Baaaby

I drew this from a photo I had of a cousin of mine from when she was a baby. This and the Jack Johnson portrait have been done in my sketchbook; I'm not too much a fan of the texture that is picked up from drawing like this in my sketchbook, so I think I'll go buy some smooth Bristol paper some day or something of the sort, and see how much better I like that.

I hope I will be able to keep up with doing portraits once school starts again...though I have a feeling I will be too inundated with assignments to be able to make the time for this kinda stuff. I certainly don't want to go another 2 years of not doing a single one, I know that much!

Jack Johnson Portrait

I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that Jack Johnson is my favorite musical artist. I never find myself getting tired of listening to his music, which is something I can't say for the large lot of other music I listen to. Yesterday I was listening to his first album repeatedly as I was sorting through things in my room for the duration of the day. That night I decided to just go ahead and draw the man. What adds to my admiration for him aside from his musical talent is his overall persona. He does so much for charities, the environment, and various other things he believes in. Take his current world tour as an example, where he's donating one hundred percent of the tour's profits to charity. If that's not respectable, I don't know what is!

I'll go on and talk about this drawing itself, and stray away from discussing the actual subject matter! This is more or less my first realistic portrait in two years, with the exception of like...one semi-quick portrait I did the other day for a friend. In my later years of high school I was really into doing portraits, but then I went on to college and I stopped. In Art Fundamentals we did have a later assignment that warranted a realistic rendering of a person's head/torso...but we had to use colored pencils and colored paper...that's just out of my medium. I'm a pencil on white paper kinda girl when it comes to doing portraits! Then, being in animation, I've never really had the opportunity to draw in this manner. Now that's it's summer though, I decided to go do what I loved to do just a couple years back, and this is that attempt! I don't really like the hair and various other bits and pieces, but it works well enough.

The photo I referenced from is here. I feel like I lost a bit of resemblance, but I don't know if that's because I truly did or if it's because I've been staring at it for so long! This took about 6/7 hours to do, but that's with the occasional laptop distraction added onto the fact that I just find myself to be an overall slower artist than many others. Though I don't know, maybe for all I know that's a reasonable time frame.

Lilo & Stitch

Lilo and Stitch is one of my favorite Disney movies, and quite possibly the one Disney film I've watched the most! Recently I found myself wanting to draw Lilo, so I decided to do so, and since I've never really drawn Stitch before I figured I would draw him as well. I painted this with gouache on watercolor paper. Initially I wanted to use a watercolor effect with the gouache...but I ended up using the more opaque painting method.