A sketch a day: horse head

Yelena Shabrova ~ A sketch a day: horse head ~ graphite pencil on Canson drawing paper, 4" x 6"
graphite pencil on Canson drawing paper, 4″ x 6″

I wanted to finish this one yesterday and make it my last horse drawn in the departing year of the Horse, but of course that didn’t happen. So let it be the first horse of the new year with many more to follow.

I want to thank you all for following me and supporting my art and wish you all the very best in the new year 2015!

A sketch a day: walking horse

Yelena Shabrova ~ A sketch a day: walking horse ~ Sharpie on drawing paper, 6" x 4"
A sketch a day: walking horse ~ Sharpie on drawing paper, 6″ x 4″

Fun fact: Sharpie marks sip into drawing paper surprisingly fast. So fast that even quick sketches like this one become a battle against ink blobs appearing in the most undesirable places. It’s kind of funny as long as I make the exercise short and repeat it rarely enough to forget that reaching for a Sharpie is not a better option than hunting for a normal drawing pen hiding somewhere in the depths of my drawers, bins, and cans.

March 13, 2013 sketch

Long time ago I was asked for a commission of a black cat, but the reference photo provided consisted mostly of beautiful amber eyes and some very dark blobs that suggested the cat surely was somewhere there in the almost black surrounding. I could not even guess the rest of his face, so asked for a better photo and never heard back. But what was not good enough for a commission once, could work for my own amusement. This is a different cat, and I am not sure how so much of it besides the eyes got into the sketch. It was not planned for.

March 13, 2013 sketch (black cat) - colored pencil on colored paper, 6" x 4"
colored pencil on colored paper, 6″ x 4″

Sketchy horse

sketchy horse - digital art (done with Harmony)

“Sketchy” is a style in Harmony that I like the most. Besides being imprecise and somewhat unpredictable by nature, it does not take kindly to thinking as you draw. The result is always a disaster, and the later in the process it happens the worse it looks. Since this is my first attempt to draw a horse in Harmony, disasters happened more than once. Luckily, I only use black and white, so for the most part when black gets out of control I managed to offset it with white. It’s not exactly erasing, but I think it works.

Other things I learned:

– colors in the color wheel come out anything but what I select and what shows in the preview square. Grays always have some odd tint, so I had to drop the idea of using them, or this would be one psychedelic horse head. I was not in the mood for psychedelic at all.

– apparently just because you can draw on the sides of the toolbox that is centered at the top of the page, it does not mean that you can draw behind it too; that’s how the horse lost nice pointy ears that I was going to give her

A growing… something

A growing... something - digital art

I haven’t visited Harmony for a long time, not even sure why. It’s a great place to get unstuck (and I am stuck thoroughly with an abstract piece right now), to unwind after a stressful day, and to doodle away no matter what your circumstances are.

Harmony is perfectly capable of helping you make realistic art, but that I could do on my own, right? So for the most part me and Harmony create strange things like this one.