Drawing Flying Fish

Drawing flying fish would be very difficult if we don't see it from closer distance. I often see flying fish when I travel by PELNI pasenger ship. I don't give particular attention because the fish looks very small seen from the main deck of the ship.
Years ago when I visited a small village in Ambon island, I had the opportunity to eat this fish. I could inspect detailed forms of the water animal that can fly.

Some of my drawings

I used charcoal pencil to draw the fish. Then I apply blue color to make my drawing looks better. Before posting the artwork on this blog, I sharpened the dark lines of the fish applying black ink on the drawing. Flying fish has got streamed line body. It can move faster in the water to escape from predator.
Because I was planning to use these flying fish in my Redbubble T-shirt design, I cut them out of this picture and added some blue wave illustation below the fish. I used Adobe Photoshop 7 and Inkscape to do the job. Here is the result:

Exocet - The Flying Fish

I hope that you will like it.

Drawing of Seashells

I like going to the beach. I go there to swim, enjoy snorkeling and take lots of pictures of colorful fish and coral reef. On my last visits, I began collecting small sized seashells which I would use later for my drawing or sketching practices. Last week I arranged them on the table and started to draw them.

I made the sketch using graphite pencil and sharpened the lines of the seashell drawing with charcoal pencil. Later, I used black gel ink pen to create darker outlines of these beautiful houses of marine mollusk.
With Samsung Tab 3 in my palms, I took picture of my drawing and cropped it in Adobe Photoshop Express. The above picture is the result. Hope that you like it. The whole process takes a few days to complete because I only draw in my leisure time.
Samsung Tab 3 is now an old smartphone tablet but it is still powerful in supporting my works. I have got some applications installed in it. Some of them are Aviary, Polaris Office, Video Downloader, TMEyePro and WhatsApp. I used Google Chrome as my browser to upload this picture to my blog. Hope that you like it :-)

Wooden Boat

The following is the drawing of wooden boats in Anggrem Harbor of Manokwari city. The boats play an important role in sea transportation connecting the coastal villages along the Cendrawasih (Geelvink bay) with the capital of West Papua province.  The average lengths of the boats are 20 to 30 meters with diesel engine as the main propelling power.

Drawing wooden boats manually as part of ship design job was an exhaustive task for me as a student of naval architecture. Now it is not difficult anymore due to the availability of cad drawing software for ship and boat design such as Delfship, Maxsurf, Rhino, Foran and etc. The time needed for manually drawing lines plan of a small boat was around three days to one week. With the help of Delfship or Maxsurf, we can design the lines plan within hours including watertight sub-division, resistance and propulsion calculation and hydrostatic assessment. Delftship can also be used to design the general arrangement of the boat. The design of linesplan and general arrangement, including the interior of the boat can be done simultaneously in Delfship, a robust cad drawing solution for naval architecture. Well, that's my opinion about drawing a boat from the engineering perspective.
Now I still draw boats manually not for ship design purposes but for artistic expression. Art drawing and cad drawing are different in process and purpose. In art drawing, an artist create beautiful drawing as final product. He or she begins sketching the boat hull, superstructure and the sea as her surrounding environment using pencil and then color it with colored pencil, watercolour or oil paints.
For naval architects, the drawing of lines plan, general arrangement and construction details are seen as tools to communicate design ideas to workers in workshops for later use in ship or boat building process. So, the drawings created by naval architects are not seen as final products but as tools to communicate ideas to those working in shipyard for the construction of the boat or ship.
If you see the above picture, you can easily say that it is an art drawing. Yes, there are boats in it but they are only artworks. The drawing cannot be used for construction. The drawing is a piece of artwork. To make the drawing, I had to visit the port of Anggrem in the Dorey bay of Manokwari city, the capital of West Papua province of the Republic of Indonesia. There, I took some photographs of the boats and used them later for writing articles in this blog and as reference for my drawing hobby. Because I studied naval architecture, I know the working principles of boats and ships but I do not want to discuss them here since the topics of boat design are very complicated. I present the above boat drawing in this post to you only to attract your attention to this wonderful watercraft or marine vehicle. I hope you can enjoy it. I will try to upload more drawings in my later posts. Thank you. by Charles Roring.

Also read: Drawing Human Figure; Cargo Wooden Boat; Wooden Boats in Indonesian Islands

Drawing Human Figure

In my previous article about Drawing human face, I explain ways to sketch and correct the proportions of heads. Now, I am going to tell a little explanation of how to draw human.  Figure drawing is one of the most difficult subjects in art. Human being has standard proportion and we all know that. Slight mistakes in sketching face, hands or legs will easily tell that the drawing has drawbacks. I have been practicing drawing human figure for years yet I still feel that I need more practice to improve my drawing skills. I like drawing women. Women are natural beauty that we can explore from every angle of drawings using dry media such as pencil, charcoal or wet media such as oil and watercolor.

 For example, when drawing face, I prefer to start from thin line sketches that depict the face of a girl before I color the face with Derwent watercolor pencil. The quality of a drawing does not always have to be the same as the quality of a photograph. Artist has other ways to deliver the natural beauty of a girl in the form of lines of pencils on paper.

When drawing human figures in groups, first, I need to identify the vocal points of the subjects that I want to draw or paint. Then I will only make sketches of them based on basic shapes (rectangle, circle, oval). When the distance and proportion of the basic shapes have been obtained and corrected the next step will be drawing the shapes of human figures within the basic shapes that I have outlined.

You might not understand my explanation. Well, if you really are serious in studying figure drawing, I suggest that you read a book entitled: Advanced Drawing Skills - A Course in Artistic Excellence.
Inside the book, it says that when we see a subject that we want to draw, a beautiful girl lying on her bed, we must ask to ourselves, "what we see?" As drawing artist, we must see a rectangle, a cirle, a triangle or oval. That should be the answer, not a sleeping beauty. So, what we draw is the basic shapes. When the basic shapes have been traced, we can easily draw the beautiful girl sleeping on her bed with perfect proportion. Before you read the book that I mentioned above, I recommend that you read The Fundamentals of Drawing by the same author Barrington Barber.

I hope that this simple explanation will be able to encourage you to explore the fascinating world of figure drawing and explore the beauty of human figure.by Charles Roring

 Also read: Drawing Dolphins

Girl on Cool Floor

This beautiful girl is sitting on a cool floor. I tried my best drawing her. This girl lowered her head closer to her knee in nude position hiding one of her breasts. Only one that could be seen. The inner thigh area cannot also be seen due to the long leg which half stretches to the right side of the girl. Drawing this skecth is not difficult. I only need to balance the proportion of the body, leg and head so that I can obtain a perfect and beautiful picture. I have many drawings of girls, nature, birds, and anything that I see beautiful to be drawn or painted. I will show some more on my next postings.

Figure Drawing Study: Beautiful girl sitting nude on cool floor

I use a 3B Staedtler pencil to draw this beautiful girl sitting nude on cool floor. The sketch paper is made by Xue shan. I don't know whether it is a famous brand or not but I just use it when I want to draw or make sketch. I am very fond of art, especially drawing. You can send me your pictures if you want to be drawn. After drawing it, I will post it on this blog. I will not mention your name as the model except if you allow.