Paper and Threads

May 28th: I really like my new book - Nude Figures for Artists - and can probably spend the next year sketching these models without running out of inspiration.  This was a quick sketch done with colored pencil - no faces yet and pretty poor hands.  But those are challenges that I will work on!  Michaelangelo on the left and me on the right.  Again having problems with the rough paper - the model didn't have hairy legs!

May 29th:  I went downtown early this morning to buy a gift for my daughter-in-law who will graduate from Medical School this afternoon!  She will begin her Pediatric Residency in June and we will still babysit their son Robbie on Fridays!  I then continued to walk downtown, through Washington Square, in the direction of Dick Blick.  I stopped for a cup of coffee and did this quick sketch at the SE corner of the park.  The proprietor cleaned and polished his cart the entire time I watched!

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It was a lovely cool morning and I decided that an early visit to the Met was a perfect way to spend the morning.  I stopped at the Southeast Corner for a quick sketch for my 10 Block series of NYC journal pages and to wait for the Museum to open.  At this corner, I sketched just one window of the windows from the Greek and Roman Galleries - and the amorphous stone sculpture that sits among the bushes. 

Inside, I wandered through more of the exhibits in the new Greek and Roman Galleries and saw the chariot for the first time.  I found one more marble figure to sketch and then went to find a small iron hunting dog in another part of the Museum.  I saw it previously and loved the shape.  Unfortunately, the body is longer than my page was wide and I didn't realize it until the end.  I will resketch it from photos so I have a better image.

I sketched the marble figure with a colored pencil and the dog with a Derwent Sketching Pencil (light wash).  I was then able to use my Niji waterbrush to add the gray color to the dog.  I love playing with those pencils!  And they are great for Museum sketching. 

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  Memorial Day weekend in the US, which means 3 days off work - and beautiful weather.  Many New Yorkers escape for the country or open beach houses.  Others, like us, love the city during the summer - it seems slower and neighborhood restaurants are less crowded. 

Yesterday I did another lesson from my Anne Elsworth Watercolor Skills Workbook:  Painting an all-white still life with a monochromatic color scheme.

Today my husband and I took a late afternoon subway ride to Battery Park - I had NEVER been on the Staten Island Ferry - a free 30 minute ride across New York Harbor.  Here are two pictures that I took from the railing - one on the way out of the ferry slip and the second one as we were returning to Manhattan.  I loved every minute of the ride, including the path past the Statue of Liberty.

After our ferry ride, we stopped for dinner at Battery Gardens - and sat on their outdoor patio overlooking the harbor.  I was able to sketch another table - and also do a 3 minute sketch of one of the huge sailboats that quickly passed our table.

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May 23rd: EDM Challenge #120 - Draw a Flashlight

We have lots of flashlights, but I love how long this one is - I guess to use in tight spaces.   

May 24th:  More Figure Practice from my new book - a book of nude photos for artists by Mark Edward Smith.  I need lots of practice and will be very happy when the Every Day in May challenge is over so I don't need to upload sketchbook pages every day!  Some of my practice figures would be best left unseen!  And I still hate rough paper. 

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I recycled a 1940s book on Elizabeth I that I bought in the basement of a bookstore on Charing Cross Road in London for 1 pound - and added several different types of watercolor paper in the signatures.  During our regular visits to our family this year, I filled one journal page each day in Cachet Linen Watercolor Journals, so I needed to figure out how I was going to use this alternate journal.  I sketched Big Ben from a photo that I took during our visit, but then never painted it - no time vs no interest vs fear of failure or combination of all of these reasons.  This week I finally decided that I would use this London journal to do a whole series of sketches of Big Ben - close up, far away, from Victoria Street, from the bridge, from the Banks of the Thames at Somerset House where it was just a silhouette in my photo, etc.  We will visit again in June/July so I can increase my photo collection even more.  When I exhaust ideas for this image, I'll move on to another London icon and continue to play.  That will make this journal different from my other 3 - and I feel good that I finally have a plan!

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 No work today and beautiful sunshine.  My husband and I wandered through a fantastic Picasso lithograph exhibit at Helly Nahmad Gallery and then I stopped 10 blocks from home to add a page to my NYC Journal.  This really interesting little store has a very narrow facade, and is squeezed between two large buildings on E. 78th St.  The large banner attracts attention from Madison Avenue and the very sedate sign next to the gate says that it is a "unique, chic haven for brides." 

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  I continue to practice figure drawing and my Yoga Book was the inspiration for this quick sketch.  I don't "do yoga" and never have - so I only know that this is Shoulderstand Cycle from the figure legend under the photograph.  My husband is watching me type all of this and just said "That is a better foot!"  I certainly hope I am improving, if only a minute amount with each sketch!

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  May 19th:  I sketched my EDM Challenge while at the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday on the World Wide Sketchcrawl.  Rocks are a little hard to find in my immediate neighborhood and the weather was too awful to go into Central Park to paint one of the big rocks.  So I painted 3 big rocks that make up the side wall of the Temple of Dendur (15 B.C.E.).  This allowed me to really focus on the engraved drawings - which are wonderful.  There are approximately 5-6 figures down each side of the Temple and I don't think that any two are the same.

May 20th:  I walked 10 blocks from home, looked around, and sketched a small piece of the roofline of the Jewish Museum on 5th Avenue in Manhattan.  There was a man sitting on the one of the benches painting the facade in a wonderfully loose, impressionistic style.  I sat on the curb (because 5th Avenue was closed to traffic) and tried to just capture a little of the essence of the complicated architecture and decoration.  I love the aged copper portions.

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 Another rainy day in New York City so the Sketchcrawl group switched the location from Southstreet Seaport to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (my 4th trip this week!).  We spread out in the new Greek and Roman Galleries and sketched - ancient sculptures and visitors.  I was really happy that Paula (an EDM member from Brazil who I met last Fall) joined me.  We had fun catching up as we sat on one of the many benches that are scattered throughout the beautiful sculptures.

Since I really want to learn how to sketch figures in 2007, I used this opportunity to sketch as many sculptures as I could before we went to the Museum cafeteria with the rest of the group.  I loved the fact that none of these sculptures had heads, hands or feet.  I'm not up to those lessons in my self-imposed curriculum yet.

These sketches were done with a Faber-Castell Polychromos pencil in a Moleskine watercolor journal.

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 We had another bad weather Friday in New York City.  So we took our grandson back to the Met for the second week in a row.  This week we visited the Astor Court in the Asian Art Galleries to show Robbie the pool full of Koi.  While he was enjoying the Courtyard and periodically returning to the pool with my husband, I sketched one of the swimming fish.

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 Those of us participating in the Every Day in May challenge are more than halfway - and I'm definitely getting faster at scanning and uploading my daily journal pages.

 May 16th:  I went to the Paul Poiret fashion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was captivated by the mannequin who was reclining on piles of pillows and a bed in the middle of the gallery. 

 May 17th: Katherine Tyrrell and I found Christopher Lambert's book Taking a Line for a Walk when we visited the Southbank Galleries in London in February.  Katherine bought it then and I received it as one of my Mother's Day presents.  The author walked from Le Havre France to Rome with several pens, some watercolor pencils, and a small sketchbook - and kept a wonderful travel journal - one page per day - every step of the way.  He never considered publishing it and the writing is small - but very interesting - necessitating me to use my magnifying glass to read the text.

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  It took me awhile to decide what to sketch for this challenge - and finally sorted through old photos to find one of me 40 years ago with my long braid.  It was cut one year later and I never let it grow that long again.  I still need lots of practice sketching faces and my husband says that it doesn't look anything like me. 

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  I continue to practice figure drawing and enjoy adding them to my recycled Michaelangelo book.  But I will never buy rough watercolor paper again - just have to get through these pages!

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I was tagged by Katherine Tyrrell of http://makingamark.blogspot.com/ on Friday and posted the "7 things you don't know about me" on Saturday on my blog:

http://www.paperandthreads.com/2007/05/post_24.php 

Yesterday the tagging spread to our EDM members and since everyone needs to tag 7 more people, I'm not sure how quickly and how far this will spread.  It is fun to do and definitely will help to develop more of a community among our EDM group members - if we know a little more about each other.

So in order to pass the Tag along, I decided that I would like to tag any EDM member who joined the group in the last 6 months.  After you post "7Things" to your blog, please leave a message on the EDM message board so we can all visit and get to know you better.

Posted by Shirley at 6:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

  We spent several hours in Central Park with my son, daughter-in-law and grandson Robbie in celebration of Mother's Day.  The weather was beautiful and the Great Lawn was full of families and softball players.  I sketched the city skyline looking south from the Great Lawn at 86th St.

 I still hate the rough watercolor paper. This sketch was done in my NYC Journal using Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils.  The piece of subway map that is above my sketch is my addition to the journal to cover the gap between signatures.

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  Today was my monthly Empire Quilt Guild meeting which is held on the 8th floor of Building A at Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT).  I arrived early to meet with my small applique group and while sipping more coffee sketched the view from the window - another NYC rooftop image.  I'm not sure what fascinates me about these water tanks.  If you take a minute to look up in the city, they are everywhere!  And no two structures or rooflines are the same.  This is the back of the buildings on W. 26th St. 

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Yesterday I received the following email comment from Katherine Tyrrell of Making a Mark - one of my very favorite art blogs. 

Hi Shirley you have been tagged by me - and now need to share with us seven
things most of us don't know about you (if you care to play  along!)   

I treasure my visits with Katherine when I'm in London and would never consider saying no.  So here goes:

1. I met my husband in our final year of high school and this year is our 40^th anniversary. We married after our second year of medical school, but I remained in Philadelphia and he stayed in Chicago and we had a long-distance marriage for 2 years. He still thinks of me as "the captain of the high school cheerleaders" or calls me the "dancing hematologist." If it weren’t for his encouragement and support, I may never have gone to medical school.

2. We had 3 children between September 1971 and July 1975. I was permitted 2 weeks vacation after my first and second children were born, and then moved from California to Texas when my 3^rd child was 14 days old. I have always loved being a mother (and now a grandmother) and a physician.

3. I just reduced my work schedule to 3 days/week, but continue to work as a Professor of Medicine at a New York medical school. This allows me to expand my interests and passions further - and I started sketching, painting, and joined Everyday Matters in 2005.

4. I spent 3 years intensively studying my family history (2000-3) and have 10 leather-bound, 3- ring notebooks full of birth/marriage/death records, passenger lists, and naturalization papers. My great-great-great-great grandmother was kidnapped as a child by the Delaware Indians in 1757 during the French-Indian War and released in 1764 by a treaty between the British and the Indian tribes in Ohio, USA. I read the original letter sent by Colonel Bouquet to General Gage about the prisoner release this past year at the British Library in London.

5. I don’t like or exercise, organized sports, running, jogging, hiking, or camping. I took dance classes "on and off" throughout my entire life, most recently ballet classes in New York. I have never been to a spa and have no desire to do so. I love living in a city where I can walk anywhere I want to go, but still drive to work.

6. I love textiles and everything related to them - sewing, smocking, French hand sewing, silk ribbon embroidery, Madeira applique, quilting, painting silks with procion dyes, and beading, These interests started when I was very young and I continue to add additional skills.

7. I adore bookstores and stationary stores! I have a shelf full of blank journals and many journals of various types that I keep: sewing, quilting, cooking, fabric dying, books I have read since 1985, travel journals and now travel sketchbooks to name a few. I write a "welcome letter" to each of my grandchildren when they are born and a detailed letter to each of them on each birthday. I have very few things left by my ancestors and want to make sure that I change that with my family. One of my favorite books is Leaving a Trace by Alexandra Johnson and I’m trying to do so!

Addendum: On 5/14 I was also tagged by Casey Toussaint and told her that I would add her name to my entry so she could stop looking for another to tag.

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 Friday is the day that we take care of our Grandson Robbie - who will be 2 the end of July.  When the weather is nice, we love to go to the Boat Pond in Central Park.  But today it was raining off and on so we chose our back-up location - the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  All of our grandchildren love wandering through the big open space that houses the Temple of Dendur.  Today he threw at least 50 pennies into the large pools and kept us really moving as he explored.  Before we left the museum we went into the Egyptian Galleries to visit William the Blue Hippopotamus, an informal "trademark" for the children's program in the Museum.  William is only 8 inches high and approximately 4000 years old!

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I am currently working my way through 2 art workbooks, one on watercolor skills and one on figure drawing.  Both authors are currently exploring "light and shade" in the lessons.  For my journal page(s) on May 10th, I moved my basic shapes around and redrew them.  Then I put in the hard shadows using watercolor pencils.  Finally I looked at the shapes to add the shading and was horrified to notice that I didn't really have a light and dark side that corresponded to the shadows.  I have two overhead track lights and two wall lights above my desk in my studio which really confused the lighting.  And I decided not to use the strong sidelighting that I used the first time I sketched these shapes because I needed to turn all of the other lights off and then couldn't see my sketch journal well enough to draw.  So I added some of the subtle shading that I saw, but it really doesn't correspond well with the true, actual hard shadows.  I will rearrange these shapes again one more time and use watercolor paints - not pencils.

I sketched a figure from my figure drawing book and then added watercolor to shade the figure.  I'm still having problems with proportions This is the rough WC paper that I added to my Michaelangelo Sonnet recycled book (along with several other types) and I hate it.  It is hard to use a pen on it and worse than that, it scans really poorly! 

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 Another long work day - and a quick sketch and painting from one of my photos of Montecatini Alta, Tuscany, Italy.  I love rooftop sketches and started to look for photos in my archive that I can use for practice.

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 Time to start Lesson 4 in my Watercolor Skills Workbook: 3-Dimensional Form-The Art of Illusion.  The first exercise is "Drawing the Basics: cylinder, cube, cone, and sphere."  I set up the forms, put a light across the still life and sketched the shapes.  Next I may try to do them with watercolor shading - but not tonight. 

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Late day at work - so I decided to try PoseManiacs 90 second images for my daily sketch.  Wow, the figures were in tortured positions and 90 minutes went by very fast.  I did 3 of the images and then added my grand daughter's hands and feet to the page for more human figure practice.

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The is a recycled book in which I inserted signatures of 140 and 90 lb watercolor paper.  I used a bone folder to press the paper and a coptic stitch, pulling the linen thread as much as I could.  I didn't use tape or glue paper or cloth over the spine.  I wanted to make sure that glue didn't get between pages - preventing each page from opening flat.

The book was made from a 50+ year old book of Micahelangelo Sonnets and his drawings were scattered throughout the book.  I incorporated many of the original pages in my book which is intended for figure drawing practice.  What better inspiration could I have?  Here is the first mixed page layout.

I decided to cover the two gaps between signatures with a piece of Michaelangelo's drawings - one page was divided in half and glued in place with PVA glue. 

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  May 6th (but labeled incorrectly as the 7th on my page)

I am starting a series of New York City sketches - when the spirit moves me - probably in nice weather and when I have time to take a walk and sketch without needing to get somewhere.  Since it is hard for me to decide what I want to sketch in this big city, I will walk 10 blocks (1/2 mile) and then select something from the 4 directions that I can see.  Today was "10 block series #1" - and I stopped in a my neighborhood independent bookstore, sat on a bench, and read for awhile along the way.   Only when I reached my destination did I realize that I only had 12 watercolor pencils with me.  This was very liberating and I think the sketch is looser.  I added ink and water when I came home.  My only disappointment is the Arches 140lb rough paper.  I bound many kinds of watercolor  paper in my recycled books so I could experiment and I don't think I'll buy "rough" again anytime soon. 

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Here are journal pages from May 3rd, 4th, and 5th.  I think it might be easier if I at least scan them daily, because my evening hours are too short to do everything I want to do.  I definitely won't take the time to also upload them to the Every Day in May Flik'r group.

May 2nd:  There was no sketching or photography allowed at the Met's exhibit "Barcelona and Modernity."  But I was taking a few notes in a really small notebook when I saw the Gaspar Homar's 1905 furniture design drawing.  I still think like a quilter and I still collect images that I want to save for textile projects.  The guards couldn't really see that I was sketching instead of writing.  The top half of the image is Homar's and the bottom half is my addition.  The colors are all mine.

May 3rd:  I was permitted to sketch in the "Venice and the Islamic World" exhibit and among the many pieces of Venetian art that were inspired by their Islamic trade, I found this "ewer."  The surface was marbelized, something I couldn't do on this journal page.  However, I tried to capture the shape and colors.

May 5th:  I was "stuck" on the last exercise in Lesson 3 of the Elsworth Watercolor Skills Workbook because I don't love landscapes.  My city landscape has really tall buildings everywhere!  I finally decided to work from one of my photos, taken during a wonderful trip to Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast in Oct 2005.  The exercise was to paint a landscape using the layer-on-layer method - and here is Mount Vesuvius from Sorrento on a partially clear day.

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I am trying multiple methods to improve figure drawing and at this moment I'm still primarily doing outline drawings.  During April I recycled a book of Michaelangelo's sonnets and I incorporated some of his drawings among the new pages for inspiration.  The above sketch is based on a Posemaniacs.com figure of the day.  I used pencil and some watercolor wash.   

Several sketches from a photo of a baby - to try to capture their chubby hands, chubby feet, and big eyes.  These sketches were done using colored pencil on one of the original sonnet pages that are on the back of the page with Michaelangelo's drawings.

This is my journal page from May 1st - another daily pose from posemaniacs.com.  Yesterday I posted this week's EDM Challenge which was done on May 2nd.  Tomorrow I'll post museum-inspired journals pages from May 3rd and 4th.  I'll then continue to post journal pages sequentially and I'm just hoping that I have time to post everyday in MAY.

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    I draw everyday so my commitment for this month is to upload one of my journal pages for every day in the month - which I never previously have done.  This one will be out of order because I wanted to post my EDM challenge today.  On Sunday I'll upload all of the other sketches.

Three "sorta" round wheels:  I was leaving the International Center of Photography exhibit several weeks ago - really inspired by Henri Cartier Bresson's philosophy about impulsive actions, when a red pedicab pulled up to the light as I was crossing 6th Avenue.  The beautiful driver, then sat up and placed her hands on her hips - exuding power and confidence.  I managed to quickly take one photo before the light changed and she pedaled on, but I was fearful about sketching from the photo because I couldn't figure out how to sketch so many spokes on 3 wheels.  I even asked for advice from this group - and sketched "the anatomy of a bicycle wheel "from our bike rack at work.  But, when I saw the magnificent tandem bicycle in the large painting by Ramon Casas at the Barcelona exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I realized the wheels had NO SPOKES - and I might never have noticed if I weren't obsessing over this photo.  As soon as Karen announced the challenge for the week, I knew I had to do this - without spokes. 

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