This was definitely a challenging exercise! Although my cat is very lazy, he moves about quite a lot even when he's totally relaxed. He's quite a jumpy cat too - the slightest noise and he leaps out of his skin. So the hardest part of this exercise was getting a decent sketch in before he decided to lick a different area! He's a lovely cat to draw though, despite his sketchiness (excuse the pun) - he has a really happy face, and things like dirty paws and a mangled ear (from fighting) just act as interesting added characteristics. I feel like pencil, although a bit boring perhaps, was a really effective medium for drawing my cat. In the larger drawing, I used quite a hard pencil for the finer details like the white hairs and whiskers, and then also quite a soft, dark pencil for the black hairs. Chopping and changing between the pencils enabled me to depict the details in a more appropriate way.
Exercise: Fish on a plate
The most difficult aspect of this drawing exercise was the changing light coupled with the very reflective surface of the fish. In retrospect, I should have used a lamp, but I didn't anticipate quite how long the drawing would take - unfortunately the light had changed quite a bit by the time I'd neared the end. I don't think it had too much of a detrimental effect, but the cast shadows will be slightly out at the very least. I chose to use pencil crayons (I didn't have my water soluble ones unfortunately, they were in a box on its way back to the UK from New Zealand), which may not have been the best medium but they did enable me to recreate the finer details of the scales and suchlike quite easily. The fish is a yellow tailed snapper, which I'd never come across before - I thought the colours were really unusual and tropical-esque. The fish was obviously very shiny, so the light from the window reflecting off it's surface produced areas of white all over the fish. It's belly was white in colour and the main colour was certainly pink, but the scales on its back were a really strange purple/grey/brown colour that was really quite difficult to emulate. Definitely another challenging exercise.
I've been thinking of other places around Bristol where there are animals I could draw easily enough. We have a couple of city farms, one very close by where they have pigs, goats, ducks, etc. Obviously there's the zoo as well, where on a quiet weekday morning you could avoid the crowds of children. The park nearby often has swans on the pond, and always ducks of other kinds, it's also a good dog walking park. So there are several places I can think of off the top of my head to get some practice in - it would be great to try out drawing some animals that move about a lot.
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