ONLINE ART COURSE – THE SECOND OF SIX SMALL SKETCHES WITH THE INK PENS – BEE

My hubby and I sat down together again this afternoon, and followed along with the video, drawing the second ink pen sketch of a bee. I thought this was going to be really challenging, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought! I didn’t use the proportional dividers this time and I think I managed to get the proportions pretty well spot on. The only thing wrong was that the back leg came out a bit too thick.

Following the teacher Phil’s initial layout for the page, the bee came out too low on the page, which means that it is overlapping the space for the drawing underneath. To remedy this, I am going to re-order the sketches and put a smaller one underneath the bee.

I didn’t feel the need to re-draw this sketch as I am pretty happy with it.

Interestingly, my hubby’s attempt didn’t have enough contrast, as he had not made the dark values dark enough. As Phil said at the beginning of the course, this is a common problem until one is courageous enough to pull out all the stops with the black! Somehow it is counter-intuitive to do this, and it’s probably because we tend to draw what our brain sees (i.e. what we think something looks like) rather than what our retina sees (what is actually there). He went back to his drawings and darkened those values and the improvement was immediate. Making those dark areas and shadows darker than you think, really makes the whole picture come to life.

Looking carefully at the reference photograph, I had never appreciated just how hairy bees are! One never sees them this enlarged in real life, of course. It was fun working on all that fur, especially using the finest of the pens. Doing this course is certainly getting us to look at things in a lot more detail and seeing them as they really are.