Pencil Cleanse!

As a painter, it becomes increasingly difficult to notice when you are "neglecting" a particular skill set in your art arsenal. For myself, recent analysis of my work has led me to the conclusion that I have been greatly improving as a painter, but staying fairly stagnant in my abilities as a renderer. Having the ability to draw accurate renderings is incredibly important for any artist- it gives your paintings believability, interest, and, overall, shapes your final product. A great solution to this is to go on a "Pencil Cleanse". For me, this means putting the paints down for a whole month, and instead, carrying a pencil and sketchbook around.

A week into this exercise, a few different things have been noticed. Firstly, I'm finding myself noticing form in nature a lot more. Rather than seeing colors and hues, I'm seeing tonal relationships in things. This shift in mental thinking is doing wonders for planning future paintings.

The other thing I'm noticing, which is a huge deal, is that I am getting less frustrated with problems in my work. Because I am working with a toned paper sketchbook only, I know that anything I sketch is merely a sketch- For the purpose of getting better, and not creating a final product. This is drastically different than the "finished painting" mentality I am used to, and is greatly helping with the anxiety associated with working on a painting.

I will put up more information when I am a couple more weeks into this process, but right now, I'm really liking the results in my improvement. Below I've shared some pieces over the last couple days.

Everything below has been done with a 2H pencil, a B pencil, and a white pencil (because I'm working on toned paper).