This is a candy dish I received from an old boss as a Christmas gift.  We leave it out all winter long, because snowmen aren’t just for Christmas, right?

Unfortunately, he has no candy.  So what’s he smiling about, then!?

Can I count this as EDM #204 (Draw Something Frosty)?

Another giant ellipse problem here, I know.   But this was just a real quick one before I head off to bed.  I may make another attempt some time when I’m not so sleepy.

4H and 4B Pencil.

This is my favorite messenger bag (yes, I have  more than one, shameful as that is). It is the perfect size for carrying my sketchbook and pencil bag around town.  I can get a book, my iPod, phone, and a bottle of water in there too.

I know I’ve already posted an entry for Everyday Matters Challenge #3 (Purses, Wallets, or Bags), but I’m doing this one for extra credit, OK?

Only two pencils on this one (HB and 2B). No blending, either. I wanted to keep it simple and loose.

On a side note… It’s interesting that the longer I’ve been sketching, the bigger my sketches have gotten. When I look back at the first few pages of my sketchbook, most of my work was tiny. I could have fit a half dozen of these bags on a single page. Today, I ran out of room. Now, I know that running out of room is just the result of poor planning on my part. No secret there. But the fact remains that, for some reason, I’m drawing bigger.

We keep a nice little jar of shells on the counter in our guest bathroom. I probably should have left well enough alone on this one.

Where do I begin?

Well, let’s start with the perspective. Or lack thereof. I clearly was not standing still, or I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing. Or both.

There is very little definition within the jar between the shells. My wife looked at this and said, “looks like there’s a dead perch in there.” Oh my God, she’s exactly right! Oh my, what have I done?

The background/foreground is just a mess. Just shear sloppiness. Sometimes that works out OK for me, but tonight… well, it didn’t.

Sometimes you can save a sketch. Sometimes you can’t. This one, I’m not even going to try. [Sigh]

Funny. I was just talking with a friend of mine today, saying that I need to learn to take the bad days with the good. So, here’s to Karma, I suppose…

Oh yeah, and even though this one ain’t so hot, I’m still counting it against the Everyday Matters Challenge #207 – Draw a Shell.

Now then… move along.  Nothing more to see here.

I belong to an online group called ‘Everyday Matters‘. It’s a group of artists dedicated to drawing/painting/sketching everyday items: shoes, wallets, food, etc. If you are an artist who struggles with picking a subject, or if you just want to hang out online with a great bunch of people, check them out.

Each week there is a different challenge. This is my entry for challenge #205 — Draw a Soda Can.

We don’t normally keep soda in the house. So I had to go buy one just for this. And since I paid good money for it, might as well drink it, right? Now I’m going to be awake all night… should have bought something without caffeine.

I was looking forward to this challenge, because I often shy away from lettering. There was no away around it with this challenge; every can of soda has a distinct logo with distinct lettering. Nobody is going to recognize a Dr. Pepper can without its logo. The lettering is a little sloppy, but the overall placement is fairly accurate; so let’s call that a wash.

I must admit, though, laziness got the best of me on this one. There were a number of really interesting reflections that I didn’t fully capture (I got some of them, but I ignored a bunch more). And I probably should have pushed the darks a little more. As it is, though, this took me a lot longer than I expected it to.

My ellipses are much better than in the past (if still a little lopsided); so score 1 for that.

Pencil (4H, HB, 4B) in Strathmore sketchbook.

My tube of toothpaste caught my eye this morning as I was getting dressed.

I had several false starts with this one.  First, the straight part of the tube was too long compared to the rolled part.  Then the cap was entirely too small.  Then the rolled part of the tube was ginormous in comparison to the straight part of the tube.  Good thing I have an eraser!

Finally, I remembered the advice I keep giving myself… do a 30-second gesture drawing.  That did the trick.  In less than a minute, I had all my major proportional problems knocked out.  Must remember that trick for next time.

Once I got over that initial hump, I had a lot of fun with this one and am pretty happy with the way it turned out.  I kind of wish I’d done it on proper drawing paper instead of in my sketchbook.

Pencils in Strathmore sketchbook: 6H, 4H, HB, B, 4B.  Lots of blending with a stump and chamois.  1.5 hours  (kind of a long time to spend in the bathroom, huh?).  That hard gray fade and hard edge on the right are scanner anomolies.

Here’s a twenty minute sketch of the teapot that sits on our stove.

I’ve been wanting to draw this guy for a while, but have been putting it off for some reason.  There’s lots of interesting shapes and varying textures.

I sort of messed up the symmetry on it.  Probably a result of my leg falling asleep partway through, so I wasn’t able to sit perfectly still.  Although a 30 second gesture drawing probably would have helped with that.

I took the opportunity to play with a chamois and a blending stump to help differentiate the plastic handle from the rest of the body and to help convey the smoothness of the teapot itself.

On this one, I used only a B pencil.  In retrospect, pulling in something from the H range probably would have been a good idea for the plain metal parts, and something much softer to deepen the shadows.  But, being tired and just trying to squeeze a few minutes of sketching in doesn’t lend itself to really putting in all that extra work.

I really thought I was doing a good job with this one.  That is, until I finished, took a few steps back, and looked at critically.

The top opening of the pot is massively crooked.  So, a couple of lessons out of this one…

1.  I need to do an overall gesture sketch before diving into the details.  Ellipses are especially hard for me to get right, so I need to focus on this.

2.  I need to spend more time looking.  Looking and comparing.  And when I see discrepancies, I need to be OK with making adjustments.

Still, I like what I did on the handle, and I think I did a decent job capturing the varying textures.

Boxes are surprisingly hard to draw accurately.  Their simplicity is, I think, half the difficulty.  It becomes easy to fall into the trap of drawing what you think a box should look like instead of what it actually looks like.

The individual boxes look OK.  But I think I’ve got the perspective a little messed up.

OK.  I admit it.  I didn’t make the bed today.

But I did draw.

I’ve felt that my drawing style has been too stiff, and I wanted to do something very loose — almost scribbling.  As it turns out, this technique is called “scumbling”; and it was a favorite technique of mine back in the day.

I had forgotten about it until it just came out of my pencil today.  It more or less “just happened”.  I was getting tired of smudging my drawings, so I decided to hold my pencils more like a paint brush.  The result was a very loose, almost out-of-control sketch.  I really had fun with this.

Once again, my perspective and proportion are off.  The bed is a queen-size, but you’d never know from this rendering.  And it looks like the footboard is narrower than the headboard. Still, I feel like I’m making progress.

This is a thirty-minute sketch of one of the cordless phones we have.

Once again, my perspective is off.  It looks like the phone is being twisted in a strange way.  Also, the buttons are not positioned exactly right.

On the plus side, I’m really happy with how the faceplate came out.  I think I captured the look of the different materials on the phone.

Office Space is one of my favorite movies.  There’s a poor guy named Milton who is crapped on at every turn.  His most prized possession is his red Swingline stapler; when the company switched to Bostich, he stood his ground.  Good for you, Milton.

Anyway, here’s my stapler.