Do you sometimes just suddenly realise the age you have got to, and it feels like a surprise? And you wonder what you have done with the last few years? I’m having a lot of those at the moment. So I will really try to keep this blog up, and post at least once a week, if nothing else as a log of what I’ve been doing.

So last week I just caught up with where I had got to with watercolour faces last year.

This week I thought I show where I’d gotten up to with my pencil drawing faces for last year.  I am always drawn to anything with eyes, I have to really steel myself to paint something that doesn’t have eyes – yeah I know; odd.

So these were last years attempts and at the time I was very happy with them.  I can remember avoiding like the plague, open mouthes showing teeth lol, but once I tried it, it wasn’t so bad.

It’s interesting leaving a gap and looking back. It’s so much easier to critique yourself. The main thing I can see that I got wrong was the depth of tone, the darks just weren’t dark enough.

So here are a few of the more recent faces in graphite. As I am now back at work, I don’t have as much time to paint, but it is much easier to pick up and put down some drawing.

While I am self aware enough to know they aren’t brilliant, I can be objective enough to see that there has been a marked improvement, and for me, it all comes down to the darks, oh and better blending.  I’m still mostly drawing in my Moleskine sketch book. I have tried other types of paper, and will do a comparison in another blog, but I’m not sure keep changing paper types or instruments of any kind is at all helpful.

I’d love to know other peoples’ lightbulb moment when it comes to improvements in their art.

If you’ve got this far, thank you for indulging me 😉 Have a lovely week.