Downton Abbey Doodles Part 3

Just another quick doodle, until I can upload some landscape drawings that I've been working on. This is probably one of my favorite scenes in the series, when Mrs. Patmore manipulates the Ouija board to make it seem as though Williams spirit is communicating with Daisy. And of course Thomas is upset because she ruined his game :P.

"Artcation"

I went out of town to attend a couple of workshops last weekend, the first was a water color and gouache class being taught at Fort Mason in San Francisco by artist Erik Tiemens  http://www.watersketch.com/#home. It was really incredible to watch him paint, unfortunately my efforts don't measure up to his work just yet, but take a look at it anyway! : P

Modern art! (No, not really, these are pages of brush practices, to see how many variations of brush strokes we could create )

We started out with just playing with the materials first, just to see what gouache can do and the effect it had when mixed with the water color: 

We then made a mess thumbnails for inspiration while painting : 

And finally we made some "sketchy" practice paintings which were more like working out ideas for compositions rather than a complete painting: 

This one reminds me of a Fauvist painting (not what I was originally going for, but it's interesting)

 Strangely enough I like the simplest one the best ...

I then went down to Los Angeles for an animal drawing workshop taught by character designer/story artist David Colman (you can see his work here: http://davidcolman.blogspot.com/)

We started off by drawing skeletons of Ice age creatures at the La Brea Tar Pits: 

Bison skeleton

A mastodon skeleton if I remember correctly...?

Giant sloth skeleton

Camel skeleton

Some type of bird skeleton (They're all raptors! : P)

We then continued the class at the LA zoo, where we studied live animals (mainly giraffe's and eagles, as they were the most active during the time of day in which  we were visiting):

 Some corrections he helped me to see

 Really loose and sketchy eagles (Soooo many feathers!!!!Almost too many to draw!) 

And here is our final task, which was to draw a giraffe from memory, I still need to work on putting more 3D shapes into my figures, both human and animal. 

Both workshops were great! And make me want to keep drawing more than ever! More to come later!