Plen air oil sketch

Hello!! Here I post a plan air I made in August 2014.

Figure Drawing 14/03/2015

Here it is another figure drawing at the Florence Academy of Art. I tried sanguigne in pencil and a red pastel in stick. Here is work in progress after about an hour.

Drawing Course 4

I'll share today another couple of works I did in my drawing course.

Here it is a portrait from Giovanni Bellini "Men with turban". The reproduction I was copying from was as bad as usual. I think I missed some proportion, some features are off, and the chin is a bit diferent.. anyway, the portrait is something good to train yourself, because the similarity is hard to achive and dipends on the correct placement of every feature and every wrinkle, But initially you can't get lost in details, you have to focus on the main shapes, like the skull, the jaw, the gesture of the neck, the cheekbones, the height of the nose, of the eyes, of the eyebrows, of the mouth, and so on... There are some kind of different approach to drawing. As you can see from the lines on the copy, when you draw from a photo and you have to learn, you can trace some lines that lead you to reconstruct correctly the image. The accuracy of the measure estabilishes the similarity. It can seem like a boring surveying, but it's important when you begin to keep accuracy and patience to train the eye and the end. Even when you have done lot of exercise, you can do sometime this kind of copy to keep the habit. The "original"..

Riomaggiore digital

Hay ya!! Here I introduce a digital sketch of a landscape made during a recent trip to the Cinque Terre. Here I was in Riomaggiore, the first of the villages on the sea of this handsome region. It's really rough and it'd need a lot of refinement..the colors are quite different according to the screen. I'm not confident with the software yet. This is done with Sketchbook pro.

Plen air sketch: Monte Albano

Here's a recent plen air sketch. Done in watercolor on spot in about 45 minutes. A child and his father stopped by me while I was sketching. The child was curious, and was also full of question which is a great thing I think... the photo has an uneven lighting because some sun rays were filtering through the branches of the pines. The dimension is about 20x15 cm on Fabriano watercolor paper.

Train sketches 4

I share some sketches I made on the train. What's new with these? I made them with Autodesk Sketchbook Pro ® for android, on my new tablet Samsung Galaxy Note 8 ®.

From an advertisment

This is quite old drawing. This come from 2010, the time of the drawing course. I copied a picture from a well-known commercial.. I hope I'm not violating some rule here >_<
I used charcoal pencil for the rocks. Chalk sticks for sky and water (only few primary colors), sanguigne and sepia pencil for the red rocks. I think also some touches with few oil pastel, diluted with turpentine. I tried to reproduce the fog effect with white pastel, but only got a burnishing effect. I forgot the boy is in marker.

Drawing Course 3

Hallo!! Welcome to the third lesson!! Today another good exercise I made in my first drawing course. You need a pencil, better a couple or three (I had HB, 2B, 6B at that time). Perhaps you can do it also with  mecanical pencils too. And you need time and patience: I think, it took me 6-8 hours to do this, maybe 10. Don't hurry!! Stick on't!!
Another time this is "life size", in the sense that the drawing is the same size of the model. We had copy af an engraving, but I don't remember the author. You could complicate the exercise making the drawing a scale of the model: double time bigger, or smaller, or even a third bigger. This is no fun for me but it forces you to become more acquainted with measuring, and it also sharpen your scaling ability. For me the best part is rendering, so I simplified the drawing part.
Still today I think that I should go back and revise the measuring technique, make some paintaking life drawing measuring everything.. but hardly ever I keep this aim..
I suggest not to go as you can; work middle tones, layer after layer. Usually it's better a light sign than a heavy one. Of course you can go darker then...

June Sketches

An eucalyptus in Empoli:

Watercoulor, waterbrush and watercoulor pencils.

Drawing course 2

Here it is the second lesson. Unfortunately, we left life drawing and we began to draw from scruffy copies. But this was exhalting anyway!! And I was able to practice at home.

This is an etching from Giorgio Morandi

Drawing Course 1

Aye!! Today I want to post some very old drawings. To tell the truth... they are the first after a long time. In fact that's the drawing course which turned on the passion for drawing and painting...after the long sleep after the middle school courses. Ahh.. such a sweet time... It was the beginning of 2010. To tell the truth the passion for art was instilled after I took up a course in pottery.. but that's another post.

San Miniato

A windy day. 8th March 2015. Still cold, even if you can see the coming of the spring in some buds and and canes. I was able to see white rushes and the snow on the far Appenine. I went to Corniano, on the southern side of San Miniato, with my new Schmincke Horadam watercolour.

I know.. The city with the famous stronghold isn't in my sketch... but it won't be the first time that I ignore buildings... Maybe I need more patience and precision, and I relax at best with painting natural object. But it could be a field were I pick up. And also I could try to paint the tower and the town someday.. Let's notice: too color density on the near hill. But I had to test the glazing with this strong watercolour brand. You can get almost a guache effect, and that's good for me, but need practice obviously. Pehaps, for the sake of watercolour, it's better to stay away from high density, but I think that finally the attention is focused on San Miniato hill, and that's not bad, because we have a stronger subject.