I started going to figure drawing sessions in September 2009, and averaged one session per month over the whole year. There is now a summer break until after Labor Day and that seems a long time away. I think I'm making progress, and more frequently sketch faces during the longer poses. Here are the two 10 minute poses and two 20 minute poses done this week.
My daughter's 3 children (ages 7,5,3) spent 3 days with us while their parents celebrated their anniversary at the Beach. They are really energetic and fun children, so I dedicated my daily journal pages to them. The two youngest ones actually "colored" in their sketchbooks during the weekend and had me draw some of their favorite images for them to color. New York City was soooo hot, that we started each day at the newly renovated Central Park playground that is next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They wore their bathing suits to take full advantage of the water play for several early morning hours.
Sydney and Callum have Christmas birthdays and for the second year in a row Syd and I celebrated her birthday in July with a trip to the art supply store. This year we went to Dick Blick and she selected a wonderful assortment of art supplies and activity kits. She used the last few dollars to buy cute little flash card notebooks for herself and two brothers, so I sketched all of them.
Callum really, really loves dinosaurs and dragons and brought a big box of them to play with during the weekend. He was showing me his squishy dragon when I decided that this was the perfect image for the day.
Yesterday afternoon, my son dropped off their youngest (11 month old Zach) while they went to a baseball game to celebrate their other son Robbie's 5th birthday. Zach stands alone, crawls really, really fast, and would love to be walking-running. We spent some time with him in our long hallway, pushing the baby carriage that we bought for Syd for her 1st birthday (but now lives with us to share with the babies). Here is Zach squealing with delight as Syd and my husband try to slow him down a little.
After Henry, Sydney, and Callum went home and Zach fell asleep, I took a few minutes to paint Zach's really cute little sandal.
A new Matisse exhibit opened at MoMA on Sunday - entitled Radical Invention, 1913-1917. The paintings were somber in color and he was definitely experimenting with the human form, culminating in his painting The Bathers. I sketched faces from one of his paintings and several of his prints for the Prisoners of Bohain-en-Vermandois.
I then use3d one of the drawings to inspire my "Eyedropper Face" which is Lab 13 from the Carla Sonheim book Drawing Lab. I used a small eye dropper and FW acrylic ink to draw the face, then painted it with watercolor.
I'm really enjoying the "labs" in the Sonheim book - and will continue to work through them even though my art buddies returned home after our evening art sessions at our beach week.
These are my morning journal pages from the second half of our beach week. Each morning we would all go for an 8AM 2+ mile walk on the beach and the 3 wives collected things that we wanted to draw/paint while walking at the surfline. These were our beach treasures. The shells were not very plentiful this week, in comparison to just one week ago when we we there for July 4th holiday.
Morning 4: We found one small dead fish, one children's plastic toy fish (blue) and one toy rubber flounder covered in sand in addition to several other types of tresures. I sketched and painted these on one journal page as we set at the Cooper's Beach Snack Shack having coffee.
Morning 5: I found a real assortment of things and put them all together as a still life with my empty coffee cup.
Morning 6: I found a few shells and a beautiful long gull feather from one of the brown spotted gulls. All week we used "google" to see if we could confirm that these large gulls were actually the young ones. Anyone know?
Departure: We kept a vase of fresh hydrangeas from the garden, in the kitchen, all week, and I finally decided that I needed to end my beach sketchbook pages with a painting of them.
We are at the beach this week with friends - who we met in the 1960s. There are early morning beach walks, afternoon pool swimming, and lovely dinners on the house patio. Three of us sketch together, so we are creating visual journal pages and having great fun doing "labs" from Carla Sonheim's new book entitled Drawing Lab.
These are the visual journal pages from Mon-Wed. Mon and Tues we went to the beach. This morning we had a huge thunderstorm just as we were leaving and we spent the morning in the sunroom identifying bugs.
I'm taking photos of my journal instead of scanning the pages, so even the white bacground is slightly blue....
Our group met at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday, instead of in Central Park, because of the threat of inclement weather. Our first drawing session was a major challenge - the Starn brothers bamboo structure on the Museum rooftop. I decided to really limit my scope and to focus on the method that they used to connect the bamboo and creat a structure which supports many people on internal walkways.
Our next drawing session was in the current exhibit called The American Woman - from the costume institute. I already sketched some of the fashions in the exhibit on a previous visit and this time concentrated on the room called "The Heiress."
Our 3rd and final sketch was in 19th C. European Paintings. I am studying Cezanne's card players over a several year period and this time did a simple line drawing of one of the card players. For more information about this project and my 2007, 2008, 2009 paintings, click here.
Moleskine lost a customer forever, when they ignored requests to make their watercolor journals in a portrait format in addition to a landscape format. I now make all of my watercolor journal sketchbooks in a 6 X 8" size using 140 lb Fabriano Artistico soft press paper. Recently I decided to make my own book cloth using fabric that I create with procion MX dyes. Here is a picture of #5 and 6 in the series.
The book cloth on the left was created using the pole-wrapped shibori technique. The book cloth on the right was first dyed with thick procion MX dye - blue to green - and then stamped with one of my newly made fun foam stamps using a darker color dye. The cotton cloth was then fused with 45 gm Thai mulberry paper using Wonder Under.
The covers of this new series of journal sketchbooks are so "busy" that I used solid color Mi Tientes paper for the end papers. There are so many colors available that I can always find one that I like. And the weight of the paper is perfect.
More Bookbinding: Our small Journal Study Group made Tag Books at our meeting in June. I made one previously, based on a Gwen Diehn design, and we used the same method to make these. The books hold many shipping tags which are our "Art Trading Card" equivalent. When we are working together, everyone needs to make enough of the same tags to give to each other.
These are the books we made:
We just returned from a Holiday weekend with our children and their children. This is the first photo that we have of all 6 grandchildren this year - and I'm thrilled to have a new one.
I sketched every day in my summer watercolor journal - in which I try to paint something that will help me remember the day. Here are 4 pages.
Blue Mussel Shells: I bought a wonderful laminated shell identification card which Callum calls "the map" and we tried to ID shells that I brought home from our beach walks.
Our 3 and 4 year old grandsons made great progress "swimming" this weekend and spent lots of time going back and forth between their parents and the wall without floaties. This is a pair of goggles that were abandoned on my chaise while I was watching them.
We waited for our car AC to have freon added and I was sitting next to this planter and flag - which looked especially forlorn after the holiday was over.
I take sea gull pictures each time we walk on the beach. These are several drawings of one gull from those photos.
