Howdy! I've been working my way through last week's Classical Art Education Curriculum. So far, I've completed Art History and Anatomy. Below are some art experiments from my sketchbook, as well as the Anatomy Assignments.

Here I was layering quick watercolor sketches of various art history images, working from prehistory to the Renaissance, before going over them with black and white acrylic paint.

Here I worked thickly with watercolors, letting them run.

This was more illustrative, working with watercolors over a light pencil drawing.

Here I painted thickly with watercolors before wiping the highlights away with a paper towel.

This was inspired by Scandinavian folk art. The white is acrylic paint. The rest are watercolor.

This was an experiment with mark making. Everything is watercolor except for the white lines, which are pastel pencil.

Here, I was looking at the spiritualist painter, Agnes Pelton, and working with graphite pencil.

This was an anatomy drawing that I messed up so I decorated it with watercolor, pastel pencil, and pastel crayons.

This was the first Anatomy assignment chart.

This was the second Anatomy assignment chart.

I continued making skull charts for Anatomy.

Here I played with pastel crayons. Very clearly, I do not know what I'm doing. Also, this was super messy.

Here I was playing with paste crayons again but while looking at Agnes Pelton's compositions.

Here I began to make an Anatomy face chart but messed up so I decorated it with a watercolor background, acrylic paint elements, and then the polka dots and eye chart pattern are pastel pencil. This went from a big mistake to some simple pop art.

Here is the Anatomy face chart assignment.

Here I was drawing a hand for Anatomy but the instructor left his incomplete, and I didn't like how empty the page looked, so I kept going.

Here I drew more hands as part of the Anatomy hands tutorial. The upper hand belonged to a baby so no matter what, it wasn't going to look cohesive with the lower adult hand. That's why I decided to get expressive with this piece. Originally, the back ground was watercolor. I tried both salt and rubbing alcohol textures and didn't like how they looked so I went over the whole thing with acrylic paint.

Here I made the Anatomy hands chart assignment. When I was done, I gave it a coffee background, to blend with the watercolor that had seeped through from the prior page.

Here, I tried watercolor texturing again, this time filling the entire page with rubbing alcohol spots. The texture looked like germs under a microscope so I adding the imagery of the microscope and petri dishes with brown and silver sharpie

For this page, I was looking at Chinese ink painting. Rather than pulling out my old tattoo ink, and pouring it into several caps, and adding water to each cap so that I would have set diluted inks to work with, I just went at this with black watercolor. The spots are from wiping away excess moisture with a paper towel. I kind of like that texture, but next time, I'll try the ink method. I recently gave all of my old tattoo supplies away, inking the ink caps, so I probably won't revisit this style for a while.

Here, I was looking at the interior art of the Mosque of Damascas. This whole peice was a pencil sketch that I filled in with watercolor. I enjoyed making it but it took a lot longer than I expected. I might come back to this peice and if I do, I'll repost it in a future blog post.

So that's where I'm at Next up is Perspective lessons. Nanowrimo starts tomorrow and I still don't have a working printer (out of ink...) nor a plaster cast so lessons will be more slow going for a while. On the bright side, I have a plan for what I want to write this November. I also plan to try glazing and varnishing my paintings, going forward, so I'm already making changes based off what I've learned. Thanks for stopping by! I drop a new blog post every Monday. Toodles!

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