Malik straining to keep the twisting pose. Decided to leave this one as a slightly rough red Bic pen sketch for now. There’s something to be said about the energy found in the work-up drawing.
as an artist I manifest my emotions through my doodles. I was going through a rough spot with my mental health back in 2016. This doodle would always light me up. I hope it does the same for you
My vision of the character ‘Smaug’ from J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’.
Pencil sketch, coloured digitally on IbisPaint X.
Here is a passage from The Hobbit describing Smaug’s appearance: “There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon, fast asleep; thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber. Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light. Smaug lay, with wings folded like an immeasurable bat, turned partly on one side, so that the hobbit could see his underparts and his long pale belly crusted with gems and fragments of gold from his long lying on his costly bed.”
I found a Gap ad in a 90s Vanity Fair magazine; the background was completely white, perfect for doodling a background on it. I also highlighted the woman's freckles and lips with a bronze Sharpie.
Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975)
Shostakovich’s contemporaries do not recall seeing him working, at least not in the traditional sense. The Russian composer was able to conceptualize a new work entirely in his head, and then write it down with extreme rapidity—if uninterrupted, he could average twenty or thirty pages of score a day, making virtually no corrections as he went.
But this feat was apparently preceded by hours or days of mental composition—during which he “appeared to be a man of great inner tensions,” the musicologist Alexei Ikonnikov observed, “with his continually moving, ‘speaking’ hands, which were never at rest.”
Shostakovich himself was afraid that perhaps he worked too fast. “I worry about the lightning speed with which I compose,” he confessed in a letter to a friend. Undoubtedly this is bad. One shouldn’t compose as quickly as I do. Composition is a serious process, and in the words of a ballerina friend of mine, “You can’t keep going at a gallop.” I compose with diabolical speed and can’t stop myself.… It is exhausting, rather unpleasant, and at the end of the day you lack any confidence in the result. But I can’t rid myself of the bad habit.
- From Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey
#dailyrituals #inktober #shostakovich @masoncurrey
Skylight from Dialogues in Paradise by Can Xue.
The light shrank back into two dots. A dark shadow brushed by, a clumsy night bird that shrieked and swooped toward the skylight, its huge wings tapping the roof fiercely, echoing like thunder.
I live by the water (Torontos inner harbour) and managed to capture a seagull in mid flight. Did my best in not coloring it , and focused on the ✏️ pencil
A fun drawing to do. I usually do a lot of crosshatching, but for this one I went for the smoothness, better to capture the light, I suppose, where crosshatching can be a little distracting. Or look like hair! As some have said.
Abandoned drawing of Ellie wearing a black turtleneck. The lighting in the room was terrible and the black fabric hid a lot of the shadow detail of the folds and it frustrated me. That’s my excuse anyway… Model: Ellie.
Doodling will give you ideas for projects that you didn't expect. The characters for my book, Flight of the Silk, came from sketches. This picture is one illustration for the book.
The things pulling me down seem so huge - cancer treatments, empty nest, COVID, depression, and big world problems. It's amazing how small things, a wren, a breeze, a smile, a bud, a furry friend, can lighten the load.
