November 12, 2011

    Today we had the opportunity to admire some particularly large and lovely trees, so it put me in the mood to draw a tree... but it was dark by the time I got to it, so I decided to reference a photo. I found one I took on the walk between the metro and my sister's house. I'm not sure of the type (no leaves), but it had striking black and white bark. Hmmm... pen and ink, then. It needed something... a person reading at the base, of course.

September 26, 2011

     I needed to do a much faster sketch tonight so I decided to draw a black beetle using black ink. Because of it's darkness it becomes a silhouette.

September 14, 2011

    I added three more seed types. You can see the bottom of the beech pod at the top, so counter clockwise from the left but skipping the beech, there is a button bush seed ball broken in half (with two seeds loose), three sections of a broken open marsh hibiscus pod, and a bitter melon seed, drawn somewhat larger than it would be compared to the others. 
     Again, I used only the 4B for the graphite and used touches of black liquid ink pen. The combined seed drawing looks like this now: 

September 13, 2011

    My kitchen window sill has a double row of treasures lined up along it:  Tiny shells, a couple of feathers, small stones and dried seed pods. These three seed pods, to be exact. Clockwise from the left, they are an empty day lily pod, an unknown pod that's still closed and a beech nut pod with the two tricorn beech nuts still in the centre. 
    This is a really tiny drawing, done on half of a sheet of an 8.5" x 5.5" sketch pad. The plan is to do some of the other things on the window sill on the other half so I have six or seven "natural treasures" depicted on the same sheet. 
    I used number 4B lead in a mechanical pencil, and a black liquid ink pen to partially hit the outlines and dark spots here and there. The interesting thing was how much of the ink sank into the paper where there was already graphite; more than sank into the paper where it was unmarked. Perhaps the graphite didn't coat the paper quite as much as it roughed up the surface.

September 2, 2011

     There was a period of time when I was fascinated by repouse cuff bracelets... the older ones. To keep them straight I stack them on the necks of a few tall bottles, so I used ink to draw two of them. 
     I never stack any on top of the silver fish clamp cuff shown on top here. It was a gift from my father to my mother... or so the story went for Years.
     One night my mother was telling my daughter and I about it - uncharacteristically imbuing the story with a bit of a romantic air - when my father became puzzled and couldn't remember buying it or giving it to her! In indignation (and to my daughter's delight) my sparky little mom decided to change the story on the spot and declare that in that case it must have been a gift from an earlier boyfriend. Ouch! 

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.

May 8, 2011

     This statue of Pan sits - of course - on one of my stereo speakers.