... but the final exercise threw me for a loop. I mistaked a little more than I hoped to mistake!

I didn't have a sketchbook available so I grabbed some heavyweight printer paper. For the title page exercise I decided to do it twice, because I had fun doing it the first time. :)

The top left blind portrait gives me many lols. I think I would have had fun doing a dozen of these!

With my right-handed portraits I can't tell if I'm 18 or 80, but it interesting to play with. The top was done with my reverse cam on, and the other two were done from photo reference.

I'm very unhappy with this, but I understand that part of the course goal is to get over your fears and accept that not every drawing will be perfect. Ink is new to me and I feel like my grasp on its techniques are weak at best. What really bothered me about this piece is that I feel it is an incredible disservice to one of my favorite songs of all time, haha.

The original intent was to maintain one line throughout the entire piece. Unfortunately, I started with a fountain pen and I wasn't very far in before I ran out of ink. When I came back to the page I had sort of lost my way. I played the song twice and on the second play-through I went over all of my lines again, trying to add to what I'd already done.

I went into my backyard and took a photo of some baby fruit forming on my Meyer lemon tree. The left center was my attempt at semi-realism, but again I felt a little handicapped by an unfamiliar medium. It was fun to try and come up with different ways to draw the same subject. This is an exercise I'd come back to for sure.

The other side shows my finished version of the final exercise. I started with an ink drawing of a jackrabbit and my "mistake" was the addition of a diluted ink wash. One of my biggest hurdles here was the crummy printer paper I was using - it did not handle all of that water well at all. The ink from my original drawing bled quite a bit and I felt like I was losing the "pop" of the subject. I pulled out some markers and decided to try and regain the focus with some contrasting color.

And here is a pic of the drawing before the ink wash was added to it.

Overall I felt like I enjoyed this class. I'm planning on making a series of small illustrations to mail to friends and this was a really good way to warm up. Since I don't have any experience working with ink (or doing much drawing in general) this felt very productive to break down some of the initial barriers I was facing. Thanks for the class!

Katherine Dinger

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