Venetian Mask Figure Portrait Woman Doodle

Venetian Mask

Had a lot of sit time yesterday and had received some new sketching toys from a friend at Zebra Pen, so took the opportunity to work on a sketch to see how they performed.  This Venetian Mask is a mixed media sketch, or I should say doodle (I will explain below) and is done with pointalism, color pencils, technical pens, fine tip markers, Pentel white gel pen and I hit it with a brush or 2 of gold paint.

I watched an interesting video from Stefan Baumann where he talked about the psychology of sketching.  He prefers we call it doodling as it takes the pressure off to produce something good enough to use that pristine white paper that comes in sketchbooks.   Doodles can really help you learn to draw and improve your drawing skills.  Doodles also imply fun, no pressure or expectations, something that sketching inherently does imply.  He also suggests that you do about 100 doodles, (Joan, I think you are the only one in the group that is hitting this stride and then some on a weekly basis) with intent, per week, and every 5 pages you should doodle with your secondary hand.  For me I am right-handed, so I have to become a lefty.   While those doodles look pretty bad, they too will improve with practice, but it engages your left side of the brain and makes it work instead of just going on auto pilot.  He says that if we just doodle our 100 doodles a Week with our main hand that we go off into other thoughts and that won't improve your drawing skills.  When you doodle with intent you need to think about it somewhat, even if you are doodling from imagination, so that you can reap the benefits to your drawing skills.  You have to make your self work to grow!!  

Thanks for taking a look