December 26, 2011

    Flipping through an earlier sketch book, checking for missed pages, I found this camellia sketch I had intended to color in with water colors as an experiment. I'd tried this earlier after spraying the graphite with fixative and the whole thing resisted the water color, so I had intended to try it without fixative, but never got around to it. I don't often use water colors, and when I do it's without a graphite sketch or with only a light outline so I was surprised to discover they were so opaque... covering all the graphite shading. On the other hand, they didn't seem to pick up the graphite and become muddied by it. Of course, since this isn't water color paper, it is buckled and you can see the shadows that causes. I could press most of these out if I were to need to do so... 

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!

June 17, 2011

    Here is the first iris and an early Virginia wild lotus (also called a pond lily or spatterdock). The iris is in an old-fashioned ink jar (diamond-shaped) and the lotus is in a tiny pot made as a sample by a fair potter.

June 10, 2011

    Yesterday I picked up a magnolia bud doomed never to open because of a hole drilled in the side by an insect. Out of curiosity I peeled the petals back (some of them ripped a little) to expose the not-quite-mature center. Despite being immature, the lemony vanilla fragrance was rich and soothing throughout this somewhat brief sketch.

May 17, 2011

    This drawing is of three stages of the tulip poplar flower. I found all three laying on the path in the park... the old, woody seed stage to the upper right being left over from last year. The bud is in the upper right and the green and orange flower is to the bottom center. 
    I could have spent longer on this, but even so I  would not have filled in all the leaves as I liked leaving some in outline. The paper was becoming the worse for wear. I had set the pad down outside and a few spats of rain had landed on the page. This paper definitely does not handle getting wet; you can detect the buckling.

April 25, 2011

    This is a sketch of a clematis I did in the backyard today while the weather turned chill and grey, and the wind picked up - threatening to rain... and, partly at least, while I was talking on the phone to an artist friend. Some of my clematis aren't in bloom yet, but several are loaded with blooms and justify the old "April showers bring May flowers" rhyme.

April 21, 2011

     Today was supposed to be a sketch of car keys... which I began yesterday. It may yet be car keys, but since I'm playing catch-up anyway I ran outside to draw the surprise iris growing up in the money plant. I can see I should have provided some darker values higher in the money plant, but it wasn't going to be about the money plant anyway and since I was getting hot in the sun, I fled! 
     I really like these Louisiana style iris because they look like alien flowers. I'm sure I stuck the bulbs in sometime last Fall and immediately forgot - which is great because I was so pleased when I discovered two of these in bloom this morning - which means I successfully and unintentionally set a happy trap for myself. It's a gift side effect of distraction! 
     The first two were white. Another in yellow and white has since bloomed, and I can see more on the way. Whoopie!

April 16, 2011

     This is a relatively fast (but not quick) sketch of a wisteria in our ash tree with the "Roo box". 
     Explanations:  This is a slightly larger sketch book, so even sketching in a faster vs. more meticulous manner, it takes some time to cover the area. The flip side of the size equation is that if I use my tiny carry around sketch book I end up wishing I had more room for certain details or even just all the important features! 
     Wisteria... yes, I know it's invasive and all that, but I'd admired it from childhood and thought that I could keep just one vine under control. Well, this vine is about 15 years old and it only began to take off somewhat in the last five years, only had one panicle of bloom last year, and this is the first year it has really bloomed. I've read up on it, we do all the right things, and yet... So much for rampant. 
     Roo box means that this was once the home box of a very special little boy squirrel - a one-in-a-million squirrel.

April 11, 2011

    It was raining today so I dashed outside and picked these soggy dandelions. I really wanted an open yellow dandelion, but apparently they close in the rain or dim light... I never knew. Instead, I got the three other stages; a spent flower, an unopened puff and a seed head. The seed head was a bit clumpy due to the rain which gave it a different look from the earlier sketches, but by the time I got to it, it had dried out.

April 10, 2011

    A single dandelion, this time using an eraser as a drawing tool instead of simply an error remover, followed by tiny dots of white water color.

April 9, 2011

     Two dandelions and a camellia. I was interested in trying the dandelions without using the eraser to soften or smudge in any way, and yet I did decide to lighten the shade of the bottom dandelion... so of course I had to touch it a bit around the inside with the eraser. I also used the eraser for mistakes or adjustments elsewhere, but the exercise was to sketch softness softly.

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...

Feb. 15th, 2011

    I'm finally caught up to posting one sketch a day on the day I do it... hopefully I can keep that up now although some days that will mean a very quick sketch just to maintain the momentum. I have gotten in the habit of procrastinating and doing my sketch late at night before going to bed, which means I'm tired, rushed, and unappreciative of all the "fun" I'm having (!) so I'm going to try to get a sketch done during the day somehow. 
    Of course, time is the problem, but time is almost always the problem with most endeavors, and the Sketch A Day effort is at least partially intended to elevate the importance of sketching and boost the probability of actually doing it. So far, it has accomplished that goal for me; I am, at least, sketching. 
    Obviously I feel I need to work on the mechanics of my timing and finding a place to work would help; these bulbs might look better is Someone hadn't moved them between when I started, dashed off to aid with something trivial, returned and Arrgh! the shadows and overlapping points were all different! Fudge, fudge... Maybe some of the lessons I'll be learning in drawing will be about fudging when necessary?

Jan. 30, 2011

    This is a sketch of the centerpiece from a wedding my daughter and I attended. My daughter, one of the bridesmaids, brought this centerpiece home. I think this is a cyclamen; one of the few types of flowers I have never tried to grow... I drew the petals as I saw them, but I found their form to be excessively confusing; clasping and curled back downward upon themselves. Good practice, I suppose!