Free Hand

The original content of this post vanished into thin air… so this is my 2nd attempt at posting. Hopefully it won’t disappear this time…

Right! Free hand drawing: something I’m quite terrible at, especially if I know I want to post it for the public to see.

Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in wanting something to look “perfect” and forget that art is all about making mistakes, working with mistakes and ending up with something that is beautiful despite the flaws. Besides, the artist themselves are generally their own worst critics (generally). This is something I constantly wrestle with, which is why it was a good exercise for me to freehand a bit.

Job 38:2

As I was reading through Job, I didn’t really know what kind of picture I wanted to draw. I ended up jotting down a few verses that stood out to me, and played around with different ideas of what I wanted the final picture to look like.

Sketching process

I settled on moon and stars and added a leaf element to complete the circle. Unfortunately, I don’t think the image is related to the verse… because saying that moon, stars and leaves are all “creations laid out at the foundation of the earth” is a bit of a stretch…

Oh well…

Wet paint! And yes, that is a traditional calligraphy brush

Next was painting, adding color and words. Here’s where the freehand bit came in for this piece. Normally, after sketching, I would trace the image on another piece of paper using a light box. But this time I tried to freehand the entire picture.

I also tried to let the watercolors bleed into each other without trying to blend it too much. I have a bad habit of wanting all the colors to blend perfectly, which diminishes the beauty of being able to create layers and textures with watercolor. It took a lot of self-control not to go back and smooth everything out. XD

Who needs filters when you have sheer curtain shades?

I also did not space out my writing properly, hence the reason why “understanding” did not fit on the same row. But that’s a pretty minor detail. Overall I was rather pleased with this piece and, even though there are aspects I would have liked to change, it was nice to not be constrained by any pencil guidelines.

Genesis 15:5

Now if we were to really talk freehand, it would be this next piece. My mom literally came into my room one day with a stack of pre-mounted Chinese painting boards and said I could use them in whatever way I wanted. Some of them already had paintings on them, while others were blank.

I ended up testing out my watercolors on the back of one of the painted boards… so I apologize to the aunty that was the original artist.

I can’t take credit for this design, because this composition actually came from something I pinned on Pinterest a few years back: Pinterest link and original link can be found here. The original art piece was black trees painted on vellum, which were then stacked and framed. I took the same concept and used black ink diluted to various levels. I originally wanted to paint more layers, but my second layer of ink was too dark, so I only ended up with 2 layers.

Painting trees is always rather enjoyable, and it was even more fun to paint monochromatically. I think I’ll try a series of monochromatic pieces sometime soon.