Shar and Helen at Graduation

This is the first of (probably) many pieces I'm going to do based on the photos I took of my basic training graduation. I don't normally use charcoal for portraits, but it's all I've got available at the moment, so I thought I'd give it a go. I used rough watercolour paper to give it a grainy appearance because I was trying to make it look a little vintage, like the photo it's based on:

It was a dark and stormy night...

A few weeks ago I went down to Somerset, MB, which is sort of the middle of nowhere. It was a middle of winter as well, and there was nothing much to look at but some really beautiful trees, devoid of leaves and covered in snow. I wanted to draw it when I got back, and started right out on this charcoal drawing. It looks nothing like the trees in Somerset. It turned out really dark and twisted. It reminds me of the Disney forests in Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast. I like the dark fairy tale feel, but I think at some point I'll have to retry the original idea.

I used masking fluid to keep the highlights really white, vine charcoal for the majority of the drawing, and compressed charcoal for the really dark blacks. I love the look of vine and compressed charcoal together. I started using it way back in my first semester of art school to add depth to my drawings:

A Try at Photography

I haven't posted much in the last few months because I was doing my Basic Military Officer Qualification in Quebec. Opportunities to draw and paint were limited to say the least. I did, however, get in iPhone for my birthday so I could keep up with the world at large, and almost immediately downloaded Hipstamatic, which makes me think I'm a photographer. I'm tryingh anyway! I've been posted and hope I'll be able to do and post creative things very soon, as I will be moving and hopefully have a place to call my own in Winnipeg.

To begin with here are some of my favourite photos from my graduation parade. The one at the top of this post is me being narcissistic and showing off in my uniform (I didn't take that one obviously), but these next ones I think turned out very well. I took about 300+, so some of them had to turn out, right? I have a few more I love as well, but I'm saving them for drawings, so you'll just have to wait for more.