After my experience drawing someone in constant motion, I moved on to a more stationary subject. Again, the likeness is not quite there, but at least I am starting to gain a little confidence.
And for those of you wondering, those glowing orbs above my subject are Christmas ornaments hanging on the tree behind his chair.
This is my nephew. He’s doing what most kids his age do on Christmas morning – playing video games.
It’s not a very good likeness, but I was more interested in capturing the shape of his body. Even that was more difficult than I expected; turns out, he’s a very active gamer. Don’t let anyone tell you playing video games isn’t exercise. He didn’t stop moving the for more than a few seconds at a time. Maybe next time, I should just snap a photo and draw from that.
This mountain bluebird is my entry for Everyday Matters challenge #125: draw a bird.
Drawn from a photograph in the book Born Wild by Henry H. Holdsworth; a photo book of young animals in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.
Drawn while waiting to get my own hair cut. This one was particularly tricky because the barber never stopped moving from one side of the chair to the other.
I finished my work a little earlier than some of the others, so I drew a classmate while I waited for the critique to start. I’m still not 100% comfortable drawing people, but I’m getting there.
Drawn during a short break at drawing class.
A simple, scribbly sketch while waiting for drawing class to start.
A 1-minute pencil study for a barn that will be going into a larger finished work.
A 15-minute sketch from my trip to Twin Lakes, Wisconsin.
I found this on top of a gravestone in some tiny graveyard in the middle of nowhere. The light was hitting it in an interesting way, so I sketched.
Actually, this is the building next to the Main Street Laundry in a little town called Twin Lakes, Wisconsin.
I sat on the sidewalk and drew this building while, apparently, half the town sat inside the diner across the street and watched me. Eventually somebody came out and yelled, “What you drawing?” I answered him, and he replied, “Mavis thought you were doing homework. I said that a strange place to be doin’ homework!”
Funny how people have no compunction about asking what you’re doing if they think you’re drawing. If I had been fixing a lawn mower or balancing books on my head, I’ll bet nobody would have said a word to me.
This building near the Lincoln Park Zoo is comprised of a bunch of greenhouses and is one of the more interesting looking buildings in the area. My perspective is all screwed up on this. Also, I should not have tried to capture such a detailed subject with charcoal in such a small format as my sketchbook.
I’m going to have to give this one another go sometime soon. Unless the weather doesn’t hold out; in which case, I’ll have to wait til spring.
As much as I hate to admit it, I learned about Honeycrisp apples from Oprah Winfrey. It was on one of her lists of her favorite things, and I stumbled across it on the web some time ago. I thought, “I like apples, what the heck… let’s try these honeycrisps,” and that was it. I was ruined for other apples. Now, I look forward to September/October the way a kid looks forward to Christmas.
The season is almost over, though the local grocery stores will continue importing them from some place south of here for a little while longer. Thought I would capture one so I could daydream until next year.
These pictures of a cat toy were done for my drawing class.
The top one is a pencil drawing and was a study in composition. We spent a good hour or more sketching out different compositions until we found one we liked. I liked this one because it is just plain silly… looks to me like the scene of a crime. There is a cat out there somewhere hiding from the authorities.
The bottom picture was a pen study in shading and line quality. The gist of the exercise, as far as I can tell, was to demonstrate how lines can be made to simulate shading from a distance.
Our condo has a small area at the front of the living room that is not exactly part of the living room, but neither is it a separate room. The floor plans referred to it as a den. I suppose with an open floor plan, you can call any area anything you want; but I get a kick out of showing guests “the den”.
This was a 30-minute sketch: 4B pencil in my sketchbook. Just trying to capture the light/shadow from the lamp.
Hobos are known to share their brown paper bags. I’m not a hobo, but I am still willing to share mine with you.
This was drawn in class this evening. 18×24 charcoal on Canson drawing paper which was graciously supplied by the instructor. This was too large for my scanner, so I had to photograph it with my phone (because it seemed like too much trouble to dig out the good camera); that dark spot on the bottom-right is my shadow.
So there you have it: the eggs that I’ve been drawing are hard-boiled. Just a little insurance against one of them trying to make a run for it, taking the death leap from the table to the floor in a misguided attempt to escape.
Following the lead of my drawing instructor, I purchased some gesso and have painted a couple of common items flat white. This helps to simplify the light/shadow interaction and allows me to focus more on shape and shade rather than having to worry about things like reflections or distortion caused by viewing things through glass.
You’ll probably see these items appear again in future drawings.
Fall is officially here. Summer activities are no longer in the way, and the weather isn’t completely frigid yet, so it is the perfect time to sign up for a drawing class. The School at the Art Institute of Chicago offers evening and weekend drawing classes, and I’ve been toying with the idea of taking a drawing class for a while now. Classes started on the first of October; I am enrolled in ‘Beginning Drawing’.
I drew these eggs last night as part of my homework. This week was our second class, and the topic was shading. We spent the bulk of the class drawing white objects on a white surface. As boring as that sounds, it turns out to be a great way to learn to see subtle variations of tone; and as you can see, white can actually be pretty darned dark.
My hand-eye coordination still needs some work — the egg on the left is a bit misshapen. But I feel like I am improving even after just a couple of weeks of class. If nothing else, I am becoming much more comfortable with charcoal (check out my previous attempts with charcoal to see what I mean).
I was happy with my loosey-goosey sketch of that garlic crock the other night, and (apparently) lacking much in the way of creativity, I decided to try it again: this time a little more controlled, and I tried to make the composition a bit more interesting by placing a bit of garlic in front of the crockery.
I stuck with the Cotman paints and waterbrush just for the sake of seeing whether I could keep things from getting too messy.
The main issue I have with this is that I don’t think I got quite enough contrast. This has been an issue that I’ve had from the beginning; though I do feel like I’m slowly improving in that regard.
As I slowly reintroduce art back into my daily routine, I thought I would try a very loose painting today. This garlic crock stood out while I was cleaning up after dinner. It keeps moisture from getting into the heads of garlic stored within, and it looks nice sitting on the counter.
I eschewed the under-drawing, opting instead to lay down the paint directly. Accuracy suffered, but I like the looseness of the image. I also opted to use my student-grade paints and a waterbrush for this one, because they are just less hassle to deal with; and tonight was all about minimizing hassle.
My artistic output this past month has been–shall we say–light. In part, this was due to the planning and preparation for a two-week camping trip out west.
I had great plans for drawing and painting for hours at a time. But the reality of camping in Yellowstone and Custer State Park (South Dakota) was that we were either driving, hiking, sight-seeing, or cooking/eating/washing-up almost every waking hour. We did manage to shoot close to 1400 photographs while we were out there (hooray for digital photography! I would NOT want to pay for all that film to be developed), so maybe I’ll try drawing from some of the pics we snapped.
I did manage to spend one afternoon painting at our campsite. This was our home for most of the trip.
The summer in Chicago has been unusually cool this year. But that doesn’t stop people from taking full advantage of the beaches. This park overlooks the beach at Fullerton Avenue and the buildings downtown can be seen a couple miles south.
There are a few things that scare me (from an artistic perspective). Water and people are at the top of that list, so I had to work hard to stifle the voices in my head saying, “what are you doing? You can’t paint that!” The water didn’t work out as well as I had envisioned; but given that I was going for something of stylized painting and not realism, I’m really happy with the group of picnickers on the grass.
People who dine at this building in the Lincoln Park Zoo have a nice view of the lion habitat. The lions have an equally nice view of the people. I wonder who enjoys watching whom more?
This building caught my eye a few weeks ago, and I’ve been waiting for the perfect day to go back and paint it. Today was that day.
I arrived before the cafe opened, and sketched out the contours. I layed down the first set of washes, and then wouldn’t you know… someone came out and opened all the umbrellas. I decided to leave them closed in this painting and just rely on memory for the color and shadow.
One thing I learned from this painting is that I need to get faster. It took me an hour and a half to get the painting to its current state. And, while I’m relatively happy with the end result, it still looks to me like a rather quick sketch.
I’m still having trouble getting really dark darks. I’m not sure if this is a limitation of the medium or if I’m just doing something wrong. Given some of the better watercolor paintings I’ve seen, I am inclined to believe the problem is me.
Another thing I learned today is that people will leave you alone at the zoo. Everywhere else that I’ve drawn in public, people had no qualms about walking right up to me and looking over my shoulder to see what I was doing. Today, people walked by as if I weren’t there. That almost more unsettling than the other way ’round.
This is the first traditional watercolor I’ve done in a while. I’m not sure which I prefer doing: traditional, or ink and wash. I suppose I’ll have to continue working on both until one emerges as a preference. The ink and wash sketches are certainly faster to finish; but that may just be a matter of practice.
Note: The scanner washed the colors out slightly. Bad, scanner.
Everyday Matters challenge #37 is ‘Draw some keys’. These are mine.
Yes, that is a Garanimals key chain. No, I don’t have kids. Yes, I am a full-grown adult. That’s just how I roll.
And for the record, I don’t actually wear Garanimals. Although if I did, it would certainly have prevented a number of fashion faux pas committed by yours truly over the years.
I’ve been in an artistic funk for the past couple of weeks; waiting for inspiration to strike. It hasn’t. Fortunately, the Everyday Matters list has lots of things to choose from — no need to wait for inspiration. Too bad the list can’t come to my house and kick my lazy butt off the couch sometimes.