more animals

 Trying to take the time to actually look at animals and learn what it is about their shapes and features that make them look like what they are.  Still need tons of practice, but hey, practice is what gets you to the destination you desire!
Top: zoo sketches and some watercolored pencil work
Bottom: Lion face studies from the other night.  Looked at a series of photos and without trying to go for a style, just drew the features as I saw them.

Plenty of life sketches

So, I've decided that hey, I'm an artist right.  Time to get back into more life sketches.
I got myself a year's membership at the SF zoo and am gonna try and go out to at least something once a week to sketch :)
Sorry that half of these are in all sorts of crazy angles.  Since I don't expect any of these to be masterpieces, I just rotate the page as I go, haphazardly catching as much as I can.

 Above all from a Brazillian bar we went to.  Drawing in dark from odd angles... woo!  I use the brush pen so I can just draw quickly without worrying about heavy details.  I keep trying to learn the poses better.  I'm not great, but practice practice practice!

 I try and doodle the animals until I can get a good idea of how the form goes and then test my ability by making poses up.

 Some of the children were excitedly waiting for the bear's feeding.  They were plastering their faces against the walls.  Drew while waiting for the bears.

 This is one of my favorite pages.  Grizzly's and one polar bear to the right.

 Polar bears, capybara and penguins.  Penguins were the easiest to "caricature"  But I need to go back and try and get their subtle movements down.

 Tiger wouldn't stop moving and the others were really far away making for bad reference.  I was tired once I got to the monkies, so I didn't finish those sketches.

 Did a spot watercolor at the tiger's cage.  I tried to exaggerate and caricature here as well as capture the anatomy.  Man, I was stupid though and forgot I was using my pigment brush!!  ANY water on it and the ink runs ALL over the place!  You can see how I used it to "paint" the rock (I had no grays in the travel set), and had to paint around the lines.  Got embarrassing because a bunch of people started standing around me to watch.  I was like "no!  Don't watch me now!  I'm using pigment that should never get in contact with water and I'm trying to watercolor on it!"
Good news was that it forced me to just keep going and try my hardest despite.  Still, I wound up liking it.  It's just a little smeary.

That's it!  I'll probably post at least once a month with a new batch of art.  Considering that the above is just 7 days compilation of sketches, I think I can manage.

Cinderella

I was unhappy when it dawned on me that the movie cinderella is a strawberry blond (especially strawberry) and yet marketing always represents her as a yellow blond wearing a blue dress (as opposed to the beautiful white dress she has in movie) ... so I did a quick painting.
Also, I needed painting practice.  considering I did everything backwards on this, I'm glad I tested this out before doing it on "important" pieces.