Drawing Practice

I mentioned Roz's class in my last post.  Her class moves you along at a pretty fast pace.  Once class is done, I intend to work my way through it again at a much slower rate.  There are a lot of fundamentals that I want to work on.  Really seeing and capturing values is one of those skills which I've mentioned a lot over the years on this blog.  It's even more challenging to me when I'm trying to do this with a live subject, even if it's a sleeping house cat, and I find that I still have a lot to learn with this. 

As a result, I sort of cheated one day this week with my homework.  Rather than working with a live subject, I used my polar bear toy with very extreme lighting so that the values would be distinct.  I used a single color of watercolor and a water brush.  It was slow going, but I felt like this was a mini-breakthrough for me.

The top part was practice.  With the bear in the bottom, I like the chest and two front paws the best. I am annoyed that I didn't let the face dry enough so when I finished the nose and mouth these features grew and it looks like the polar bear is smiling.

Going forward, I am finding that I just need to do, accept and embrace the process, be comfortable that I may not be enamored with the results, and trust that if I work on the skills from Roz's class it will help me get closer to the place I want to go.