Raven D's Wildlife and Pet Portraits

I've known about Croquis Cafe for years. I used to follow their Youtube channel, and saw some wonderful model videos. They were a free resource channel running on donations. This was a wonderful channel as an alternative for those who cannot make it to a life drawing class. At some point, they had free reference photos of many models for us to use, too. The photos were decent. I wouldn't recommend what I saw for hyperrealism study, but they were still wonderful to work with.  Light sources were good and all. I remember perusing the archive and thought about using a few. It didn't happen due to my laziness. Then, eventually I lost the few photos I downloaded due to my laptop taking a dump. However, I feel good about being too lazy to pursue projects based off their reference photos and you'll know why as deep as I get into this blog. At some point, they've became a subscription-only page, and took down the free material. It's fair. You have to think of the cost o

  Baby Girl 7x10" oil painting on gessoed wood panel *I'm aware she's a male bird I admit I am drawn to black and white images and really love my charcoal drawings and rare occasional graphite studies, but this year I want to focus more on painting. I have all these mini-canvas and some wood panels that are stuffed in a drawer and boxes waiting to be painted on. I also have watercolor, acrylics, oil pastels, and now Pan Pastels (Shoutout to GamerPrince25 on Twitch for the PanPastels! I truly appreciate it!). I especially need to practice more with watercolor. I'm a self-taught artist who didn't have access to really good tutorials. With all the resources I can easily find today without having to pay an astronomical amount, I'm taking advantage of watercolor tutorials rather than figuring it all out on my own like I did with drawing. For those who know me, I wasn't thrilled having to be the "I have to figure it out on my own" type of self-taught ar