#DoodlewashNovember2019 7-8-9

Here are my next two entries for November. There was a prompt of "leaves" for November 7 and one of "owl" for November 8, so I decided to combine them by using the leaves as a decorative autumnal background for this encounter of the baby corvid with the baby owl.

These two are supposedly enemies, but I think maybe, if caught young enough, they could be friends...Today's prompt was "nuts," and I could either paint a self-portrait (ha ha) or render some actual goobers, so I chose a medley of favorites in the shell—peanuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts, almonds, brazil nuts. I drew them with a brown micron pen to keep all the colors as true as possible.

I don't always like the prompts on offer, but this time Charlie chose some nice fall themes, and I'm enjoying putting them on paper. More to come!

Uniball pen (birds), Micron pen (nuts)

Paul Jackson watercolors

Bee Super Deluxe Mixed Media Sketchbook

November renaissance

Since I bagged Inktober, I haven't been making much art. I seem to go through these cycles where I can't focus to pick up a pen and draw, even if it's just some little thing. So when November rolled around and Charlie over at Doodlewash published his prompts list for the month (and it looked like one I could get with), I decided to let that give me some impetus. Here's what I have so far:

#2 Pears

I enjoyed painting these—there's just something so paintable about pears. I even managed a little spatter without it looking like a crime scene. The shadow could have been better...

#4 Eyes

I had fun with this one. The prompt reminded me of this old movie from my younger days, which gave me nightmares for weeks after I saw it. I chose not to put too much emphasis on the camera and focus on the eyes. Who knew how hot Tommy Lee Jones was in his youth?

#6 Water

This looks like I did it en plein air, but it's actually from a photo I took while at Echo Park with the Urban Sketchers group one day. (I painted other things that day, but really liked this bridge.) There wasn't a lot of water in the scene, but enough to fulfill the prompt. I struggled a bit with the reflections and the ripples.

More to come!

Coffee shop fame

A few postings back, I shared an urban sketch of Bobby's Coffee Shop that I made. Since I had done it while there on my own, the next time Cousin Kirsten and I went there to breakfast, I remembered and pulled my sketchbook out of my purse to show her. The manager (owner? not sure) of the restaurant happened to be passing our table. He saw my drawing, and promptly solicited me to send him a .jpg because, he said, they were reprinting the menu the following day, and he would feature it in the menu! I negotiated a credit for myself with him, and sent it over. The next time we went to breakfast, there was my picture—on the front cover of the menu! Pretty cool.

I haven't said anything about it up to now (this happened a couple of weeks ago) because Kirsten and I wanted to take our friends, Kirsti and Aaron—who recommended Bobby's to us—to breakfast there and spring the menu on them as a surprise. We did that this morning. They arrived first, and it was fun, upon walking through the door, to be greeted with exclamations of "There's the celebrity!" They thought it was way cool, and I have to agree.

Although some people chided me for not charging him for its use, I felt like since I didn't do it as a commission but purely for fun, why should I? Also, it has already borne fruit—last week he sent me the email and phone number of a local florist and said "please call them, they have some work for you." From the way it was phrased, I'm hoping he didn't tell them I did the picture gratis, because if it's a commission, I will be charging. Still, what fun! opening doors to local businesses to showcase my work.

Bagging Inktober

Well, I hung in there for a whopping two drawings, and called it a day. I just wasn't having fun. The prompts didn't inspire me, and I got tired of having to sit and cogitate for hours on what I could do to fulfill them; and honestly, although I'd like to be better at those things I mentioned before (cross-hatching, etc.), I don't enjoy them. I like doing what I do, which is making a contour drawing and then giving it personality with watercolor.

Also, unlike the other challenges in which I participated (30x30 Direct, Every Day in June), this one seemed different—competitive, full of one-upmanship, a little mean! There was so much brangling over what constituted an appropriate drawing for Inktober—whether any ink was fine, whether you could use ink like paint, whether you could use color, whether working digitally was okay, and on and on. Some of the people who were following the "legitimate" Inktober prompts talked smack about those who were making up their own prompts, there were a lot of attempts at censorship if people ventured into life drawing territory, and I just got tired of seeing it in my feed. So I bagged it.

Here are the two drawings I did, neither of which was I particularly happy with; and below that is a contour drawing I made and watercolored for pure fun and satisfaction. No comparison.

This was the drawing for the prompt "ring." It's a newly imagined cover for a Georgette Heyer novel. I misjudged the proportions and ran out of room; my original plan was to make it about 1.5 inches taller so I could put the title above the figures and the author below.

And this below was for day two, the prompt being "mindless." It took me forever to think of this, and it didn't actually express what I wanted it to, which was "less screen time," because the TV is no longer the major offender in this, it's all the trawling on social media! But I had the idea based on an old photograph for "Turn off the TV" week from a decade ago, and went with it. I drew in ink, and then used Tombow markers for the color and tints, and spread them around with water (they are water soluble). Again, not my best drawing.

Today, just for fun, I used a reference photo from a trip the cousin of my friend Mika is taking across 48 states in 48 days, and made a painting of "Eric driving the caboose." I made his head a bit too big (he looks a little too much like Paul Bunyan here), and simplified certain aspects of the caboose, but otherwise it's pretty accurate.

It was fun, I enjoyed doing it, and I'm sticking to my style for a while!

in the Sketchbook...

Faber Castell Pitt Artist Pen

Uniball fine pen

Tombow markers

Paul Jackson watercolors

The Inktober Challenge

Yet another challenge approaches, one that I've never had the nerve to do. It's called "Inktober," and it's basically making 31 drawings in 31 days, using ink. Your tool (dip pen, fountain pen, ballpoint, Microns, technical pens, etc.) is up to you, but it's all about drawing. And while I do draw in ink, it's been strictly contour up to this point, which is to say, the basic outline of the object and its details. Once I left art school, with its geometric shaded objects and charcoal portraits, behind, I used my drawing purely in service to another medium. Because I love watercolor so much, I have always sublimated drawing to a framework for my watercolor, so once the contour drawing is done, I jump into color, shade, and shadow using the paints, not the pen.

Because of this, I feel a little insecure taking on this challenge. Yes, I could just do contour drawings, but the thing I love about art is its details, and the people who participate in Inktober are all about the details. I don't think I'm quite ready to draw like my new Facebook friend Steven Reddy (i.e., brick by brick!), but I would like to master the basic skill of hatching!

I decided to be proactive about this instead of trying to wing it and feeling dissatisfied, so I signed up on Bluprint (formerly Craftsy) for a class called "Pen & Ink Essentials." Here are some of my visual/verbal notes from the class:

1. Basic contour drawing (I practiced on the book sitting on top of my scanner.):

2. Contour and parallel hatching:

3. Cross-hatching, and specialty hatching (basket weave, gestural, stippling):

4. Types of gestural hatching:

For deciduous trees:

For rough stone walls (I repeat, if you're not, like Steven, inclined to draw every stone, brick, tile, shingle, paver, etc.):

There was also a segment on ink washes, but A. I didn't have any ink (oh boy, a trip to Dick Blick), and B. because it's so much like using watercolor, I didn't feel the need to practice it!

This gave me lots of ideas. Now, to try them out in "real" drawings.

Inktober isn't quite as daunting now...except that the prompts leave me drawing a blank (pardon the pun), so I may have to come up with my own theme as well!

Continuous line, contour line

Every once in a while, you need to go back and remind yourself of the basics. Since I've been teaching the occasional contour line drawing workshop at libraries this summer, I've returned to the continuous line drawing as the basis for everything. Can I make a better drawing, if I really concentrate, check all my proportions, maybe use an eraser occasionally? Sure. But who's to say it would be better than simply eyeballing the line of an object and following eye with pen in hand? As I tell the students so eager to find out that they can, in fact, draw, it's not a matter of perfection, it's a matter of personality.

So this morning I decided to do a continuous contour drawing of my desk lamp. The drawing has its flaws; the arm of the lamp is too small, the base too big, and I didn't focus carefully enough on the curves to the right of the lamp as I returned up that side from the base after delineating the left. But does it have personality? Definitely.

I then decided to paint it, because for me, color makes everything come alive. The colors of the base were complicated by the light from above as well as the light from the window, and ranged further in tone than one would expect from a basic gold-toned metal. The glow of the lightbulb was intense. I went back and forth over whether to include a background, and finally settled for an anchoring shadow, a few strokes to indicate the bookshelf on which it sits, and a few light reflections on the turquoise wall behind it.

My only other foray into art this past week was a drawing at a new favorite breakfast hang-out, Bobby's Coffee Shop in Woodland Hills. Kirsten and I are still continuing our sporadic exploration of breakfast places in the Valley, and this one was a favorite of Kirsti's and Aaron's but neither of us had ever been there. We liked it so much that we have returned, once together and now once for me by myself. As I have mentioned before, Kirsten doesn't like it when I draw during our meet-ups, so I decided to treat myself to a solo date at Bobby's to see if I could capture its ambiance.

There are several angles to capture, but I decided this time on the counter and cook-space behind it. Maybe next time I will go for the booths and 1950s signage on the other side of the room, or the tables down the center, populated pretty thoroughly no matter what time of the morning. (The lettering is an addition by me—not in the scene itself.)

Urban sketching, watercolor flowers

Urban sketch of the North Hollywood Regional Library (alias the Amelia Earhart branch) of Los Angeles Public Library, last Saturday morning.

In the sketchbook, drawn with a Uniball pen and watercolored after.

And a floral watercolor based on a reference photo from Hilary Weeks's garden.

These got a little fuzzy and muddy, but I loved the colors and the way they blended. They might have popped a little more had I put in a darker background, but part of what i liked about the reference photo was the light in the background, so I kept some of it.

On Fluid watercolor paper, drawn with pencil and watercolored using Paul Jackson Signature paints and a synthetic Escoda brush. About 7x10.25.