Morgan Johnstone

Just as I was hoping, I was able to finish the first canvas of my cloud drawing!  While it isn't perfect, I decided to get a start on the other because I can always go back and make small changes.  So that's what I did.  I finished the clouds and moved onto the sky of the next canvas. While the second canvas requires less detailing it has a lot of shading.  Being mostly sky, it was really time consuming to evenly shade the sky, sooo… I gave up.  I just got it done so I could go back and darken it later.  As with the first canvas, I traced around the basic shape of my clouds to go over later and refine.  I found that shading became a lot easier by using my hand, this made the process a lot faster. As you can see, the canvas on the right's sky isn't very even.  Next week I will be fixing this as well as finishing the project fully.  If I have the time, I might go back to the first canvas and touch up on the detailing and make it ju...

This week I continued my cloud drawing with some shading of the actual clouds.  Last week was spent shading the sky.  And when I say shading, I mean SHADING, like a ton of it.  What made it take even longer is the fact that I did both canvases.  This week I just worked on one.  I figured that by doing it this way, I could at least fully finish one canvas instead of two partially finished ones. To create my clouds I simply eyed the shapes of my picture to draw them onto the canvas.  As I tend to be a perfectionist, it was really hard for me knowing it isn't perfect.  It's clouds though, meaning there is o proportions or positions that I have to worry about so I was able to just go with it. I started my refining the edges of the clouds to create a sharper line to contrast the sky.  Then, I started the actual clouds.  I tried to focus on the darker spots first.  Then I blended this out into the light patches and edges.  I did this ...

For the next few weeks I am going to draw one big final project.  It was extremely hard to decide what I thought would be worth all of the time and effort a huge detailed drawing would take.  Sadly, it took multiple ideas and sketches before I decided upon clouds.  There are several reasons I chose this; I can make it more and more detailed as I progress, and I can make it as hard as I want. To go about starting this drawing, I first made a border,  I did this with painters tape, this will provide a clean edge to my drawing when I'm done to make it look more refined.  Next, Pinterest provided me the picture inspiration.  I took a picture of some clouds and sketched the very simple outline onto my two canvases.  Then, I shaded in the sky portion.  This has taken me about two hours alone as the shading has to be very even and there is a lot to do (even within this timeframe I wasn't able to finish it). So here is my progress thus far.  Next...

This blog is a continuation of the project I started last week so I'll recap a little to avoid confusion.  Last week I started a drawing of a fern leaf.  I cut out my leaf design and traced it onto my canvas which I painted grey previously.  That is as far as I was able to get because of the fact that I got sick.  So now onto this week!!! For this drawing, I used some cheap chalkboard chalk.  I could've bought something more expensive and of better quality but I wanted to give it a try.  To create my fern leaf I simply colored in all of the leaf, except for the stem, in solid white.  After that I decided to set it in place and then add detail with chalk and charcoal.  EXCEPT THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN!  Turns out, when you spray chalkboard chalk with a moist setting spray, the chalk fades drastically, to the point of disappearing if sprayed too much.  Here's a visual of what I mean below: As you can see, it alm...

This week I wasn't able to get nearly as much done as I would have liked to due to my immune system shutting down.  Shoutout to my dad for giving me this amazing opportunity to feel like dying for the third day in a row now (thanks for sharing, dad)!!!  Anyways, let's talk about what I actually got done this week: For starters, I spray painted a canvas dark grey last week so it would be fully dried to do my drawing on.  I decided not to draw another face, which was my original plan, because I wanted to make something to hang on my bedroom wall.  Maybe some of you would like seeing a creepy face staring down at you when you sleep at night but... I like to sleep peacefully.  I decided to draw a white chalk fern leaf instead.  It is a very minimalistic design as throws a splash of modern style into my room.   To create the design, I printed out a picture of a fern leaf onto paper and traced out the border.  After that, I cut out my design and tra...

This week, I was originally planning on doing a contrasting drawing to my first drawing but I realized that I hadn't painted a canvas black yet.  Because you can't draw in wet paint, I had to do something else.  So I am such an amazing sister, I asked Sydney if she wanted me to draw something for her to put in her room.  We decided upon a butterfly (because all of her other ideas were way too hard). To draw the butterfly onto the canvas, I cut out the shape and simply traced around it onto the canvas.  Then I began shading using a simple charcoal stick.  To do this, I taped a picture of the butterfly on the wall above my desk and drew free hand the shapes and contours of the butterfly lightly and then darkened it. After drawing the top wing of the butterfly completely in charcoal, I decided it was too boring and that I didn't like it.  To maybe solve this, I dug through my piles of craft stuff until my ancient case of colored chalk pastels.  Now...