Sketch Awesome Project 2

Project 2 – Sea Life

Project 2 was dedicated to sea life. This topic was interesting and, at the same time, outside of my comfort zone. I am more of a landscape/nature girl, but I did enjoy it and overall I am happy with the end result.

This week project was split into three parts:

Part 1 – Sketching Shark

Part 1 was about 33 minutes long, and it was the longest video so far. It consisted of talking us through the pencil sketch, inking, mixing shades of greys, painting over the sketch and creating the background. I tweaked a few elements to my liking when comparing it to the original video and skipped white pen over the shark so my background has more depth and is softer in tone. I did not outline a shark with a thick black line either for special effect. 

Only four split primary colours were used – cold blue (phthalo blue), cold red (quin. rose), warm red (perm. red deep-only for background) and warm yellow (azo yellow medium.)

Part 2 – Further Ideas

Part 2 was quite a short video proposing some further ideas for practising and providing more reference photos of sea creatures. I’ve opted for a seahorse in loose sketch style and a turtle.

Part 3 – Bonus: Goldfish

Part 3 was a bonus video of sketching a goldfish following the same principles as when sketching the shark. I was experimenting a little as this is what a sketchbook is for, after all, so I was following the tutorial very loosely.

This week summary

• creating shades of grey is fun. I found out that it’s always biased towards one of the primary colours, and it is hard to get a proper ”grey” colour but this custom-made colour enhances sketches more
• Royal Talens Rembrandt and Van Gogh watercolours are much more fun than Aquafine ones
• I am fiddling far too much with some sketches and need to do them more quickly
• Artkula community is very supportive