These are just some photos of some of my art that I am still working on. They mostly started off as rough sketches, just for fun, and then they start to grow into… something… You might be wondering why I start to cut them out. The idea is that someday, I will mount them on wooden plaques, and then varnish them. I like that one, because it doesn’t have an ‘up’ or a ‘down’. You could hang it in any direction. I often do that with weird pieces of art. You could rotate them every day, if you wanted to.

These sketches didn’t begin with a plan. Sometimes the best way to start a picture is to put a blank piece of paper in front of you and just let the art happen. That is what ‘pouring your art out’ is all about, I suppose. Once I have a page full of… whatever it ends up full of…  I start adding color. It might be colored pencils, or watercolors, or crayons or oil paints or ink pens… or all of the above.

These are just some of the pictures I happened to stick in a bag full of unfinished art, watercolor paint sets, and brushes. I take the bag with me when I go anywhere that might allow me some time to paint. You may notice that there are some pictures of my face in the unfinished picture above… you know how much I love my own face… Yeah, they are pictures of me from when I still had the long hair, but some of these I started that long ago. There is no time limit on art.

Oh yeah, you might as well throw yourself into your work… HA!

Now that one is just me practicing drawing eyes. This is another good way to have fun while brushing up on your painting and drawing skills… ha… see what I did there…

That’s me as a samurai… it is going to look awesome mounted on a piece of dark wood.

That picture you might remember from the last time I was at my mom’s house. I think it is finished now. As I told you in the last post, simple geometric shapes done in pencil are a good way to learn watercolors. Find some objects around your house that have interesting shapes, and just run a pencil around the outside edge… you do not have to be able to draw a perfect circle or square. Let the shapes overlap, and where they do, you can play with letting the wet watercolor paints run together. Try using different amounts of water to let the colors swirl and run. And try getting a brush very wet and full of pant, and then dribbling or flicking the drops onto the paper. The splatter can end up being beautiful. And it will react in new ways, depending on how wet the areas where it lands happen to be. Play with your colors! Have some fun!

I think that one is finished also… if art is ever actually finished. You can see that I colored over my lines of the geometric shapes with felt pens and colored pencils. I also added some very simple flower shapes over the top… because: why not?

I may come back and show you some of the unfinished art in this post again. I have a vague idea that it might be fun to finish them in Photoshop. Remember, that is how I finished the pictures of the funny monkeys for the children’s book I wrote. Maybe I will do another ‘step-by-step’ series. That could be fun.