Jan. 22, 2011

    Three different takes on a female chameleon walking around on the table, mat and a climbing ladder. The lower right is the most realistic, though they do change from long and flat as in the central, almost contour drawing, to lemon shaped (generally only the males go "angel fish" shaped). I wasn't happy at all with any of these... another subject to tackle again another day!

Jan. 21, 2011

     Having discovered, doing the blind contour the day before, that a son on the computer is a very still and stable model for drawing, I sketched my younger son. Scott has his right arm out so his hand can rest on the mouse. The lighting was coming from the computer screen (variably), from the window (light on his forehead mainly) and some from the lamp that put light on my pad.

Jan. 20, 2011

     This is a blind contour drawing of one of my sons working on the computer with his dog, Mindy, beside him. He's sitting on an old school house bench seat. The desk top is behind him and would have served the child behind the seat when many of these were lined up in a column. 
     I had to drape a light scarf over my pad and pencil or I would have cheated! I started at the upper left arm (about the top middle) and had to look down to place my pencil seven times... twice on the scroll-work on the desk - and I'm amazed it isn't more crossed up - and twice on the dog - and I'm amazed she is so crossed over and goofy looking! I didn't look to get the numbers onto the alarm face, but they pretty much made it there...

Jan. 19, 2011

    The 19th was Cezanne's birthday so I pulled up one of his paintings on a laptop and sat in front of it and began copying in pencil. Initially I was just going to block in general shapes and values, but I neglected to note that the proportions of the pad and screen image were different. I know, how obvious... so obviously when I came in from different sides and corners I wasn't going to meet in the middle... there's a whole lotta fudgin' going on! Nevertheless, with proper fudging the sketch began looking pretty good, then I decided I'd been neglecting the darker values and started putting some of those in and for that reason - and others - the sketch started going badly down-hill... having already demonstrated I didn't know when to quit...
I quit!
   

Jan. 18, 2011

     Today a friend of mine had surgery on her right eye... a second surgery to improve the outcome of a prior surgery which has forced her to keep her right eye closed since the first of the year. Despite that, she has been doing the sketch a day too! 
     Around the 17th or so, she commented that sketching with one eye closed had helped her see her values better. Intrigued, I announced that "in solidarity" with her condition, celebration of her resolve, (and out of curiosity about the effects) I was going to do my next sketch with my right eye shut. I had to tape it shut with duct tape (not so ouch as you would think), and here is the sketch, done on the 18th... posted on the day of the second surgery.
     I did not notice a difference with how I perceived values (but the human mind adapts and she may have been getting different effects after a few weeks of monocular vision) but I did notice that the edges of things acquired a strange, almost shimmery but subtle effect as though back-lit with a peculiar kind of light. I believe it was from my mind dealing with the edge information being singular as opposed to being averaged from two eyes. For me, the real difference came in my ability to see what I was putting on the paper. I felt uncertain about placing my pencil quite where I wanted it. Unassisted, my single eye did not want to refocus between jar and sketch pad quickly and I had some trouble with bleariness as well.
     Here's hoping she's back to working and enjoying life with both eyes soon!
   

Jan. 17, 2011

     Two pumpkins (they do sit with half of the top one looking levitated... a hollow side inside?) and a pomegranate... unlikely companions.

Jan. 16, 2011

    Three onions and two potatoes with a net bag. I was playing with different ways of showing the net - if you click on the image to expand it, you will notice a couple of approaches. Some are more successful than others.

Jan. 15, 2011

     I raise these to feed my lizards; primarily chameleons, a beardie (Mia; see Jan 2) and a baby Eastern mud turtle. These were alive when I drew them, so I used a Victorian style of standing magnifier and a broom straw for flipping, repositioning, herding...

Jan. 14, 2011

    Hannah, being an elderly dog, finds it difficult to chew on rawhide strips. She wants them... she just can't really maul them properly so she carries them around to prevent her nemesis Mindy from getting them. Generally, Hannah wants to take them outside to enjoy in an unhurried manner. Rather than torment her too long, I took a flash photo of this (hence the type of shadows) and let her outside...

Jan. 13, 2011

      
     
     
     Several sketches of a cicada exoskeleton.

Jan. 12, 2011

    Again, as with the fire ring, I was interested in playing with jumbled, confused visual information. As a way of refusing to allow myself to become too fixated on what I know I should be seeing instead of simply what I am seeing, I looked around for something to draw that I couldn't see the details of well enough to "explain" them in the drawing. This pot contains two just-sprouting amaryllis bulbs, lots of dead, dried-up amaryllis leaves and brown pine needles. Even if I could see where any particular bit went for any significant portion of the length of it, it would be tiresome to draw it... Of course, I should be painting this... graphite pencil is not the best medium for this type of attempt, but that's what I wanted to try and that's what this sketch is all about... and not in paint.
    Oh! Except that I decided I did not want to move down onto the table, began to take it out again but grabbed a rotten eraser so I got icky pinkish-reddish smudges before I realized it, and took those out with white-out. Click on this to blow it up and you can see that, especially near the pot's lower right...which reminded me how much I like to use white-out on purpose. I just like the cake-y hard chalky build up with pencil or pen. Maybe soon I'll allow myself to do a sketch using white-out...

Jan. 11, 2011

    My feet - the way I see them - stretched out in front of me, usually bare... 'nuff said.

Jan. 10, 2011

     This is a sketch of the corner of my living room, and a terrarium where a tiny baby Eastern Mud Turtle lives. Although the light looks like the lamp was on, the flat rectangular light on the terrarium was on, and not the lamp - it just threw those light arches on the wall. Also, the shade really was cocked so the top rim leans up against the flying bird finial, which didn't bother me at the time, but in the drawing does... There was a chameleon sitting on the rim of the shade to the left, knocking it all skee-wunky. The odd thing is I must have gotten distracted and wandered off before doing more than a line or two of the chameleon. I didn't realize I had neglected to finish drawing him in until I viewed the scanned photo...
    Several lessons here for me:  Take another look after I think I'm done (which doesn't mean I'll always take more time, but I'll Decide to take more time or not); use fixative if there's a lot of dark or worked areas; and it's okay to take a moment to set the area up a bit before the sketch. It's about the sketching, but it's legitimate to make it about the composition too.

Jan. 9, 2011

     These were fast sketches of our younger - and much more active - dog, Mindy. Mindy is a Mountain Cur, and although it does seem like she sleeps at times, I failed to find more than a few seconds at a time when she was not moving. The sketch in the lower right corner, for instance, started at her rump (I was learning the head moves most) and at first the shoulders were lower, with the neck outstretched, but by the time I was up to that area she had raised her head to gnaw at her right foreleg. Before I managed more than these few lines in that position she had laid her head down again. Thus, the many abandoned fragments. She's a lovely dog though, and deserves further attempts even if only similar seconds-of-gestural type sketches!
  

Jan. 8th, 2011

        The first night back from the mountains I was tired so I decided, uncharacteristically, to watch some TV. This shelf with shells, rocks, coral and a cut marble slab was right in front of me so I drew it during commercials. 

Jan 7th, 2011

    We found this skull, which we thought might be a baby beaver skull due to the location, the teeth and the size.

Jan. 6th 2011

    The reason we can "camp" in January and still be reasonably comfortable doing it is this cute little gal... "Ivy" the "Autostove" (although I can't find a thing automatic about her; you have to load her with wood, constantly adjust her, remove her ash and so on). I adore her - she's so cute! She also puts out some Major heat, so I could only work on this sketch for a few minutes at a time before having to dash outside to wander about and cool off in the January mountain air. Unfortunately, after fighting with the sketch ("hmmm... something wrong here") I discovered the folding chair I was using was being moved a bit this way and that in between sittings, so there were subtle differences in my view which lent distortion to the sketch. Ivy and her pet dragon-steamer are cute enough that I'll probably end up using her as a subject again before this year is out...

Jan. 5, 2011

    This is a sketch of a pair of shoes on the rocks of the fire ring. I started with the bucket but quickly became bored with it and moved on to the shoes, rocks and ground duff. Part of my intention in doing this sketch was to play with the problem of depicting busy areas where there is a confusion of shapes such as the grass/leaf area at the base of the bucket and the area inside the fire ring... without having to take on the tediousness of rendering so much detail. By the time I got to those areas I wasn't willing to spend a great deal of additional time on the sketch, so I have just experimented with sampling tiny ground areas. I wanted to run off into the woods and play!

Jan. 4, 2011

     January 4th I found myself in the passenger seat of a truck on the way to go camping near Charlottesville, VA (brrrr!) when I realized we wouldn't get there until after dark. By climbing around over the seat I managed to retrieve my sketch pad but couldn't reach the pencils, so this sketch of the rear view mirror - the only thing not moving - was done with a ball point, bumping and jostling along 29S. 

Jan 3, 2011

     This sketch of someone picking seeds from a pomegranate was used to think about the hands on a painting I started a while back from a photo. I had wanted to change the hands around some, and that brought me to a halt on the painting... thus the decision to do a study for the third sketch-a-day sketch, although I don't plan on restarting this painting until I finish a different one...

Jan. 2, 2011

     Mia, my son's female bearded dragon, has an entirely different attitude toward being stared at; she loves the attention. Named by a prior "owner" because of her "it's all about Me" attitude, Mia's beard turns black the moment she feels the slightest bit annoyed... so I could be pretty sure she was perfectly comfortable with the mutual watching game.
     This sketch allowed me to practice a number of things I find difficult, or simply difficult to make myself do, when sketching... such as allowing physically distinct areas with similar values to merge. I used a standard number two school-house-yellow pencil with these first two sketches.

Jan 1, 2011

     Although I started my sketch a day on January first with this sketch of Hannah, at first I emailed these to a few friends, then put some on Paintbucket, then bowed to friendly pressure (ahem... Amy) and started this blog. Sketches will have to be added at the rate of several a day until I catch up to the real date...
    At fifteen years old, Hannah is a supremely obliging model. She found my sitting in front of her on the floor staring at her to be disconcerting so she's not asleep, but she's resigned and waiting for me to be done with my crazy, mysterious human activity.