Chachava's 'Sketchbook'

[Chachava]

It's been a long time since I've updated this sketchbook, and that's way too long. I've had a lot of problems and I've let myself get over run with them and basically spent the last year feeling sorry for myself. I've finally started making some moves to sort myself out. One such 'move' is to start painting every day, and to make sure I have some purpose to what I'm painting rather than just blindly copying some form of photo reference and telling myself that I'm doing it to learn something, when really all I'm doing is sitting squarely in my comfort zone and giving the finger to anything else.

Anyway, what I intend to do is to upload everything I do to my sketchbook on a daily basis, regardless of whether or not I like it or think it's any good. Hopefully you guys will be able to give me some feedback and advice, and good kick when I'm slacking off.

For this post I'll upload what I've been working on this week, starting with what is hopefully the tail end of my 'comfort zone' painting.

This is an almost finished portrait of Katerina Graham (Bonnie from Vampire Diaries). Portraits are pretty much my comfort zone, the only part of this that was kind of out of my comfort zone was avoiding colour picking from the reference photo.



I very very rarely paint or draw anything from imagination these days (another result of my comfort zone), and I've always tried to stay away from landscapes and environments, I suck at painting them.....so as my first real step out of my comfort zone.....



This was kind of an attempt at trying a different, less photo realistic painting style. I'm quite happy with the results, although as always there's a whole lot of room for improvement.

And the 2 bits I worked on today, the first was back in my comfort zone again, but I was really just using it as an hour long warm up sketch.



And, back out of my comfort zone, I realised that I had never painted any kind of building before in my life (Or at least not that I can recall). So I had a quick look through deviant art and found a nice building of a church in the snow (another thing I have very little experience painting). And tried to paint it. I managed to get the basic block in and colours working ok. But as I got into more detail I struggled. I didn't want to paint in as much detail as I usually would, I wanted to try a more kind of 'hinted at details' approach (I don't think that actually makes any sense, but I'm struggling to find the right words for what I mean). I really struggled though. I kept zooming right in and trying to paint all the details.....anyway, this is what I eventually ended up with. Definitely a lot more practice needed



That was a much longer post than I had intended to write, hopefully they'll be a little shorter in the future. If anybody can give me any crits or advice, especially regarding the stuff out of my comfort zone, It would be very much appreciated.