Really great at starting things...not so good at finishing/keeping up with things

I am halfway done with Einstein I think.  I had to get different paper before I started because the charcoal was not sticking to the paper I chose.  My mom picked me up some special charcoal paper, and the charcoal stick okay, but now I'm having issues with the paper peeling.  I don't know what's going on.  Oh, well, I just have to be careful.  I took a 5 week summer drawing class and I drew one of my pictures I took in Sedona. In real life it's 18' by 24".  The picture does a bad job showing what the drawing looks like in real life. 

 

I had so much fun doing this landscape drawing.  Before this class, the only things I drew were portraits and I thought drawing landscapes would be boring and hard. I kept thinking of drawing ten-thousand individual leaves on a tree and that did not sound like fun.  Turns out, landscape drawing is just a bunch of smudgy values to create the illusion of texture of a tree or a rock, etc.. 

I really liked how this turned out so I decided to choose another one of my own landscape pictures for my final drawing.  Something with lots of trees so I could smudge values to my heart's content! Anyways.  Here's a picture of my final drawing.  I decided to incorporate some colored pencil. This is also on high-quality handmade drawing paper that I bought specially for my final drawing.  

I think it's 20" by 30"

I took this picture last summer in France.  This is just a random bridge in some beautiful random greenery at Leonardo da Vinci's last residence.

I've also painted a couple of things and sewn alot since my last post in March, but I'm terrible at taking pictures of what I make.  I will try to do better next time so I can actually post here more often!

Albert Einstein Charcoal Drawing

I've begun the prep work for my latest project.  I'm doing a charcoal drawing of Albert Einstein for my friend Tyler.  I haven't done a charcoal drawing for a long time and I'm really excited to get back to it! Here's a few pictures because what would a blog post be without 'em. 

 I'm using this brilliant photo taken by Yousuf Karsh.

I need a coffee refill!

 I'm doing a grid technique which will help me get more precise proportions(great for the perfectionist that I am).  Basically, I draw a square grid over my photo.  Then I rub charcoal over my entire paper and use an eraser to make grid lines on the paper that have the same amount of squares as my photo.  Then you work square by square.  If that makes sense.  

 About to rub charcoal on my paper! ....But.  I used the wrong kind of paper.  I just used what we had lying around the house (watercolor paper), and the charcoal would not stay on the page!

YAY! More coffee!!

 See?  It's suppose to be evenly covered.  And it's not.  So I bought new paper specifically for charcoal, and now it's just a matter of redoing the taping/measuring and charcoaling.  I will hopefully get to this Tuesday night!  Bye for now!