which is used in pencil drawings, for shading and creating texture. Saying as I learnt this from staring at pencil drawings, I’m not sure of the actual name for this technique, but would describe it as a messing scribbly scratchy way of shading, which uses several different grades of pencils.

Originally, I wasn’t going to make this post and only wanted to see how the technique worked. But the results at the ¼ way point looked kind of good, so I decided to turn it into a post. At this stage, some of this picture maybe too lightly drawn to make out, but what I had drawn was half a face and flowers. That may sound a little disturbing, but I couldn’t decide whether to draw a face or flowers, so settled on drawing both as I wasn’t planning on sharing the drawing.

Luckily the finished piece doesn’t look all that disturbing. It looks more like the woman in the picture got really drunk and fell into a flower bed, where she slept with her face half planted all night. Then in the morning, woke up with her face half covered in soil, flowers and foliage. Putting that aside, I really like how this technique turns out. It gives the skin a very nice texture and looks more realistic than the other techniques I’ve used and gives the drawing some life. As for the flowers, it works just as good as the other techniques I’ve used, but is more fun. So, with all that in mind, I would definitely like to dedicate time to try and perfect this method of shading.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this post and….
As always, Thanks for reading.