Any improvement in my drawing skills?

I am still beaving away doing an hour's drawing practice every day. I don't honestly think it is getting any easier. The tremor in my hand (brought about by the drugs I have to take daily) is certainly more under control and I am not quite as scared of putting pencil to paper. I am learning to look more and am less afraid of putting in a wrong line. Anyway - these are today's drawings.

Drawing

I have been working at my drawing and my stripes each day for an hour and possibly getting slightly better. However, I have decided to take a month to concentrate on my drawing technique before I go any further with the course as I just seem to be skating across the top rather than doing it in any depth. I will therefore keep the blog going but for the time being the work will be drawing exercises. Just off now to do the first one.

I am still beavering away.

I am still working every day but on the whole my efforts are not good enough to show you. I just have to keep going. I found a little bit of Kaffe Fassett material in the drawer left from a wall hanging I made last year. I folded it over and drew and painted it (stripes), now I am intending to move on. I shall not move forward until I have mastered those stripes.

I have had a few goes at painting a nectarine. Not easy but again I shall keep going. Thanks for the encouragement you keep giving me.

Using colour.

After a shaky start I began to get the hang of this. It is a long time since I used a paint brush and my early attempts were pretty awful, but after a while it improved slightly. One of the problems is that Koh i noor (which I love for its clarity of colour) does not dry anything like the colour on the palette - the final result is much brighter and clearer.

For the first exercise I picked some things in reds and purples from the garden and then made a wash on the page, trying to replicate the colours. I have not done this very successfully, but I did like the image I got from pressing the wet page on the opposite page and wished I had done this sooner to get a clearer image.

Next I got some bits of material and 'matched' them to colours from the paint box. I painted the stripes and then stuck on the bits of material and I am quite pleased with the result there.

It is quite a relief to finish my hour on a high point rather than the point of despair I have reached over the last few days!

A Brick wall.

I have hit a bit of a brick wall. This is probably due to having three days out when it was impossible to do my hour's drawing. The exercise is to drape a piece of striped material and draw it. I have to admit that I can't do it.

I find my failure most frustrating. Three attempts and it is still no better. So I have decided to miss that exercise out and move on to colour. Whether or not I come back to it depends upon how I get on. But I have to tell myself that I am doing this for enjoyment, otherwise what is the point?

So I feel quite down about the course today. Tomorrow is another day.