Paper and Threads

This is the first self-portrait I have ever done - and one of the first pencil sketches.  I took all of the advice from the Everyday Matters group today and my choice was to make myself look 20 years younger!  Seriously, neither my husband nor I see a resemblance, so Karen will have to repeat this challenge so I can obtain more skills before attempting self-portrait #2.  The drawing was made from the photo that I added, taken at my son's October wedding.  I don't even have any fixative for pencil sketches, so this image will slowly fade away in my sketchbook.

Posted by Shirley at 8:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

February was my month to experiment with my cadmium red and alizarin crimson W-N tube watercolor paints.  I made several more sketches, but these are representational samples of the type of paintings that were done.  The "lion" journal, which I purchased in Venice, was done using a watercolor mask. I was pleased with the process because it actually looks very similar to the handmade cover - imprecise sketching and painting.

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Last fall Laura F. shared her 2005 color series with the EDM group.  I am such a novice with watercolor paints that I just made the change from student grade pan paints to Winsor-Newton artist grade tube paints.  This seemed like a great time to play with color mixing (my favorite part), so I used blue for January- a frosty cold winter month in the Northeast.  I am also just learning how to build a webpage with help from my home-grown, computer expert son so this is my first attempt to add 3 pop-up images to the page.  Hope this all works.  If not, he is visiting from Boston this weekend, so I'll be able to ask for HELP!

I just tested the entry and learned that the second and third images will open only if the one before is closed properly.  Sometimes the previous pop-up was still open and was actually hidden until I reduced the size of the window to see it lurking behind the page.  This is probably novice information for some of you, but my skills building and editing webpages is really at beginner level.

Posted by Shirley at 8:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This was a fun, quick, challenge drawing.  I went searching for unusual doorknobs but found more than 25 in our apartment that look just like this.  If they weren't predicting colder weather this weekend, I'd search the neighborhood for a few that are more interesting to sketch.  That will be a great project for spring!

Posted by Shirley at 7:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Valentines Day 2006:  I love my 3 grandchildren more than words (or drawings) can express.  

My skills at portraiture are such that I'm disappointed when my drawings don't look like my subjects.  After much thought this week, I decided to sketch "someone that each of them loves."  From left to right:  2 year old Henry's Lion, 13 month old Sydney's Monkey, and Mambo - 6 month old Robbie's monkey.  Henry and Sydney adore their stuffed animals and bring them to Grandma and Grandpa's apartment for overnight visits.  Robbie is still too young to have the same type of bonding with Mambo, but every month they have their picture taken together to chart Robbie's growth. 

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I had several hours of sun at the beautiful Biltmore pool before the temperature in Florida plunged to the 50s and the blizzard of 2006 started in New York City.  We actually had "snow envy" because we were missing the winter fun in Central Park.  The tower on the beautiful old Biltmore Hotel must have been sketched and painted thousands of times, and it was a challenge for me to work on this 4.5 X 6" drawing.  A hotel employee told me that many artists sketched it from the golf course, head on, instead of from this angle as it rises above the other rooflines of the hotel.  This seemed like just the "perspective practice" that I need.  I used my new Daler-Rowney travel set of watercolor paints and medium and small Niji waterbrushes for the first time.  These traveled well, in contrast to my Pigma micron pens which leaked during the plane ride.

Posted by Shirley at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

This was an impossible challenge for me because I'm struggling regularly to draw realistic body parts. I couldn't decide how to shade the lips using pen and ink so this page was done with a smudgy 2B pencil.  It will be a long time before I can figure out how to draw an open mouth with exposed teeth.  Preliminary efforts were great dracula look-alikes!  Several of the lips were from magazine photos, one is a self-portait, and the remainder are from photos of my grandchildren (7 months, 13 months, and 2 1/2 years).

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I attended my first Sketchcrawl Friday February 3rd.  It was organized by Patti and Danny Gregory at the Rubin Museum of Art which is a new Manhattan museum that features art from the Himilayas.  It's a gorgeous space and the art was inspiring.  I filled 5 pages of images that I abstracted from the paintings, clearly more in my "comfort zone" than sketching the very ornate, small sculptures.  The sketch above was one tiny portion of a very large painting from 17th C. Tibet to which I was drawn because of the stylized clouds.  I did the sketch with a Pigma micron 05 pen and added watercolor washes at home.  I wish that I could have met all of the other artists, and I really wish that I could have seen their work.  Hopefully most of them will post their sketches to the EDM group.

I loved this little fish - created in a transparent orange pigment over a dark background with white highlights.  The same fish appeared scattered around the border of the painting several more times.  I can't wait to recreate him on paper or on silk in a quilt journal page.

Posted by Shirley at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)