Here’s one from our trip to Seward last weekend. This is on the beach in front of Miller’s Landing. I recorded a YouTube short for it here.
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Tugboat and Barge
Hey Everyone
Here is a sketch from a photo I took on my phone back in 2021. We must have been on a walk or something on the coastal trail and I decided to take a picture of the barge in the water.
I think it may be two vessels – a tugboat and a barge sitting next to each other.
Anyway, I used a 0.5mm mechanical pencil with a graphite hardness of ‘B’, blending stump for the clouds and a 3B pencil for the dark spots down in the deadly mud flats below.
Tugboat and Barge in the Cook Inlet -
Let’s draw a squirrel on the fence.
Hey everyone, Steve here for another drawing session. If you’re an artist, I’m going to let you in on a little secret – get a camera and keep it handy. It can be the one on your phone or something more advanced. Take a lot of pictures, and try to get a feel for what makes a photo interesting because a lot of that skill also applies to drawing.
Over time, your photo library will grow and you’ll have a lot of material to work from – it feels a lot less like cheating when you reference your own photos.
Now a lot of people swear by drawing from observation, but there are some things that that just won’t work for – and squirrels are one of them. They are just too fast. Drawing from a reference is ok and it doesn’t have to be copied pixel by pixel – you’re not a printer. You are free to edit the composition, add things that aren’t there and anything else you can think of.
Maybe you’ll notice I’m not just using pencil for this one – I’m adding some ink to make some
Dark shadows and details. I think it makes pencil work a lot more interesting. In photography, the difference between the darkest shadows and brightest highlights is called dynamic range, and so I’m trying to make the shadows darker than graphite allows.
Anyway, thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next one. Goodbye for now.
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Mountain sunset sketch
Hey everyone,
Thanks for tuning in. It’s a sunny, but lazy Saturday so let’s do a quick sketch here in my sketchbook. For this one I’m using a 3H pencil and a 12B faber castell matte pencil. The scene I’m drawing is along the turnagain arm just south of Anchorage. You can see a few chunks of ice sitting in the frozen mud.
Also a quick thank you to everyone who came to my birthday party last week and for the thoughtful gifts and wonderful artwork, I am grateful to have such good friends.
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A Self Portrait
Me Drawing Me Is it weird to draw yourself? Every drawing is a form of self expression, but this is the most direct form of that expression. For me, drawing is a hobby and I tend to focus more on the skill than the creativity, but the result is the same, the manifestation of an extension of the self that persists afterwards. And that is one of the reasons I keep doing this.
Watch this link – a youtube short of me drawing me on my channel @oneofthesteves.
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Inkvember Doodles
A doodle from my noodle. New Video on YouTube.
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Isometric Cityscape
An isometric cityscape, the likes of which I might have drawn as a kid, contains elements from real life – a reflection of random thoughts on paper. In the upper right corner is a garden that we built this summer in our front yard. It was designed to match the neighbors’ garden. On the left is some industrial process equipment, similar to things I’ve seen on job sites when I worked in the field. There’s also a train, because in the future there will be more trains.
In the drawing, I started out just scribbling with one of my fountain pens, but I quickly felt lost so I picked up a pencil and sketched out a rough idea of where I wanted to take the drawing. Then I continued with the ink and at the end I decided to add some color so I picked out a nice palette of prismacolors and filled it in.
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Another Squirrel Sketch
Squirrel Sketch I’ve got another drawing of our squirrel friend. Here she is eating some almond flakes, strategically placed on the fence where I could snap a reference picture.
This drawing was done in a small sketchbook with various wooden pencils and a fine eraser. I started it a few months ago and left it unfinished for one reason or another.
Here is my YT Short, finishing up the sketch.
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Habit Tracker
Habit Tracker I recently came across an ad for a physical product that hangs on the wall. It features backlit buttons for each day of the year, allowing users to track daily habits by pressing the corresponding button and having it light up.
While this concept may provide a sense of satisfaction for some, I personally find a cloud-based spreadsheet much more practical. In fact, I quickly put together a similar system using Google Sheets.
Feel free to explore the idea and download a copy for yourself! -
Turnagain Arm
One day a few weeks ago, we were driving the Seward Highway and had to stop for a rock slide. I decided to take a picture and later I drew it in my sketchbook.
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