Horsing around in my art journal

You probably know already that I’m a HUGE fan girl of Sandi Hester. I’ve mentioned her here several times in the past. I love the artwork Sandi’s been creating from the prompts she’s been using from Sarah Dyer’s patreon, so I decided to sign up a couple weeks ago. 

Sarah did a drawing session from reference photos with Emma Carlisle. If I remember right, all of these drawings were timed. Some were only one minute, and others were 3 to 15 minutes. Since I wanted to keep these pages super loose, and childlike, I didn’t need the full 15 minutes. So when I had some spare time left over, I went back in, and colored with oil pastels. 

The horse on the bottom right cracks me up. lol What in the world is that? Looks more like a deer than a horse. 

I love how playful Sarah & Emma are in their work, and how they overlap their drawings. I thought I’d try doing the same, but I wasn’t copying them exactly. Some they overlapped, and I didn’t. I mostly kept my eye on my own paper, and the reference photo. There wasn’t time to watch the video, and draw at the same time, especially when the timer was set for only 1 minute. 

Speaking of timed drawings, there are a few free sites that I use when I want to jump start my artist motor. When I sit down with my art journal, and have no idea what to draw, I visit these sites. 

Quick, Draw! – this one you do online with your mouse. You only get a few seconds to do each prompt. You could always use your art journal, instead of your mouse. Or you could start with this, and move on to your art journal once you get your brain fired up. 

Line of Action – this site is cool because you can choose an emotion you want to draw and gender of the person. If you know me, you know I love drawing/painting emotion. 

Quick poses – this one is primarily for figure drawing, which I need to explore more. You can chose between 15 second to 5 minute drawings.

When I’m feeling uninspired, 15 second drawings usually gets my creative mind in gear. Racing against the clock shuts down the critic living in my brain because I’m focused on the timer, not so much what I’m doing on the page. It most likely will work for you, also. There’s no time to listen to all the nonsense your brain tells you. There’s always time to hate on what you’ve done later, but hopefully you’ll be impressed with how much you can do in only a few seconds or minutes. If you have a tough time getting started creating your art or you don’t have enough time required for a painting, these quick sketches might be the answer. Doing some art is better than not doing any art. 

Art Prof is also awesome. If you find 15 second drawings too fast, try this one. She has some that are 20 minutes long – which seems like forever after you’d done multiple drawings in that time on the other sites. 

I hope you make time to do something silly today. 🙂

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