Quick Draw

There's something about an open book...if you aren't reading it, you can be drawing it. I made myself do the chapter heading lettering just as I was seeing it, which was upside down. Fun! And not too much detail. In fact, I kind of regretted going as far as I did trying to put in the text block on the page. Hard to get it random enough, and at the same time to look like regular rows of type.

Drawing and Painting

I'm continuing on with the drawing in pen each day. Last night I decided to draw this orchid plant (a gift from my friend Anarda) with my micron pen, and then today I went back and painted it. The colors are so intense/extreme on orchids that it's almost hard to capture them and keep them real-looking. In fact, I think my painting looks a bit pallid next to the real thing! This was fun to draw and to paint.

I'm not so sure about the drawing in pen / painting with watercolor thing, though. When you do your drawing in pencil, you can really define your lines, colors, and shadows with the paint alone; I found on this painting that, for instance, the center of the leaves dipped in and demanded a little different color there, but the space for that was already mostly taken up by the black line, so I had to simplify or omit some of the subtleties. Also, the black outline gives me more the feeling of an illustration or even a cartoon than it does a painting. Or maybe it's just a style thing that I will learn as I go along. Anyway--ORCHID.

Experimentation

I went to the art store today, because I lost my black micron pen and wanted to buy a new one. I didn't, of course, escape with such a meager purchase! I defy anyone to buy one pen and walk out.

One of the things we did in Brenda Swenson's workshop was draw with Tombow pens, which are colored, water-soluble markers. She uses only one color, a kind of sepia-tone, which is nice; but I decided I wanted to play with using other colors as the basis of a painting. Since the colors from Tombows will bleed into your painting if you add watercolor, though, I decided to stick with some fairly neutral colors, so I bought a gray-green, and a dull purple one.

I went out in my back yard to draw the fence between my house and my neighbors'--they planted a vine on their side, and it has crept around and up over the fence, to give a nice leafy, softening effect. So I drew the block wall and leaves in the gray-green, and then the fence cap and the blossoms on a rosebush and a scented geranium in the purple, and then I decided to paint; but instead of introducing more color, I just used a wet brush over the Tombows.

As you can see, I had very messy results; I guess I went in with too much water, and everything bled together and got blurry. Also, the purple bled into the green, which I should have anticipated but didn't. I'm going to try this again, but using just the green, and then use paints to finish, and see how it works. I like the gray-green as a base color--an interesting change from the sepia.

After this experiment, one of the outdoor cats came along and decided to lie down in the middle of the picture and bathe himself, so I did a few quick studies of him licking various unmentionable parts in some of the extreme positions that only cats can encompass. I liked these better before I introduced water, but...experiment noted, I'll try something different next time.

Book cover

Here's the cover of a young adult novel I just read. I drew this all in pen, without resorting to sketching it out in pencil, which is a first for me. The lettering was a little irregular, but otherwise, I think I caught the cover design pretty well.

I liked this book--if you'd like to read my review of it, go to the young adult blog for Burbank Public Library!

A couple more...

Continuing with contour line...

It's weird how it looks right to you on paper and then when you scan it you see every little dip and bend and sway, every strange angle and line.... Doesn't this lamp look like she has her hands on her hips and is saying "Wha-a-a-t?"

On this one, because these goblets are clear glass, I went in and tried for the shadows and reflections, along with attempting to capture the way the circular indentations that go all the way around the bowl of the goblet look when you see them through the glass to the other side. This is a weighty glass, and I feel like I rendered the heaviness of it.


So far, all of these are done while sitting in my living room. I'm going to go outside and try something more ambitious soon...

Contour drawing for 75 days?

My pursuit of the "artistic license" began yesterday. For now, I am being faithful about doing only contour-line drawings in pen. This may change as the 75-day period progresses, but I am going to pursue this kind of drawing to sharpen my eye, hone my sense of perspective, and learn to really look at what I'm drawing instead of reproducing what I THINK is there. It may get boring to look at, so I'm not going to post every blessed drawing, but I thought I'd start with a few.

Here is my footstool with my book and glasses. Yes, the book IS beginning to levitate off the footstool--it is a magic book. I specialize in drawing those.

Here is the top of my bookcase, with an array of framed photographs. Making your way around all of this with contour line is tricky and messy. I think I used about four lines for this.

And here are my most available and faithful models, Beatrice and Miniver, the one usually somnolent and therefore offering a perfect opportunity for drawing (although the poses remain quite similar), the other stately and languid, but prone to jumping up to howl and nip her sister at a moment's notice (she has thyroid issues that make her crazy).

I'm hoping to find time to paint something this weekend.

Day Three, Part Two: Sketch Collage

Brenda does something she calls "sketch collage," but the name is a bit misleading, since most people think of a collage as bits and pieces of photos, drawings, tickets, leaves, or whatever that you glue into a hodgepodge of images, like scrapbooking. The sketch collage is indeed a pastiche, but it's not cut out and glued together, it's drawn together (literally and figuratively) because of the significance or similarity of the sketches. For instance, you take a trip to a town in Italy, or to the county fair, or to your farmers' market, and do a bunch of small sketches all on the same page, then find a way to relate the images to one another, with words and format. Or you put together a bunch of botanical images, or sketches of birds you saw on your morning out with your binoculars.

Our homework on Friday night was to decide on a theme and pull together some objects or images of objects that we wanted to inter-relate in some way on paper. The results were pretty amazing, and ran the gamut of: architectural wonders from European capitols; the famous buildings of downtown Los Angeles; garden gloves, a trowel, a watering can and a couple of flowers, all tied together by a wandering vine; a robin and its nest/egg, with a border of feathers and bird tracks; and many more. They were all different, all personal, all interesting, all illustrative.

For my theme, I started out with literal artifacts that my parents had given or left me, and I was going to title my page "Inheritance." But as I assembled images, I thought about the less tangible things they had given or taught me, and decided to include some of those, too. Ultimately, my picture remained title-less, but some of the words it inspired were included as book titles on the shelf at the top. (And I included Betty Crocker too, because who doesn't have a copy of the Betty Crocker Cookbook residing in their kitchen?)

This was a fun and instructive exercise, which I hope to repeat.

Note: I tried to do as much of this as possible as modified continuous line drawing, so the candlestick, the door angles, etc. are all a little wacky. Someday I hope to be able to do continuous line with accuracy and grace! So...75 days of practice await (see previous post).

Another note: I had to scan this in two pieces and I couldn't get rid of the shadow across the bottom half of the top or the top half of the bottom.