charcoal never dies....

A couple of sketches I did a about a week ago-

This one is of a guitar, eviedently. My guitar. I was just starting off to sketch when I wanted to warm up a bit, and I find that the best way to do it is some rapid sketching. A teacher of mine once taught be about contour sketching- he called it sketching with your eyes. What you do is sketch an object without looking at the paper, but following the lines on the object with your eye and moving your hand on the paper correspondingly. What I observed was that a contour sketch of an object had an amazing feel to it. You never get the proportions right; it takes years to do that. But it looks beautiful in a much more sublte yet energetic way than a regular sketch done by overdrawing and paying attention to detail. Maybe thats what it is- too much attention to detail, which goes wrong. A good artist is not one who paints something exactly as it looks like. If that were true, then the signboard painters who thrive on painting Amitabh Bacchans and Hritik Roshans and Angelina Jolies( occasionally) would be milloinares. I am not saying that what they do is not art; infact, what they do is one of the most difficult things you can ever accomplish, and hats off to them. But art, in its bare sense is a way to express yourselves. And every individual has a different way to do so. It is that original style which an artist has to find, and once he finds it, nurture.

Okay, so we went a bit off track( some call it 'train of thought'. I call it a 'paranoid rambling'.) Anyways, so the sketch. It is not a contour sketch, but it is close enough to it. I was sitting with a charcoal in my hand looking around the room when I saw 'her'. I rushed through the sketch as fast as I could.

The next one I did was supposed to be a study for a painting of a blues guitarist I had in my mind. But halfway through it, I decided to go with the flow than with the plan. Inspired by painting I'd seen before once, on some blog I think, don't quite remember where. But heres how it is-

Again, its charcoal. Anyways, tell me how they are!