Vacation is over

My winter vacation is winding down even though I have the weekend yet, however I am back into teaching mode. Which means my drawing time will be shorten.
Friday January 4th I  went into school  for a little while. So I only managed to do two drawings. One easy, I have done this Mickey mouse before at DCA Animation Academy, however it is in the book so I decided to do it anyway. I also tried a very difficult one. I had hard time with Pumbaa and almost gave up a couple of times. But he is what he is.

 On Saturday January 5th  I tried drawing Elasticgril. I am not as pleased with her as I was with Mr. Incredible.

On Sunday January 6th I started Atta however I was not able to completely finish her until Monday after work.

Tuesday I found a little time to do a few easier quick drawings.   The Mouse on the right is Emile, Remy's younger brother.

 Wednesday I tried to challenge my self again.  For some reason I find the Lion King characters to be very challenging. Then again they are the last ones in the book so maybe that is what they are suppose to be.

Thursday I woke up sick to my stomach and ended up coming back home. After sleeping for a while I drew the last two figures from the Wall-E section. 

 Autopilot is where all of my grey colored pencils really paid off. This one makes me want to go back and redo EVE,

After taking another nap I drew Buzz light year. Getting the dome to look like it was there, was a challenge but I think it looks pretty good. 

January 3 Back to Disneyland

Today my Daughter and I went over to Disney California again for a few hours.  We mostly rode rides today. However, I did manage a few times while we sat, to do some drawing. We did visit some artist at Off the Page and Down Town Disney. I learned that the Disney artist also use Prismacolored pencils, I found that to be a pretty cool little fact.

On the way back from Disney I stopped off at the art store again to pick up a few colors I felt I still needed to do justice to my pictures. Then I practiced more using the blender to blend together colors.  Especially for Mr. Incredible. He is not a real red or an orange red that I had, but between the colors I had and using the blender marker I think I got a nice color match. I am extremely happy with they way his hands came out. The picture does not show it as well as I think it does in person. However I am very pleased with this one. 

January 2 New Art Store

Well today I tried to draw a very interesting character. A character that is all white on a white piece of paper just does not work well. So I tried to shade using some of my grey colored pencils only to find out I really do not have the right colors. So I did the next best thing I colored the back ground.

Next I went to the back of my book and drew Simba. I'm having a little difficutly getting the characters centered on my page.

Flick makes my 25th page of my sketch book. I am quite pleased with this guy. To me he looks almost traced but I swear I did it all on my own!

I also found a new art store today, Utrecht.  When I was in Canada we went into this neatest art store by the airport. I was hoping this would be something like that. It was close. It is definitely and art store however and not a craft store. They have easels, paper and canvas, and then every color of every type of materials any artist might need. Their paint section reminded me of the Art Academy at Walt Disney World, with rows of pant tubes in every color.

I however focused on the pencil area. They sell the Prismacolor pencils individually which is sweet for me.  Right now they are on sale for nearly half the price of what I paid at Michaels. So after my frustration with Eve and not having the right grey I went and got a bunch of grey scale pencils. Luckily I had my handy Excel sheet and was able to know what colors I already had.

Later when I return with my teacher Id I will get another card and that card will give me 20% off all non sale items.  I will definitely be getting my pencils and other art supplies from here from now on. 

January 1st Happy New Year

Today I went well out of my comfort zone and tried to draw Mater from the Pixar Movie Cars . I nearly gave up on this one. However I did keep at it.
Much like Wall-E I do not see me coloring this guy. I realize I am not comfortable with drawing rusted items.

I did 6 pages yesterday so today I only did the one. Maybe some day I'll come back and color him.

December 31st New Year's eve

I tried one more time to draw a princess face from the "Learn to Draw Favorite Princess" book. This time my a tempt was Mulan. I actually started her the day before. She was looking pretty good except for the lips. So I decided to walk away and try again today and maybe just color it. But still not luck those lips are hard.

Next I decided to try Stitch. My daughter says this is one of her favorites that I have done.

Today, I also went back to Michael's again. Besides purchasing the sets of pencils you can buy them individually. So I bought a couple more grey pencils and a Prismacolor Colored Pencil Accessory Set. It has two blenders one is a marker and the other is pencil. It also came with 2 erasers and sharpener and the coolest thing, I think, is the pencil extender for when your pencils get short! (All of my art supplies are thanks to my grandmother for the gift card!!) 

I next made a chart for easy access to know what colors I have. I originally made a chart in the back of my book. As seen on the right side of the picture below. But it was difficult flipping back and forth. Plus I realized as I got new colors it would be hard to add colors. So I decided to make a list of all the colors in Excel and print it out. Then I colored lightly over the name or number of the pencil and then dark in the little box. On the Excel sheet below the left hand side is all the possible Prismacolors available. On the right side of the excel sheet (middle of picture) is the Artist's Loft pencils I had gotten first. I have all of the colors but I only listed the colors I am keeping in my case. As some of the Prismacolors are close to those colors.

Each day I have tried to do two characters that seem difficult or more of a challenge and then for my third page I look for something a bit simpler. My goal is to fill up my sketchbook with all Disney characters and to do all of the characters in my books. At the very beginning of the Learn to Draw Celebrated Characters Collection there are many of the same pictures they teach you to draw at the Animation Academy. Being it was New Years Eve and the family all had a head cold, we were taking it easy. My eleven year old however wanted to stay up till midnight.  I decided to just sit and draw some of the faces from the beginning of the book as we waited for the ball to drop at midnight.

December 30 New Pencils.

I am still on the mission to learn to draw faces. Another thing I find hard to do is hands. However I seem to be doing better with hands and fingers and even find the kind of fun to do now.

Out of the Character Collection book today I decided to draw Lilo. I think she came out pretty good. The hard part was getting the grey highlights in her hair.

I then decided to take a little break from the Learn to Draw books and with what I learned the other day at the Academy at DCA and by looking at the Learn to Draw book on Amazon for Phineas and Ferb I tried drawing the 3 main characters.

I kind of like this picture where you can see some of my color pencils of to the side.


And for my last picture of the day I decided to draw Tigger's body. I think his arms look very weird but that is how they were in the book so I went with it.

I am frustrated with the pencils not being the color they say or not having the right color. For example the Perry int he picture above he is colored with the pencil that says green!!  So with a 50% coupon and  a gift card in hand I went to Michaels and purchased the 36 set.

 And I have to say these are expensive pencils but I feel they are worth every penny! They are very nice!! So the above the pictures I did go back and touch up a little with the new pencils.

December 29th Pixar

Not feeling confident with the Princess book. It over whelms me for now. So I went to the Character Collection, which has many Pixar movies in it. I started with Wall-E. The down side of some of the Pixar characters is that they seem a little flat to me.  I also admit I do not follow directions very well. I started with the basic shape in step one and then skipped to step 3 and 4. The first picture below is what it was suppose to look like. But I just was not happy with that so I looked up the second picture from the internet and combined the two.

 This is my final project. Not exactly what the book shows but I like it. I do not feel I have the right color so I doubt I will be coloring it. 

Next I decide to try another face. So I picked Liguini and Remy from Ratatouille. 

I have been doing 3 pages a day in my sketch book so I did not want to stop that trend now. However, Wall-E, as well as Linguini and Remy where pretty challenging. So I thougt I would try a character not so challenging. 

To my surprise Mike turned out to be the most chalenging of the day. He is so round it was hard to get that persist round body and eye.