#DRAWtoberfest Begins With A Kiss

October has begun and the creativity from artists on Twitter continues to awe and inspire. If you haven't already, check out the hash tags #DRAWtoberfest #thedailysketch, #printoctober and #draw2live

I finally got around to drawing a piece to submit for the first week's theme for #DRAWtoberfest which was entitled "The Kiss". The first thing I thought about drawing was the kiss of a dog, so went on an internet search for a photo to draw. I found many with people being the recipient of the kiss, but the photos I liked best were all dogs kissing other dogs or cats - then I came across this one lol:

I don't know who to credit for this wonderful photo, but just love the expression on the cat's face and the far off, dreamy look in the dog's eye, so decided to give it a go. I started working on it just after dinner and wanted to submit it last night before the weekend when the theme would be changing, so it was a quick drawing (for me) and I took a couple of work in progress photos along the way:

And below is the final drawing - a little rough, but was a fun piece to work on. I quickly realized what is needed in my art supplies are more graphite pencils with varying degrees of softness (used a 2B pencil) and a smudge stick, seeing as a piece of tissue paper is not at all precise while trying to blend shadows:

The Kiss

I may give this one another go for the practice and because I love the subject so much - maybe as a color pencil drawing. The next theme for #DRAWtoberfest is Paris. Not sure what to do for that yet, but there will surely be lots of interesting art by others submitted to be inspired by.

Thanks for reading, have a great Saturday everyone! :)

Second Color Pencil Drawing - Dahlia

To continue my practice drawing with color pencils I thought I'd tackle a Dahlia flower.  I took pics as I went along to show the progression.  This time I didn't draw it out first with lead pencil, but went directly to using a medium shade of purple to draw all the outlines and shapes, then defined the shadows more thoroughly with the same pencil.  (Sorry the purple is so faint, I tried to adjust the contrast in PS but that didn't help much)

Here yellow has been added to the heart of the flower and I layered over some of the original purple with a redder shade to add some depth to the shadows: 

Next a darker purple was layered over to give more definition to the shadows and the petals:

For the darkest shadows I began to add brown and began shaping the petals more with varying shades of pink and purple:

Continuing with the purple, more pink and white was added for the petals' highlights:

This is the completed drawing before cropping:

And this is the cropped copy slightly color adjusted in PS. The original drawing is quite purple, but most of  the photos and even the scan kept bringing out the blue.  It was hard for me to decide which one I liked best, so I tried to keep it as true in color to the original as possible:

I still find myself layering a lot and many of the drawings I see in this medium that I admire are not so heavy handed. I guess it might just be my pencil style, more like painting in a way, but I also think it is my inexperience that I need to do so much layering before getting the look I want.

This was another fun exercise to do and I'm already looking through my photos to find the next one.  Over the past couple of summers I've taken many photos of flowers growing in my garden, mostly macro shots and I have plenty of source pics to choose from.  It is good practice and flowers are fun to draw because they are so pretty - lol!

Thanks for visiting! :)