Monday Morning Spice: Eiffel Tower at night

Today, I am going to do a little bit of cheating in this post. Instead of the usual photograph of Eiffel at night, shimmering with lights and it’s beacon of light standing out in the sky (it reminds me of the Batman signal!), I’ll post a sketch of it instead! 🙂

I made this sketch last night – looking at a photo from google, rather than standing in front of actual Eiffel Tower (hey, it still counts!). It took just half an hour and I used a single Faber Castell PITT artist pen for it.

Eiffel Tower at night! 🙂

Sketching is one of the things that really excites me these days – and drawing pens are a medium I accidentally stumbled upon, through a case of impulsive buying. 😉

 

I hope looking at the beautiful Eiffel inspires you to travel to Paris, as much as it entices me right now! 🙂

 

Have a great week ahead!

Sketching – the old sailor

Here’s the latest installment from my sketching class! In last class, I attempted a portrait for the first time which came out to be okay. In today’s class, I tried sketching a side-angle portrait of an old sailor. Here’s the sketch (with the original on the left, obviously :P) :

The old sailor

And my art teacher said I have a knack for drawing portraits! Yay! 🙂

Sketching – cats and portraits

I’ve been a bit away from the blog lately.. lots of travelling or preparation for travelling (read as: the hassles of getting a visa for visiting Europe) has kept me away from posting.

So, this is a comeback post of sorts. Although not really a ‘travel’-post, it relates to one of my travel dreams, of being able to capture beautiful sights while travelling – be it a historical landmark, a mindblowing scenery or a cute girl.

Being absolutely useless at art, I took up what I think is a considerable challenge and joined an art class. I started with a few landscapes and boats that my teacher Lynn taught – although didn’t bother to upload any pictures. After that, impressed with our efforts (or more likely just to give us some encouragement), Lynn asked us to bring any photo we liked and try to sketch it in class. The result was a sketch of a photo I had taken in a museum sometime back.

A couple of weeks back, I drew this cat:

The cat

I had uploaded this photo on facebook and got quiet a few interesting comments regarding it size and how it could be one of those pets who feeds on McDonalds food or the fat cat in Shrek. Nevertheless, I loved how I was able to sketch it in less than an hour and felt pretty good about my efforts.

After a couple more classes on things like shading, texture and figure-drawing, Lynn asked us – what we wanted to draw next. Without a fragment of doubt, I answered – “Portraits!!”. I didn’t realize how tough a challenge this was going to be until last week, when I tried to draw the first portrait Lynn assigned to me. Not only is it so difficult to get it accurate, but the fact that it’s a portrait, it’s much easier for me to find mistakes or dissimilarities from the original in my own work because all our lives, we are trained to look and recognise faces. To find and identify each and every feature, line, wrinkle, hairstyle. Whereas it’s much easier to play around and alter a landscape. Anyway, I’ll stop making the excuses now and show you my (self-proclaimed) brave effort:

The man

In my sketch, the man looks like he has much less sharper features and probably a bit broader jaw/face. But Lynn said it resembled the original to some extent. Although I know she’s saying that so that I don’t feel too bad, I am happy 🙂

Capturing a beautiful moment – in pencil!

I mentioned in a recent post that I am learning sketching and will post some sketches here. But, before you dive headlong into the post, here’s a DISCLAIMER: I am not known to be good at art. At any type of art. In fact, I’ve never taken an art class before. So, please be sympathetic when you see the sketches 😛

Alright first one, it’s a sketch I made in last week’s class.It is based on a section of a photo that my art teacher had brought to the class. The bit that I liked, are the clouds – made by rubbing out bits from the charcoal-shading. This was something very new to me.

Quaint rural setting - with my favourite - a windmill!

In yesterday’s class, I tried sketching a photo I had taken at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC.

The photo I tried to sketch

So, here’s my attempt..

Drumroll please!!

Attempt at sketching a beautiful moment!

What do you think? 🙂

And as mentioned in the disclaimer in the first paragraph, please be gentle in your critique! Hehe! 🙂

p.s. Apologies for the poor quality of the photograph of the sketches! Poor lighting in my apartment (yeah, I know, lame excuse!)