Dear Reader,
Some people are fantastic artists. They can draw pretty much anything you can think of and a dozen things you haven't imagined. I'm not so great. I'm trying again to sketch out the bear root plant and I just can't get the root ball to come out correctly. I'm trying to sketch a few characters and I'm having a devil of a time trying to make the hands come out right, let alone have faces in the correct proportions. A part of me says I should go back to the semi-cartoonish style I was working in when I was at the daycare teaching and drawing portraits of the kids for them to color in when they got bored with coloring book pages.
I used to be pretty good with realism. Still life sketches are ok. It gets hard when I'm trying to get the shading of things right. It gets hard when I'm trying to draw intricate root structures (because it is as bad as drawing hands if not a thousand times worse). I am not giving up on the herbal/bestiary project that I have going as part of the legendarium for this series. I'm just taking a breather from drawing stuff because I don't think my notebook can handle more erasing and redrawing of material.
I had this wild dream of possibly doing these sketches in pen and ink. I even made sure to have a full set of dip pens for the project. I haven't touched them once. I'm afraid that I am going to have even less control over the ink than I do over water colors. Anyone with any suggestions for how to keep your ink from bleeding together, I am highly interested.
In the meantime, I'm going to go back to reading herbals to try to concoct some recipes that these theoretical plants would be used in. Culpepper is my friend right now. Middle English may be a bit hard to decipher at times, but it is easier than drawing hands or root balls right now.
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