March 25, 2011

    Here is the slice of banana walnut bread I had for breakfast. I wanted to try to portray the different textures and densities; where it's wetter at the bottom and so on... 
    I moved right up over the plate and tried to draw a circle free-hand. Considering I usually have a hard time with free-hand circles, ovals and straight lines, I didn't do badly though I can see on the scan that I flattened it below the fork. I should do a day of Elements practice... how boring the "shoulds" can be! 

March 24, 2011

    This was a rather quick sketch of my bathrobe, jeans, sweater, hose and fleece turtle-neck on hooks in my room.

March 23, 2011

     This is a pottery teapot I use. It has thick clay peas, leaves and I guess a pea plant flower as decorations in clay. The funny thing is, I never really thought about the flower before drawing this. Here is a teapot I really like, and yet I think I thought (I'm not even sure what I thought) it was an odd cluster of grapes, which shows that I hadn't really Looked at it until I had to draw it!

March 22, 2011

     I have several bird statuettes; chosen not because of the maker or for some collectible valuation, but because I like the bird and the piece's workmanship (or, occasionally, the absurd or engaging lack of workmanship) or the way some of them evoke an era. This one is a china canary, sketched in pen. 

March 21, 2011

     Okay - so this isn't a new sketch... but I'm so far behind right now that I'm allowing myself to post the colored version of this previous drawing as a sketch for a day. I decided to try coloring this one, and in keeping with the child-like drawing, I wanted to try using crayons. I had a box of 64 I'd picked up as a whim somewhere because the colors grabbed me  (no wonder kids eat these things). I knew the paper wouldn't take water color, but I decided to color it with crayon and wash over it with water color since it would resist - which it did; and beaded up nicely, which you can see if you click on the image to enlarge it. Ignore the buckles - they're from the paper being for sketching and not water media. I'll plan ahead better next time, but an experiment is an experiment and play is just that!

March 20, 2011

    My older son commented he thought I should do another of the "scribble pictures" where I simply scribbled and then drew something based on the scribble, but he declined to provide the scribble so I lassoed the other son into making a scribble for me. After all, the original game, when I was a kid, was for one person to make a scribble and the other person had to make something out of the scribble... My second son provided the following scribble (I think he was channelling Joan Miro):

     I could turn it any direction I wanted, and I ended up using the direction that was 180 degrees from the orientation in which he drew this, but I have given you the scribble in the direction I used it. Can you find all of the original lines in the final drawing? 
     I drew the golden fish from the fairy tales, who could grant three wishes. Here, he's swimming with a companion, and some hopeful soul is attempting to net him with a net which is much too small. Magic can't be captured with a tiny imagination...

 

March 19, 2011

    For today's sketch submission I finished the sketch of my daughter's pet leopard tortoise named Tippy Toes.

March 18, 2011

    Today I visited the National Gallery with my friend, who is a copyist, and saw their lockers, how she sets up, and wandered the gallery while she painted. The gallery seemed to have a moderate sized crowd, but she would have up to eight people watching her paint at a given time. I'm very impressed by her bravery! 
    I was determined to get at least one sketch done, so I did this one of The Stranded Ship by Asher Durand. I chose it partly because it looked less complicated and thus doable, which is a good thing because I had to sketch it in two sits, due to picking  up a shoulder-peeker rather quickly the first time. The odd bat to the lower right is the worst as it should lay down, which it certainly does not... and I think it was actually the broken mast. Whatever.

March 17, 2011

    I was tired and thought I wouldn't have the energy to finish the turtle sketch tonight so I started a sketch of some twigs of the camellia that has begun to bloom next to my front door. I didn't stand there, though; I cut some stems and brought them in to put in a vase. I was just going to do a simple contour but didn't end up going that way, so again I'm going to post an incomplete sketch because I have to get up early and have a moderately long drive...

March 17, 2011

I'm several postings and two sketches behind unless I use the (as yet) unfinished sketch I did yesterday, so I'm going to try something new (for me and this blog) and post the unfinished sketch now and post the finished sketch when I have it done, which may not be tonight as I will be home fairly late.
    It's interesting, anyway, from the perspective of how one of my drawings looks part-way through; for instance while I am more apt to "work all over the page" when painting, I tend to establish some boundaries and then grow outward from one spot when sketching... as I "see" the sketch "forming up", or "coming out of the page".

March 16, 2011

    A boy and his dog:  Mindy ( a mountain cur ) and Scott catching up on zzzs together. Mindy's ear is inside-out, and I'd think being belly up would feel vulnerable too, but they've "got each other's back". 

March 15, 2011

    This is the crab shell left sitting on the bench in the sun. I did it with colored pencil and a hit of white paint... an entirely different treatment of colored pencil. The odd white "eye" spot is a barnacle... I could have left it out, but I liked the peculiar alien look on an entirely alien but earthly co-habitant.

March 14, 2011

     These two snail shells, the fresh water clam shell and a crab shell were already sitting in harsh sunlight on the weathered wood of a bench at Leesylvania. Someone had collected them and left them as a tiny still life. I drew these essentially black, white and grey shells in 2B pencil, but saved the crab shell for color.

March 13, 2011

    I had said I would probably do some more of the Girl Scout cookie trays. The last one (March 5) turned out to be more interesting to draw than I had expected, but this one (again in 2B pencil) was turning out boring and consequently I wasn't able to get myself to put too much effort into it. I was grumpy and dissatisfied. 
    I commented to my son; "You know what would save it - if I could put a realistic cookie into the corner of the tray, that would salvage this sloppy hasty  sketch... turn it into something more interesting". Too bad the cookies were all gone. I could imagine the waxy chocolate coating on a thin mint, but I would have a hard time drawing a very realistic one without one to look at. 
    Sympathetic, he headed off to bed then came bounding back - he'd remembered there was still one in a bowl of ice cream in the freezer! Dad hadn't wanted his dessert! The sketch, if not the day, was saved! 
    Of course, I had to lick off the ice cream, rinse it and pat it dry before I could place it and draw it, but it did add the bit of interest this light sketch needed. And of course, having licked the cookie, no respectable person would have returned it to the freezer...

March 12, 2011

    This stump is on the way to one of the overlooks at Leesylvania Park. It must have once had burls around the base. I stood - for too long - in order to get it from the top down (more natural) view so the sketch could include the tiny nut shells on top. I always like these little signs of someone having had a woodland picnic.

March 11, 2011

     This was an exercise in drawing a moving human figure, although I cheated quite a bit by using a "vlog" (no idea why the referencing site calls it that) of a dancer so that I could play and replay the moment that caught my eye, even though she is moving extremely slowly in this passage... no pausing though!
     I used a video of Zoe Janeroncka, partly because the pose appealed to me and partly because of the dramatic lighting. I changed her hair from dark to light however, simply because it worked better for me. 
    

March 10, 2011

     This is a blue glass cruet with glass stopper. The line down the left side and the shadows on the paper behind it are because I'm having to get used to a new software. Perhaps when I learn to do this better I'll replace the image with one scanned more tidily.
     I used Prismacolor pencils, and would have liked to have had a smoother paper, but you can zoom and see that I laid down so much pigment it should bloom like a candle (am I mixing my metaphors if I mean "bloom" as in wax?) to crush down the pores. I enjoy using either a light touch or a heavy one with colored pencils... it was fun simply to do one with Color!

March 9, 2011

    A huge glass stein from Germany.

March 8, 2011

      Three wine bottles - I took four (optimistic? pessimistic?) to our art guild board meeting, but they only drank one. The remaining three, determined to serve art, sat very still for me while I drew them for my sketch a day. In case you're wondering, the yummiest is quite cheap; Duplin's Scuppernong Blush, made in Rose Hill NC, which tastes just like scuppernong grapes... And also in case you're wondering, no - the wine had nothing to do with the left side of the right hand bottle being slightly bowed. It's just a wobble of the hand...

March 7, 2011

   Here is a pencil sketch of four tiny cherry tomatoes (Max's Wild Cherry) and a wee little Indian bitter melon from plants in my son's window. It's going to be a long time before he can subsist on what he's growing... but it has been interesting to see whether tomatoes and bitter melons could be more than annual if not for the winter weather. The bitter melons are succumbing to scale bug, but the wild cherry is attempting to take over the window area - true to it's summer habits.

March 6, 2011

    This is a magnolia seed pod and a twig of magnolia leaves, sketched with pencil.
       I will be catching up over the next few days; I still have a sketch pad with two sketches missing, and I have been doing without a working computer for two days... Hopefully I'll have my computer back sometime tomorrow or the next day.

March 5, 2011

    This is a very fast sketch of an empty cookie tray from a box of Girl Scout cookies. Being sleep deprived tonight (practically unable to focus my eyes), I really rushed through this one - cross hatching where I should have shaded gently, not being careful to translate between shapes seen through shapes and the confusion of reflections... so the shape doesn't read well at all. 
     I do think it made a far more interesting subject to draw than I expected when I ate the last two cookies merely to be able to draw the tray (ahem). I'll be giving this type of object a try again sometime very soon, when I can stand to spend a little more time with it.

March 4, 2011

    An avocado... at some point while gathering the salad fixings I thought "this should be a good subject", then shortly after beginning the sketch I thought "ugh... a way to use up lots and lots of lead". Then came frustration, then patches of hopefulness, and finally I was happier with it... but Mainly in the end I decided an avocado is a Super teacher. 
    Within the lumps on the skin are pretty difficult lessons in how important scale is, even with texture, how important it is to trust what you see, how hard it is to produce random repetition but how wrong too many same repeats can look in nature, and some of the more or less useful ways the human mind translates visuals into verbal coding to grapple with pattern.
    Then we had the salad...

March 3, 2011

    This is an enamel pot for heating water. I'm rather fond of it despite it's obvious challenges (having had the handle replaced sometime in the past with shelf brackets) because it's something of a magic pot; it holds about twice as much water as anything it's size should...

March 2, 2011

   Mindy playing at the park... lots of motion, little reason... just filling up the space in the park (and on the sketch pad) with muscle and action and Who Cares?!)... a dog at play.

March 1, 2011

    Six female veiled chameleons waiting for their breakfast... um, five... female number six is lurking in the greenery as usual. Yes, I am behind, but I have lost my other sketch book and had to buy a new one. When I find the other one I will catch up, and also post all my fabulous tips on housekeeping (maybe not)...

Feb. 28, 2011

    Contour drawings of garlic. Garlic reminds me of ample figures sheathed in tight dresses made of crisp shiny cloth like silk taffeta.