August 29, 2011

    For my drawing effort today I chose to revisit the August 16th sketch of Patch, the one-eyed American toad... and I expect I'll work on it (and probably finish it) tomorrow.

August 28, 2011

    Today's sketch is a simple pencil drawing (that counts as a pun, doesn't it?)... and a brush drawing. Since the shadow of the pencil looks just like the pencil, it's the shadow that's drawing the fruit, but the drawing of an eraser that's erasing the trail into the shadow drawing.

August 27, 2011

    This is a large wheel thrown and embellished vase. It is lightly burnished and made of a terra cotta colored clay with many small flecks.

August 26, 2011

    When I do a drawing I don't think much of, I think of it as one of my "stinky fish". When I saw this stinky fish lying on the beach, I knew I had to try to draw it as a joke on myself - and as a reminder that, well, stinky fish happen to everyone now and then...

August 25, 2011

    Because I'm taking a bit of a break, I got one of my sons to scribble something for me to use as a constraint/starter to do a just-for-fun sketch. This is what he came up with... a bit light, but the rules say I have to use the lines. I can ignore any I don't want to use but I have to leave them there (I did go over them to make them more visible). I can turn it any direction I want, so I'm showing it in the orientation I settled on. 
    I made it into the up-close mouth of a dog (or doggish creature). Yes, I know dog teeth aren't really like this, but this is probably the way my poor valiant mail man is imagining they look as he approaches the door...

August 24, 2011

     I added some more color, but I'm going to break for a few days on this... I was crazy to line the steps up right above the pot even though they looked lined up from sitting on the end of the bench that let me look between things into the pond. Since I didn't stick with a strictly realistic style, and was experimenting anyway, I should have done what it took to get a good composition. I'm annoyed by the double tree too, but will live with that. 
    When I do re-approach this, I'll plan on moving the steps some, painting the middle in, the middle right, relaxing the goldfinch so he doesn't look stuffed, and... well... working All Over this thing. Sigh.

August 23, 2011

Starting to add color...
    Okay, here's what I'm up to:  Generally, under-painting is done with oils. At least, that's the only way I've seen it done, and obviously the Old Masters did not have acrylic paints. I do generally  prefer oils (for lots of reasons), but when it comes to clean up outdoors, carrying the thing, and so on... I do better with acrylics. I'm just messy, I guess. For that reason - and maybe just because it occurred to me - I wanted to try using the gray under-painting with acrylics, which means I needed to use a gel medium to increase transparency. 
    You can see some places where I added too much water with the gel and pigment, and got more the look of particles over the under-painting, and others where it is much more gel-like. Sometimes I actually like the "wiped off" look acrylic gets when there's too much water, and sometimes it's just wrong... At any rate, I'm learning - adding tools to my bag.
  

August 22, 2011

    Well, it has been a long and busy day, including all the planned things like meetings and appointments, and the unplanned things (like having an earth quake and all that), so I just finished up this grisaille under painting. Grey paintings aren't exactly sketching, but they do sort of resemble graphite drawing, don't they?

August 21, 2011

    Since I wanted a break from messing with the other painting, and since I needed to let a few spots in the oils get a bit drier (well, at least a bit tackier), I worked on and just about finished the grisaille of the pond. The season has changed everything quite a bit, but the sun was out, there was a slight breeze, and the temperature was perfect - a Grrrrreat day to paint outside!!

August 20, 2011

    Yesterday I did not make much progress on the painting I started a few days ago! I was juggling with such a terrible physical set up for painting that, as my son put it, I was "cursing the darkness" until I'd developed a headache, scrubbed off much of what I'd done, and turned in without posting my poor progress. 
     Cursing the darkness indeed - for one thing my lighting was so awful that my own hand kept casting a hard dark shadow on the exact spot I was working (and of course it Stayed with me, the dumb thing...) and the glare elsewhere was terrible. The canvas was too wobbly to be able to steady my hand. Curse! Whine!
     I set up in a different location to start off again tomorrow, although I have so many different commitments I expect to be able to devote only a small chunk of time to the paints... but it will be a more Pleasant (and less whiny) chunk of time!

August 19, 2011

    I didn't get to work on this as much as I would have liked today, but I did get many of the base colors laid down so most of the canvas is at least covered. The paint is still wet and I had to use a flash so that the photo shows  some glistening as an artifact of those conditions. Perhaps if the weather cooperates and I remember, I can retake the photo tomorrow before working on it again.

August 18, 2011

    This is a terrible photo (for instance the gesso should definately be white and I have weird shadowing), but it serves the purpose... 
    Day one of Passing Lane. 

August 16, 2011

     This is a sketch of a little American toad we found in the middle of the side walk one night. It just sat there unmoving and wouldn't budge when gently prodded, so we picked it up to see if it was okay. It was missing one eye and one knee was skinned bare, so we took it home, washed it up, and put a bit of antibiotic ophthalmic ointment in the missing eye socket and on the knee... it has healed up but it has pathetic bug-catching skills without binocular vision.     
     The plan is to feed him (let's just say him) up and let him go when he gets  better at catching bugs. That may take awhile. He hasn't improved much yet - but within two or three days of feeling enough better to come out of hiding he began to hop toward us begging bugs. He can eat a bug held for him, or one that walks over his left (blind side) foot. He flips the bug up with his foot while flipping out his tongue. For some reason, that doesn't work as well on the right side. Can you imagine having to wait for bugs to just walk over the correct front foot? He'd get pretty hungry out there! We do make him practice catching the provided bugs for himself some of the time.
    He's extremely cute; squat and round, and he moves in the endearingly awkward, abrupt way of toads. We've provided him with a name for the meantime - really a convenience for us. He's named Dispatch - which we hope he'll learn to do with bugs - and for short he's Patch, which I think is a cute name for a one-eyed toad. For now, he lives with my son's baby mud turtle, now named Pokey (see January 24th posting). 

August 15, 2011

     This is a contour sketch of a white pine cone done with ink (a particularly scratchy pen... not one I really enjoyed much). The shadow didn't allow the cone to stand out so I filled it in with graphite, which worked okay.

August 14, 2011

    More tea figurines... one of the things that amuses me about these is the complete disregard for relative size concerns. Here are a mountain lion, an owl, a goose and a polar bear.

August 13, 2011

    Three shark's teeth.

August 12, 2011

     The design on this raku pot was made by tossing handfuls of horse hair onto the clay as it fired. The lid was unglazed but burnished and the bunny on top was glazed with a crackle glaze. I got this at a crafter's fair. My drawing needs to plump out a bit on the right I can see... still practising free-hand rounds... 

August 11, 2011

     These are four quick contour drawings of a tea figurine. It seems (rather oddly, I think - television or story character?) to be a monkey in a pleated skirt and holding a drinking glass. Only the back has the (possibly circus) designs on the base. 
     One thing I like about these little tea figurines is that the glaze runs and fills in crevices so each one is a little different. This one is so odd and slightly "off" that it reminds me of a Chinese (I think) figurine I saw photos of once that illustrated a story about a beautiful girl that turned into an ugly witch as she crossed a river. The figurine was carved so that you saw a beautiful girl on one side and the witch on the other, but they blended into each other as you twisted it around. 

August 10, 2011

    The view is looking down from the side onto this robot bug, which was done very quickly and in a way that proved to be more testing than learning or skills practice. I didn't measure or take care to get my angles just so, and did not pick it up and make sure I understood the parts or how they related spatially to each other. I just drew what I could see. 
     The over-all shape of the two sides of the back is wrong, as they are symmetrical (I think), but the shapes of the flanges and the ways they stick out relative to each other stood up to re-checking although they also seem symmetrical. Being different lengths and bent at different angles they didn't appear visually symmetrical from this angle. I was pleased that although I just placed the legs quickly and freely by eye, when I hooked them up with the cross-bars, they actually met up with the other legs at the correct locations. My more casual free-hand is improving since I would have had to correct for that a few months ago...

August 8, 9, 2011

     A graphite portrait of an anonymous Official Good Deeder. Some days, it's just hard on your hair being an angel...
     I've been gone again, during which time I did a few very quick drawings which I will also post, but I worked on this portrait for two separate days. The second day was today, but I'm keeping the date count as 8,9 to cut down on confusion or I'd be jumping all over the place!

August 8, 2011

     This mousey looking little fellow is a baby squirrel. He has been coming to our feeder on the kitchen window sill for about three days. I drew this over two days because of the movement of my "nude will pose for sunflower seeds" model. He moves about, but shows very little natural fear of us... unfortunately. 
     His tail is not fluffed out yet, his ears look a bit big on him and he is so skinny he almost makes a question mark instead of a plumper squirrel's hunched shape. When they're really tiny they go from looking like rats to looking somewhat like baby kangaroos! This one is just a bit young to not be still following Momma Squirrel around when outside of the nest... I hope all is well in the squirrel neighbourhood.

August 7, 2011

     This is a beach scape from two photos taken at Gay Head beach on Martha's Vineyard. Some fellow was porpoising about in the water right behind these stone towers someone had built on a sandy rock, and I took about eight photos trying to get one just as he burst upwards behind the towers. Of course I never did take a photo at just the right second, but I did get one as he splashed in out of the water so I combined that one with one of the towers photos to get a live human next to the humanoid stone piles. Hmm... the figure looks better when you click on him to enlarge him; otherwise it looks like he has a white stripe down his front (not that there weren't plenty of people on the beach with odd red and white markings!). 
     

August 6, 2011

     This is the stem from a bok choy. When you've pulled off all of the big leaves you usually have just a core left, but this time the core had smaller bok choy starts all along the length of it, and it had such a bizarre, bonsai look that I immediately knew I had to draw it. It could be a plant from another planet...
     I have already stuck a few more normal looking cores in the ground and they seem to be growing, so I did the same thing with this one. Our turtle will no doubt find them and chow down! 

August 5, 2011

    A harbor scene.

August 4, 2011

    For ease of posting after a long day ("helping" put in a new counter/sink combo for my parents), I'm going to post today's drawing of my elderly dog asleep on the kitchen floor in lieu of more of the catch-up drawings from Woods Hole.
    My old doggie gal used to be much fatter, but has lost quite a bit of weight (for her health) and is now soft and a little like a low pressure water-balloon so that she can sag in on the up-side (creating a waistline) but out on the down-side with a fold slightly over her leg. She's a black dog, but it's so hot we've shaved her over-coat so the woolly under-coat shows, and it's a black brindled cream with a black stripe down the middle! She snores when she sleeps...

August 2, 2011 - August 3, 2011

     I worked on this landscape over two days, although I wasn't able to scan or post the intermediate stage of the drawing. These trees are on the lawn outside of the dining hall on the Marine Biological Lab campus.

August 1, 2011

    This sketch of the interior of Captain Kidd's in Woods Hole was done from the corner booth. There was a local band in the far back corner and a palm and pirate mural on the wall. 
    Someone had told us the Kidd had been written into Herman Melville's Moby Dick, but Wikipedia says the Kidd has been around for (only!) 100 years, while the novel was written over 50 years before that, so it would have been a neat trick...  

     

July 31, 2011

    I'm so tired I've already fallen asleep once... sitting up. It's my first night back home, but I'm only going to post one sketch tonight. I'll catch up over the next few days with my posting. 
    This is an air plant sitting in a flute, and it was on the table in the B&B where we stayed. I sketched it in about two sittings over two of the first few days we were there, but I also did some other sketches and/or starts, so this one counts as one - for the 31st. 

July 30, 2011

 

    This peculiar glass vase is in the bathroom where we're staying, and it holds three paper roses. The marble is from the little keyring thing that attaches to the room key.

July 29, 2011

    I'm drawing, but having trouble using someone else's equipment. If I manage to figure some things out, I'll post some tomorrow. If not... I'll just keep trying when I can work in some time to try things out. 

July 29, 2011 

     Well, I had a breakthrough in process, although I'm still dependent on someone else to help with the resizing rather than install different software on someone else's computer (!) so here is the plane window from the flight out on the thirtieth. 
     There's not much to see from a window seat, really, but this was the most time in one spot on that day! It was very awkward working in this small space; I couldn't move my elbows freely enough in the confines of the wall, seat and arm rest. To compensate, I rotated the pad instead, and the results are not what I would have liked. The biggest problem is with the bottom of the shade, where I have gotten the shape wrong... almost reversed the two bottom curves. 
    The Atlantic ocean was in sight when we were low enough, with the thin line of barrier islands visible.