October 27, 2011

    I'm going to do that thing I do where I put up part of a drawing and get some sleep! Instead of a drawing of a bowl of (mainly) squash, just consider this to be a drawing of a bowl of two squash (one is in the background), one apple (in the front at the bottom) and something way down there I would have to move things to identify... a yellow apple, maybe. 
    Maybe I will finish this tomorrow, but since it's Halloween tomorrow the temptation will be to draw candy or ghosts or something and finish this in a day or two... 

October 26, 2011

    The last, and I suppose the least... this is the final rotation and the one I felt least inspired by, so I settled on a fishing boat. The fisherman has tangled his line around the handle of his rod, but he's about to get the catch of his life anyway. 
    That's it! The last of the four scribble drawings - one for each orientation. I'm not caught up, but it helped move me along... 

October 25, 2011

     Here is the third rotation of the scribble - a stylized horse head. It looks to me like it belongs on a Soviet poster from the 1920s. 
     I was having a very hard time with this rotation... I could "see" some things in it, but they would work okay for this little bit over here and then I couldn't see anything to do with the rest, or maybe something else for a different part but with the same problem... the rest wouldn't work in at all. Remember, the idea is to try to use all of the lines in the original scribble below, no erasures, and to try not to just over-ride or ignore a line. 
     So, there I sat in the wooden state of mental block when suddenly I saw this horse, as though it had been there all along. A horse, of course!
   

October 24, 2011

    So, I rotated the scribble posted on October 26 (for October 22nd), and got a harp player. Perhaps the daughter of Pluto and one of Picasso's painted ladies? No wonder she drowns her sorrows in wine and music...

October 23, 2011

    Wow, I'm going through a huge slump in getting these drawings done... and even my scribble sketch scheme to catch up hasn't helped me out of the slump much. 
    I did finally pull up my drawing suspenders enough to do the first of the scribble drawings:  It's a circus. On to the next rotation...

October 22, 2011

     I made this scribble for someone else to play "scribble sketch" with. You're supposed to use a scribble someone else did, so it's guaranteed to have been unplanned... but I know this has no planned image so I know it's just a random scribble. Also, I'm behind at this point since the last several days have been jumble-pile days and I need to squeeze in some catch-up just-for-fun sketches. SO - I'm going to see what I can come up with for this sketch from all four orientations and make those be the next four sketches. Hopefully posting tomorrow...

October 21, 2011

    Today I had to give my elderly dog, Hannah, a bath. She has some medication that's good for her skin and after I apply it I leave in on awhile before washing it off. I told her to stay in the tub and went to get my coffee from the kitchen. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her scooting along into the living room, trailing blue-green suds and medicated soap, trying to act casual... Told to go get back in the tub, she plopped down on a towel waiting for her (future cleaner self) in front of the window. Two of us picked the towel up like a hammock and returned her to the tub, to her great disgust. She has gotten pretty hard headed in her old age! She claims the privileges of age, I guess...
    At any rate, I had learned my lesson! I had someone bring me my sketch book and drew this poor little soggy dog, standing with her tail tucked under and her bottom socked up against the tile wall so her head could hang out (making it less likely to be rinsed, is the theory I suppose). She always looks so much thinner and sorrier (or maybe sulkier) when she's wet!
   

October 20, 2011

     I was joking about drawing a bar of soap earlier... I thought "well, why not?" so here it is. I considered the wrapped bar... too plain. I ripped it open and held the bar... creamy and nice, but still too plain. I shoved it back into the wrapper, which was all wrinkled up by now, and just like with Goldilocks, the in-between stage was Just Right.

October 19, 2011

    This is a drawing of a bookshelf with toys and books.You might recognize some of the toys from earlier blog posts.

October 18, 2011

    I've missed a few days now, having been without a computer - at least without my computer, due to an unfortunate updating accident... as in; I accepted an update. It was severely incompatible with something and the only thing lacking was the smoke.
    Thanks to the technological expertise, patience and persistence of my sons, my lovely computer is back and doesn't even seem to mind all the completely foul things I called it in the heat of the moment. Let's just say I was inventive...
    Here is a hand pump container of hand sanitizer - the aloe gel variety. I used a 4B the whole way. Hmm... maybe I should have drawn a bar of soap?
   

October 17, 2011

      This is my completed drawing of a Grey Tree Frog sitting on a magnolia leaf. Grey Tree Frog is really their name, as unimaginative as it sounds. I would have named this kind a Lichen Frog, since they come in grey and grey-green, and really seem to be imitating the lichen found on rocks and trees. Besides, lichen is a lovely sounding word. 
    This graphite B2 and B4 drawing was done from a photo taken of a young frog I found in my back yard. Sitting like this, with his feet tucked tightly in under himself, the other thing I took him for just at first was a strange fungus on the leaf.
    For me, drawing the fuzzier, more out-of-focus things that are very near or very far is more difficult. Drawing a whole lot of nothing (because there is nothing defined as any given identifiable object) and making it seem like it might be something if you could just see it better is also difficult. I think that even though you'd expect that any old fuzzy doodle would do, the human eye-brain duo actually expects certain typical shapes, and probably more importantly, has scale expectations that must not be violated or else things start to jump out at you as just wrong!
    

October 16, 2011

     For one thing, I was behind one day in my sketches, for another, I ended up deciding to put in a bit more (fuzzy) background... so I figured I would just count this drawing as two days' worth. Usually though, when I do that I put up the first day's drawing instalment then the next day I put up the finished drawing. Well, I'm not done yet but this is a bit more than the first day so I cut out background and am posting just the little frog now, and hopefully will post the background too - the finished drawing - before the night is out.

October 15, 2011

    This is a blind contour of a mixer... or a partial blind contour. I did look at the paper a couple of times... mainly to move from the mixer to the bowl, to put my pencil in a starter position for the shadow behind the bowl, and to move from there to the start point for the egg and vanilla pair. Working in the kitchen, "heart of the house", I matched those moves up with the interruptions that caused me to forget where I was or else I'd have had to look over and over again! 
    I decided to do a blind contour because I only had fifteen minutes to spend on a drawing tonight, and you can spend that little time on a blind contour or you can spend twice that. My son was ribbing me that "it's the 'I only have fifteen minutes and I don't want it to look like I spent a lot of time on it' drawing"... well, yes and no. Yes, you can do something in fifteen minutes, and yes it doesn't look like you spent a lot of time on it! But... it wouldn't be a waste to do several blind contours in a sitting, or to do them more frequently. 
    I find that when I'm doing standard drawings I sometimes move my hand back and forth without touching the paper to help judge how long a line should be... how large a space is. There is some connection between your visual processing and your kinaesthetic processing so that the hand movement provides feedback concerning translating seen objects into drawn objects, and that is the connection I believe blind contour drawing tends to strengthen. Standard, constantly-checking drawing strengthens it also, but blind contour drawing provides a slightly altered feedback that's useful and interesting. 
    The same son suggested I might be describing something akin to what is referred to as "muscle memory" - and perhaps so. If you see the distance is this long, you draw it with a hand movement/pencil stroke of this length, and your visual check confirms it looks right, then an association is strengthened. If your visual check finds the results unsatisfactory then the association weakens and is corrected. Your hand starts to become a more active participant in the collaboration. 

    And a blind contour only takes fifteen minutes to do!

October 14, 2011

    This is a drawing of a golden retriever, done from a photo. One day recently a young girl came to the door to tell us "our" dog had been hit and was laying under our car down by the road. Our dogs were both inside, but this little guy was laying in the gutter and acted like he couldn't get up. Eventually he did, but he was wobbly and trembling. We suspect he had been hit by a car that had almost managed to stop, and thus he wasn't seriously hurt. I'd like to think the driver stopped to check on him, but didn't know where he had gone since he had crawled under our car.  
    Although it took several hours, we were able to eventually find his owner because he had a micro-chip under his shoulder skin. He was a sweet little guy so I photographed him a bit before he was collected by his family. 
    Yes, yes... I know the tongue is seriously wrong... but I'm Done with this one for now. One of my theories is that I'm going to go back one of these days and redo the bad drawings from the start. Maybe...

October 13, 2011

    The last three drawings made me want to draw just shadows... the peach pit had three shadows despite one sun (reflected light, I guess), the tomatillo had a delicate lattice-work shadow and was almost as airy as a shadow itself, and the wool tassel I posted earlier today was mainly ivory but solid and it cast a very dark shadow, so the shadow had more presence, from a distance, than the tassel itself. 
    I set up a clear plastic cup (with handle) and filled it with paint brushes and placed one across the rim, put a light over it and behind it, and there are ambient lights in the room. I drew just the very bottom front edge of the cup, and the shadows it cast.

October 12, 2011

    This is a drawing of a wool tassel. It's a large, ornate Victorian-style thing; done in shades of ivory, evergreen and maroon.

October 11, 2011

     This is a 2B graphite drawing of a tomatillo husk. It is the leaf-like covering that protects the tomatillo until it's ripe. You peel them off to use the tomatillo and throw these out. The cellulose veins throughout them must be somewhat tougher than is usual in leaves because whereas some leaves do turn to "lace" when the softer parts get decayed and eaten out by insects, tomatillo husks almost always turn to lace when they weather outside on a compost heap. 
     I'd planned to draw one of these several days ago, but you can see where a puff of wind would carry them away... so I had to find a new one. In fact, I was just about finished with this drawing when I gave a huge sigh and my model poofed off the table... drawing done! 

October 10, 2011

     For today's sketch I finished the drawing of a peach pit. I should have backed down some on the edge line at the left end of the pit, to reduce the outline there, but I'm too darned tired so I won't... 
     Last night I snuggled down in a bed where the antique style of real metal springs make the mattress feel like jello, under an old quilt between open windows with a breeze rustling the leaves of a huge old oak branch stretching out over the roof. The particularly close roof... the kind of room where the edges of the ceiling slope so the room can be Particularly close up under the roof. The roof where the Golf Ball sized Acorns that Blam against it every five minutes then roll blumbeda blumbeda blumbeda down to the edge sound like you are under fire from crazy squirrel cannons and they just might break through... 
     I was extra tired today. I'm going to get a bit more sleep tonight, back home, where horns and sirens are the loudest things going on at night. 

October 9, 2011

     My hand is pretty swollen today from the yellow jacket sting. I don't know why it has reacted so much, but the skin feels uncomfortably tight when I hold small objects like a pencil, so I will finish this tomorrow. I considered drawing my hand (just about every day I consider and reject several things!) but since it looks a bit like Mickey Mouse's hand, it would look fakey no matter what! 
     I had set aside some husk tomato "husks"; the kind that have been reduced to lace cages by insects, but they have been carried off by squirrels or the wind, so while I was wandering around trying to find them I ran across this peach pit. Since I was drawing it outside on a sunny day it seems a bit odd that it has three or four shadows... very alien world.

October 8, 2011

    This is a drawing of a funky glass bottle made in China. I'm lucky I drew it this morning because the antics of our young, overly exuberant mountain cur raised the wrath of a yellow jacket and she took it out on my right hand (the dog being, apparently, too fast to catch). Half my hand is double it's normal size, and if it's not waaaaaaaaaay better by tomorrow evening I may just have to do tomorrow's sketch with my toes!

October 7, 2011

     One of my angel wing begonias had several large clusters of their strange pink spun-sugar flowers. I kept intending to sit outside and draw them, but I hadn't gotten around to doing it yet when I noticed they were starting to drop off... so today was the day. I caught the last three hanging blossoms!

October 6, 2011

    This is a 2B drawing of a single clementine. The range of textures and opportunities to explore ways to show those textures on a single clementine is astonishing and gratifying.

October 5, 2011

     This is a drawing of a soup bowl (wide shouldered) full of clementines. These were in a bag instead of the usual box, they varied in size a little more than they typically do, and most of them were smaller than the clementines I'm used to buying.

October 4, 2011

    We finished up some Chinese food tonight. Most of it comes in plastic micro-wave safe containers any more, but the rice still comes in these white shirt cardboard "goldfish" containers, so I rinsed one out and drew it... then got out a few grains of rice to add. 
    I did this my "lazy way" by starting to the right and moving to the left across the page, without measuring or - more importantly here - aligning lines according to perspective rules... which is why the perspective is a bit off. Even when I just go with my "lazy way" I keep meaning to move left to right to avoid the smudging... but it seems right to left is my no-brainer default way of working, especially when I'm tired. 

October 3, 2011

     This was done from a model, so I had the little guy right there On the table in front of me... nevertheless, I still managed to push the front wheel out too far, which I've seen done (I'm told it's called "raked"), but which isn't accurate for this one. Ah well; sometimes I can see I've gone a bit wrong with a drawing but decide to finish it up as it is instead of erasing, erasing, erasing!

October 2, 2011

    Tonight I drew a hand full of lollipops, wrapped in clear cellophane, with silver "twisties" around the sticks attaching oval tags. They're stuck down into the neck of a royal blue bottle - although it's all in 2B graphite. Oh, and one chewed lollipop stick...

October 1, 2011

     Here's a quickish sketch of my son's big bare feet propped up on a table while he's watching television.