Paper and Threads

I have had many types of mailboxes in my lifetime: mail slots in the front door, rural and suburban mailboxes with flags, and mailboxes with combination locks filling entire walls while at school. Our "mailbox" in New York City is really our mail table.  Mail is sorted in the morning into cubbyholes in a large rolling set of shelves and then the apartment staff moves the shelves into the elevator and delivers the mail to our hallway.

I love mail and as a child home during the summer could hear the mail truck move down the street approaching our house.  Several letters changed my life as I was accepted into college and then medical school.  But the best mail was the daily letter I received from my boyfriend, then fiance, then husband as we both went to medical school hundreds of miles from each other.  We have two full boxes of letters that some day we will open and reread.   

Posted by Shirley at 3:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

This week's EDM Challenge is to "go someplace different and draw what you see."  It was a very wet weekend in New York City and my husband and I spent much of both days seeing current exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art (DADA art) and the American Museum of Natural History (Darwin). 

My son Jason had a pet iguana for many years and our family got attached to Pablo (as long as it was living in my son's apartment).  When I saw the iguana from the Galapagos in the Darwin exhibit, I decided that this was as "different" as I was going to get - and it was a good time to do more museum sketching.  I wasn't sure about the rules at AMNH, so I waited to paint it at home. 

Posted by Shirley at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

I didn't have many orange items to paint - and will soon be leaving for London - so I'm uploading a few of the completed sketches/paintings before the month is over.  My warm and cool reds and yellows produced oranges that were very similar.  The colors in my Daler-Rowney travel set, which were used for the lily, produced much more varied and interesting colors.  This ends 6 months of using my current palette - one cool and one warm red, yellow, and blue - which I used for an entire month of painting each primary and secondary color.  When I see my 18 month old grandaughter in London, I may be inspired to work with pinks!  Until then, I'm done.  The scans were more difficult than usual today - maybe because the paper was more buckled.

I'm still doing a minimum of one page per day in my sketchbook because I'm determined to improve my drawing and painting skills in 2006.  I still feel most free working in my inexpensive spiral Aquabee Globetrotter sketchbook, so I'm not making much progress moving to the Moleskine or Cachet watercolor journals that are waiting on the shelf.  There are several threads on the forums at Wet Canvas about sketchbooks and I'm comforted to know that many others share my "Fear before action" (see my EDM challenge #70 entry).  I found some of the proposed solutions hilarious as those who have no trouble using "special journals" try to coax those who do.

Posted by Shirley at 3:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Someone in the Everyday Matters Group announced the new Wet Canvas Drawing Basic 102 Classes and I'm working my way through Class 2 assignments on creativity.  I posted the sketch made with a 1:4 ratio view finder earlier this week and these are the next assignment: 4 progressive sketches starting with a kitchen object and then leading to more and more abstraction as each sketch becomes a starting point for the next one.  The 3 smaller sketches can each be enlarged.  It also is one of my "color project orange" pieces - since June is my month for orange, the last of my secondary colors to explore. 

The Wet Canvas website still confuses me so I was very glad to have a link posted by one of our group members - so thank you.

Posted by Shirley at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I went to San Antonio last weekend to give a lecture, visit Mom, and see old friends from my 18 years working at the University of Texas Health Science Center and participating in the Greater San Antonio Quilt Guild. 

The first page includes sketches from the Hilton Palacio Del Rio Hotel.  I loved the perspective on the torchere and the color variation in the large marble wall hanging which is an outline of the Alamo.  On the top right is a small sketch done with a 1:4 ratio viewfinder (Wet Canvas Drawing Basic Class 102 - Class 2 - Assignment 1 on Creativity).

The second page was done from the Hilton outdoor cafe on the Riverwalk to commemorate the famous San Antonio Riverboats which fill up and empty at the landing directly across the river (really a small canal) from where I was sitting enjoying my annual margarita and cheese/fajita beef nachos.

The 3rd page is a sketch of the small, soft Spurs basketball that I purchased in the airport to bring back for my oldest son (the big San Antonio Spur's fan) and his 10 month old son.  It is perfect for the weekly EDM challenge which was announced <24 hours later.

Posted by Shirley at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Posted by Shirley at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

My favorite beverage is coffee, especially when I wake up at 5:30 AM on work days.  I sketched our Krups automatic drip coffee pot for EDM Challenge #14 - "The First Thing That I See in the AM" shortly after I joined the EDM group last fall.  This time I decided to draw other ways that I have to make good, black coffee: an Italian espresso pot, a brass Turkish coffee pot, a Bodum travel press that allows me to make pressed coffee and then drink it from the same cup, and a Melitta filter for an individual mug to make a single cup of drip coffee. 

It is very apparent that my style has changed significantly in the last 8 months.  I didn't start adding watercolor washes to my pen sketches regularly until December and now prefer COLOR!

Posted by Shirley at 9:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)