Wednesday, November 10, 2010

How to Keep Your Drawing Clean?

When you need to work on a drawing that requires your hands and arms to rest on the artwork, these are some tips that can help you keep your artwork clean:

1) Cover the area of your drawing where your hands and arms are going to rest. You can cover it using a paper, newsprint paper or simple paper towels. You can tape the covering paper to your drawing board to prevent it from moving.

2) Try to begin drawing on the upper corner of the paper and work toward the opposite lower corner. So if you start on the upper left hand coner, you end up on your lower right corner.

3) If you are using different materails on the same drawing, lets say soft charcoal, conte and dark charcoal, leave the materail that smears very easily for the very last.

4) Use some fixative every so often can also keep the charcoal and pastel in place. But use this option as last resource since fixatives tend to change the texture of the paper.

Tuesday, November 09, 2010


Free Art Class at The Upper Tampa Bay Library

The Art Of Drawing by Vanessa Montenegro
Saturday Nov 13th at 10:00am
Upper Tampa Bay Regional Library
11211 Country Blvd., Tampa, FL 33626

I will be presenting a hands-on drawing workshop for adults and teens. I will be offering advice about materials, techniques and step-by-step exercises. Feel free to bring a drawing pad, pencils, etc.

Finding The Beauty On The Mundane

It was a rainy fall day in Florida. I was working on a portrait commission at my home studio with the patio door open, listening to the rain...