I've not been doing a whole lot of painting recently. Like all of my beloved books and some of my other treasured possessions, I've boxed up my painting materials and made them ready for transportation which, obviously, means I've not been at them that much recently.
Now, where I'm moving to is somewhat smaller and I'm sacrificing a dedicated office space for the foreseeable future. This means that most of my materials will be going into deep storage for that time and, without that dedicated painting space, I can't see myself doing as many paintings in the coming year.
But that's okay, because I've decided to spend the next year getting better at sketching... with a real pencil! YES. For the past 4 years, most of my drawing activities have been digital and as such, I've kind of neglected draftsmanship skills and also stock piled a load of pencils and mostly unused sketch books. Now this is kind of a crime so to rectify this, I've going to try to devote myself to drawing more in the pages of the many sketch pads I have, and I've already made a start (and I'm bloody lovin' it as well!):
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| Concept sketches for a character idea I'm trying to develop for one of my many open projects (a project that I've been chipping away at since 2005). |
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| Found an old sketch while I was clearing stuff for the move, of a wing that had a stained glass window in it. This made me want to develop that concept a little further in case I wanted to do a follow on painting to the Entomologist piece and show another angel creature. |
While at the moment my graphite wanderings are a little sporadic, I'm sure I'll become more organized in time and start to focus the sketching on the projects I've outlined for myself. At the moment though, I'm enjoying getting the feel for the material again, and trying to break the thought process I have of thinking "undo" in my head when I make a mistake.
Lloyd Harvey
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