Taking A Quick Break To Color - Leopard Tutorial - Seven Hours And Counting

After crafting with my mom last week I took a very short crafting break to get in some practice time using my new colored pencils. I've spent hours and hours researching relevant YouTube tutorials and have downloaded the materials for a few of them. I chose to start with the leopard eye colored pencil study by Amie Howard. The tutorial is four and a half hours long, and I put in another two and a half hours fine tuning my drawing. Here is the link to Amie's YouTube channel: Amie Howard Art.

I chose tutorials that use the colored pencils I own, which are Polychromos and Luminance (both products are linked below in the supplies section). These are the two most popular pencil lines used by colored pencil artists. For me, it is critical that a tutorial specifies the exact colors used so I can get the closest match to the artists finished drawing. For me, the closer the match the better I did with the tutorial.

This is my first real time tutorial I've tried and I enjoyed it. The biggest take away I got from it was to NEVER give up, keep going until you finish. You will most likely be pleasantly surprised with the end result. And that is exactly how it happened. About three hours into the project I was frustrated and wanted to start over. Now here I am looking at the finished piece and I am totally ok with it.

I am a amused that for this year's new "hobby", I chose realistic colored pencil drawing. Hub and I already share two hobbies together, online gaming and disc golf so I did not feel the need to find another shared hobby. Crafting started out as a hobby and I've turned it into a side gig, but yeah, it still feels like a hobby. So I have to ask myself why I felt the need for yet another hobby. I think it is because I like to stay busy all the time. Colored pencil drawing have a very small footprint, they are not messy (aside from the shavings I generate from constant pencil sharpening), I can put a project away and return to it later and the style of coloring is very, very time consuming so there is no chance of running out of projects to do. I had some supplies already and high end colored pencils are far less expensive when compared to crafting supplies in general.

The cost to get setup for colored pencil drawing was less than the expenses of disc golf (for an intermediate, "play daily" type of player). One more benefit of this new hobby is that "if" I achieve the level of skill I aspire to, I can turn it into another side gig like crafting. Disc golf and online gaming aren't hobbies I would want to have to make money from. Yes I know I could use "Twitch" and record my game playing, then slice it all up, reviewing various aspects of my online game time, but I don't think I would enjoy it. Thinking of disc golf, I am just not that good and don't want myself video'd. Who wants to watch a 50 something woman play disc golf right? Um, no, not me.

Finally, I do like that the artistic skills I am fine tuning lend themselves to crafting and can be used in crafting. I think this is a winner all around. However, hub keeps bugging me to color cool stuff like dragons and I don't think I am there yet!