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  Who needs warmup sketches?! Oh, right.Jul 24, 2012 6:36 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:Page 25 is one of those pages that really makes me irritated with myself afterward, when I belated realized that it was much more stiff and picked at than I want to these pages to be. Then I took a few stabs at page 26, wasted both sides of a piece of paper in equally stiff layouts, and decided I'd better try loosening up with some sketches in the remaining white space. This one seemed to start going into the more expressive territory I would like to be in
 
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and sure enough when I went and tried another layout for page 26, it flowed along much more successfully than the previous attempts.
 
I read about a lot of artists saying they do like a daily warmup sketch or something to loosen up--I suppose a Monday after not having drawn all weekend would be a particularly useful time for such an exercise. I've thought about doing more regular warmup sketches before, but I'm always worried that--knowing me--I'd get too into them and they'd start taking up way too much time; like, if I wasn't doing the sketch I'd be able to get another A* page done or something. So I guess I'm still waffling about committing to something like that. They do seem handy sometimes though.
 
The gray tones in that sketch (and, for instance, in the hair of page 26) kind of happen accidentally with this big brush I'm using now: it's so thick that it's hard to dry thoroughly after rinsing, so especially when I first start using it I sometimes tend not to towel it off very thoroughly, dip the tip in ink, and then start drawing; this starts out drawing deep black from the pure ink at the tip, but gradually rinse water from the inner depths of the brush starts working its way down to the tip, so the painted line gets gradually lighter and lighter. It can be pretty handy, actually! And stuff like that is a big part of sumi-e painting (that's the type of brush this is), at least according to the little booklet they had at the store: in fact, in sumi-e you're supposed to be able to get really sophisticated and, like, triple-layer your brush in different tones of wash, so you start a stroke with one and then it shades to the other, and eventually the third, or something.
 
... I'm probably not going to try that. :P
 
 
 
 
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