Sep 30, 2014

Can you Draw Upside Down???

NEW WORKS FROM THE STUDIO OF ART BY WENDY

I mean work away with everything
UPSIDE DOWN!
Paper, reference photo reversed!

Necessity forced me to give it a go!!


Western Hawk Owl (We think)


My Owl is one of my projects for the Mount Revelstoke Show from my Residency this summer. I really wanted to emphasis my owl up in the tree; hence the long, thin format.  However, it was far to uncomfortable when working on the top, to lean over the whole picture so I decided to turn things around.

What a difference it made!

When you work on a drawing it is so easy to fall into a pattern of drawing 'what you think is there' rather than 'what is there'.  That old left brain, right brain thing comes into play.  The left brain sees a branch and says, yeah, that's a branch and it looks like this.  But the right brain says well no, it kind of bends here, moves there, gets lighter and darker, it seems to have a life of its own.  Unfortunately, the left brain usually win these discussions and the drawing ends up looking very boring with everything looking very nondescript.

Working upside down I found that I worked with shapes and values more, my poor left brain had no idea what I was drawing and kind of left me alone.  It made it so much easier to create tangled branches with interesting shapes and lots of volume.

I turned the picture around so you could see how things were going!

We spotted this owl when hiking on the trails on Mount Revelstoke. We were really very fortunate to see him as he totally blended into the dead branches of the tree in a very dark and shady spot. I tried several settings on my camera to get some shots and was really pleased that some of my pictures turned out.  We are not quite sure what kind of owl he is but we think he is a Western Hawk Owl.  We are just waiting for confirmation.  I should know by the time I am finished.
Note: Just confirmed it is a Northern Hawk Owl.  Oct. 6, 2014

Well I have to get my peddle to the metal and get this guy finished, he has to be ready to head off to Revelstoke by Thanksgiving Weekend!!

Capturing animals in graphite is one of my passion and one of my specialties.  If you would like to commission a drawing of one of your pets Contact Wendy .  I would be pleased to work with you to bring your project to life.  See more of my Pet Commission Work on my Commission Page.  

Special Note: To learn more about the Residency see my first three August 2014 Posts beginning with this One

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very cool Wendy. Fun how chaining things up can be so enlightening. :) Your residency sounds interesting. How long did you do it for?

Wendy Mould AFCA said...

The 3 of us stayed in a cabin on the mountain for 4 days, I would loved to have stayed longer. We are now preparing work from the trip for a show that opens Nov 7 in Revelstoke, then travels for a year to promote Parks Canada.