Booking it

Here is the result of my storytelling practise so far: http://amandavanlaar.com/HKU/Vissenboekje.pdf
I will eventually upload the storyboards and stuff as well! Some day.

Here are some photo's of how the book would look

Much much more to come!
I can't wait dfdsfsagfdag

Caricature

To illustrate my lack of diversity, have this picture:

Suuure I tried to draw different noses and stuff within a certain ratio, but I always feel a little insecure(?) about taking things to the extreme. It is pretty frustrating to feel like all my faces look the same. This might not be the most confronting example, but I feel really reluctant to show some of my old doodles. You could visit my outdated portfolio while it is still up to check :/

What I hope to achieve by practising caricature is more expressive and diverse characters as well as objects. It is a lot of observing, exaggerating, practising and (obviously) making people angry hehehe.

Freaking angles man! I should keep my board toggled when drawing...

Hah.. Yeah I have the best boyfriend.

Suddenly a leek on my desk. Might as well!

I have always been a bit shy when drawing in public, but after practising caricatures for even a short while I feel a lot more comfortable! Even if the drawings are not that good, haha. I have to practise for a reason, right? (kind of sad...) Furthermore, I noticed that I really really suck at drawing caricatures from photo's. I need the person to move around and interact to feel the result fits the "original".

You might have noticed I still don't exaggerate a lot... I'm still very slowly getting out of my shell. What I might be missing is a lot of anatomical knowledge, planar build-up and "flow" in my art, so let's losen that up a bit! I have yet to find "my" medium, though indian ink with a brush feels nice. Oh and black and white charcoal/crayons, mmmmmmm.

Tiny bird, big bird, angry fish and running leek!

I'm getting there...! Though it's very cartoony and not really the type of caricatures I am after.

Back for more!

Well, I never really left... I just didn't upload anything, haha;;

I am looking into shapes and exaggeration some more. It's easier to draw animals and objects than humans, since I can give them any kind of personality I want! I am having way too much fun looking at silly hands and paws... Also, fat.

Quick warming up, looked at some animal video's. 

Worked from the top of the paper to the bottom, but that might be pretty obvious, haha.

Decided to not go too toony with these as it feels really cheap. I want them to be a bit more childeren's book type drawings. 

Things I should look out for are: 

1. Don't make everything fat with tiny feet!
2. Variable linethickness (use it more)
3. Balance
4. How would the character move? Laugh? Eat?
5. Try two more approaches: one more animal like and one more whacky (these are a pretty tame middleway of the two)

Learning paint and stuff

Watercolor
I have only a bit of basic experience with watercolor and aquarel pencils, so I would like to expand on this.
In the crate of inherited paint stuff were a lot of cool watercolor containers! Oh, and the stretched sheet of paper you see on that board? It is older than I am haha, my mother stretched it ages ago. It helt up fine during practise, but I'm glad I didn't keep it for a more elaborate work.

I never heard of line and wash, but boy do I love its looks and style!

Nostalgic~

In the bottomleft you can see a small negative space practise, but ah... Soon after this photo I went to ruin it.

I should probably draw something other than trees.. Oh well!

I have also tried salt and masking fluid, though I tend to be too impatient for these techniques (it looked fine, untill I started poking around and testing techniques upon techniques... Should have made progress photo's because it just looks like puke now!). I should also try to work with negative spaces more, as well as planning my steps better.

Acrylics
Because I never worked with acrylics before (only once to make a costume, but I don't think that counts) and wasn't sure what "styles" are most common I followed/imitated Gagnon's tree video as a step up.
Oh god, I didn't adjust the colours to eachother. And my small brush disagreed (probably picked the wrong one). And my fanned brush was a monster compared to this tiny tiny canvas I had laying around, meaning my grass looks more like some bright green mush ghhh.
I enjoyed the paint and method! It is sort of like watercolor in terms of mixing and deluding, but more like how I expect oil paint to be in terms of movability when on the canvas. It did dry super fast, faster than I would have liked.

Gonna try different methods very soon, I hope!

Oil

During my first attempt at oilpaint, the brush felt very awkward... So I decided to try the paletknife instead for my first go. A problem I ran into before I could start was that I couldn;t open 80% of my paint tubes, resulting in problem number two: ran out of certain colours since I could only open the tiny tubes and needed a lot for the paletknife technique. I also didn't observe the reference enough and could (wanted) have gone in a more abstract-expressive way. It's all kind of fuzzy now.

Do love the medium though, just need tons of practise. Next time, I will try the more gentle approach, as this approach miiiight have been more of a gouache or other thick paint type of thing, haha.

Revisit....

Doesn't look like the source in the slightest way urgh... Didn't pay attention to the curve and direction of the face enough. Should have taken the caricature aspect into my oilpaint practise!! OBSERVATION! God...

Learning pencils

So far my penciling skills have been limited to simple sketching (lines and shitty shading, haha). So I really wanted to get into that realistic jazz! And what luck, we have/had artists in our family who left us with several boxes full of pencils, charcoal, charcoalpencils, white and black chalk, a sharpeningknife aaand lots of paint and other stuff, which I will be trying out in a while as well. I don't know why I never bothered to learn about the traditional media in a proper way, pff... Went digital at 14 and never decided to look back?

I decided to start with a start-up sketch in my own lazy "good enough as base" sketchingstyle so you will hopefully be able to see my progress. Source (hahaaa... looking back, it has pretty obvious mistakes).

Gentl erased the sketch and added cleaner lines and some basic shade.

Looked up more tutorials sice the second phase. I loved the idea of using regular graphite pencils for the light areas and charcoal to get the dark spots really dark. Didn't have a tortillon so made one from soft paper. Wish I had heard of these earlier!

Lovelovelove charcoal filled pencils!

Oh and I tried some other techniques and materials before filling the face, so for the sake of completeness I will add some of the scribbles.

Aaaand then I got to the hair... I will get back to that some other day, gonna try other media first.

Continuing pencils
Looking more into penciltypes and hardness as well as shading techniques now. I constantly find myself using the same techniques gah... Crosshatching always feels so messy, so everytime I use it, I get frustrated and throw it away instead of saving it as reference crapcrapcrap!

More shading and stuff.

Gotta learn how to create different textures! And more use of linethickness.