Kat Johnston

Category: Sketch-Book

  • Sketch: Little mister dragon.

    Kat Johnston Drawing: A little dragon sketch – isn’t he cute? Ok… so he might be just a scribble-dragon… but I think he is cute!

    I was doing a little scribbling last night in a sketch book (oh my god! I’m sketching in an actual sketch book!), and this little fella popped out. I was sketching dragons… you know… just coz? Ok, I might have had an ulterior motive. I need to make a birthday card later today because I am too lazy to go out and buy one for someone. I mean, it is really kinda rude to show up to a birthday party without even a card, or so I am told! It won’t be overly fancy, but it should do the job.

    So, later on, I think I’ll get to sketching the actual card. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do for it – it has to have at least a dragon. Possibly a dragon rolling a D20, swilling a good glass of red while being attacked by a ninja reading a fantasy novel. Well, perhaps not… but it would be a good way to combine a heap of things she loves into one awesome image!

    My apologies… my writing may not be fantastic today. I am writing this blog post while listening to the commentary for ‘Dr Horrible’s Sing-along Blog‘, which admittedly is really as good as the movie itself. So I’m a little distracted. But don’t worry – I’m sure that my posting will be up to its usual fantastic (ha!) standard again soon. When I am not listening to musicals and grooving along instead of paying attention as I should.

  • Sketch: Rawr the Dragon.

    Kat Johnston Sketch: Rawr the dragon is full of dragony, rawry goodness! Is rawry even a word? It should be!

    Going to Sydney is a great idea, when you have a party on down there to attend. What isn’t a great idea? Doing a drive down and back (about 12 hours each way) in the space of a weekend! It was well worth the trip, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think I’m going to be wanting to do that trek again so quickly any time soon. I was just the passenger, and I can admit quite freely that I am rather exhausted! I don’t know how the drivers are up and functioning properly today.

    There were some highlights of the drive though… a fox who decided to cross our path (though thankfully not to get run over), a stop in Scone to purchase (can you guess?) a scone… and to top it all off, at the close of what turned out to be around 13 or 14 hours of driving through excessive roadworks, small towns, and other delaying things, a traffic controller who waddled over to our car less than 30km from home to tell us that we had to stop for a while because they were sorting out some line-work on the highway. Believe it or not, that made us quite hysterical with laughter, so close as we were to our goal of bed and much needed sleep.

    Was it worth it to go and see all our Sydney-based friends for a night of fun and frivolity though? You better believe it.

    I very much wish there was a way to smush all of our Brisbane-based friends and Sydney-based friends into one, big, very-easy-to-access (geographically) group. Sadly, the distance is really rather a pain. Don’t you wish that teleporting and making portals to other major cities was as easy as casting a quick spell or pressing a little button? I know I do. The airline companies might not be especially happy about it, but I’m all for it. Viva-la-teleportation!

    Oh, and a note about the actual picture for today. It is made in honor of a friend of mine who is hitting the big three-oh on the weekend. She likes dragons!

  • Life Drawing / Sketch: The morning after.

    Kat Johnston Sketch: A nude I drew last night… perhaps I shouldn’t put the word nude in here. Googling might get a whole lot more fun.

    Mmmm, I am starting to enjoy the wonders of raspberry tea right now. It is both tasty and delicious. That is what I am drinking as I sit here this morning, doing this post.

    So I think that it is going to become required to put up at least one picture a week that results from my life-drawing thingies on Wednesday nights, provided that I go to them. This is one of my picks from this week. Yup, I’m going a full nude this time, but surely the world can take it? It’s just a few lines on a page, after all.

    I actually played around a bit with artistic license on this particular sketch. It was nearing the end of the session, and the girl just seemed a bit exhausted, and I have to admit, I was kinda getting to that point too. My back was being an utter pain in the… uhhh… back!

    So anyhow, yes… it isn’t true to the person laying there, in that she doesn’t have hair that covers most of her face, or looked completely and utterly bushed… but I am happy with it. Of course there are errors, but hey, as I keep trying to tell myself, what can be expected from a 15 – 20 minute sketch? I’m almost tempted to refine this one into something better, later.

    That’s about it for this morning, though I might post another picture later too, if I have anything to say, or a reason to say it. For now, I had best get into the day and try to start it properly.

  • Body Art: Another dragon.

    Kat Johnston: A dragon for her back, not yet a tattoo, but perhaps destined to be.

    So I mentioned yesterday that I’d been drawing on people smart (or stupid?) enough to make their bodies available to me. This was one of those sketches from the week-end just gone. Ok, so it isn’t the most brilliant thing in the world, but gigantic nikkos with blunted edges (as in it didn’t come to a nice chisel point at allll) are sometimes just a bastard to work with. I am so glad that I went out and bought some awesome sharpie markers – my wonderful friends are going to be letting me draw on them again, apparently, despite whatever trouble they might have had washing off the last bout. Yay me!

    You know, it’s really rather hard to put this one into a category. Sketch, yes, I suppose it would come under that, but it is neither digital nor on canvas, on plain paper or lined… I think it’s just going to be a bit uncategorized. One little category of sketch, and no other to define it… I wonder if it feels sad.

    So that is all for today – I’m getting back to work on other bits and pieces now. You know, playing with markers, drawing with markers, dreaming up wonderful things to do… with markers. Yay markers!

  • Life Drawing / Sketch: A figure and a face.

    Kat Johnston: venturing into life-drawing this week, here’s an ‘actual’ sketch… as in, one that isn’t a cartoon.

    How’s that for a literal title? And how’s this for a proper sketch!

    I must admit that I don’t draw from actual figures all that often – I don’t really get too much of a chance to tell someone to pick a pose and sit in front of me naked for 20 minutes. The last time I did a proper ‘sit down and draw from a person sitting there’ thing was years ago. Soooo, when I found out that there is a place in Brisbane (at the Metro, actually) which has weekly life-drawing sessions, I was more than ready to drag a friend along and give it a go.

    I find it rather amusing that with a fully-naked figure sitting there in front of me, I’ve decided here and there to draw parts which really require no nakedness at all. Both last week and this week I have found myself focusing on just the face, or a hand at some point, rather than the whole. I know that I could probably get a friend to sit still for a while to let me draw their face, but I guess the glitch with that is that I’d then probably have to show them what I just drew. I’m sure that I don’t have to mention that drawing from a photo is just not the same.

    Today’s picture is plucked from my sketch-book from last night’s session. The up-tilted face and the partial figure are two of my favourite drawings from the evening. The model was absolutely fantastic for figure studies with well-defined muscles, a wonderfully interesting body/face and an excellent selection of poses, including an incredible kung-fu ‘crane’ style one for a minute there!

    So yes – if you’re in Brisbane and want to give it a go (and you should, even if you’ve never picked up a pen before), check out Drawn From Life. All you need to take is yourself and something to draw with – easy peasy!