Exercising the fingers

I realised recently that I hadn't been drawing anything much lately, so I thought I'd better take myself in hand and get back into the habit of drawing something every day. Drawing is like pretty much any other skill; if you don't use it, you lose it.

I need to get back to drawing from life, but first I need to get used to actually manipulating pens and pencils and what-not again.

Sure enough, I'm terribly out of practice. My fingers feel like sausages, and it doesn't help that my eyesight is deteriorating as well. Hey-ho.






I bought a multi-colour ball-point pen to play with a while ago, and was given another by a friend. I wanted it originally for writing up game-related stuff, so that I could colour-code bits and pieces without having to keep track of half a dozen pens. Instead, I used them for doodling, and one of the doodles is this guy to the right.

This one is coloured pencil, specifically Faber-Castell Prismacolor pencils, with a ball-point outline.

I tried to seal it with hair spray so that I could over-draw in more colours, but all it did was activate the ball-point ink so that it bled all over the place and straight through the paper.

I could maybe get the textural depth I want in the background with oil pastel, though I'm not sure it warrants going to very much more trouble over.