Paper and Threads

We moved to San Antonio Texas from LaJolla California and while my husband worked at the Army Institute for Surgical Research, I joined the faculty at the University of Texas Health Science Center.  We initially intended to move on at the end of 3 years, but instead my husband joined me on the faculty and we raised all 3 children there before returning to New York City.  We had a Texas ranch house built in the 1950s, with wonderful shade trees and lots of space for our family.  This sketch was made from a photo taken during the winter - and our live oak tree still has leaves.  When we moved to Texas I learned for the first time that live oak trees drop their leaves in the spring instead of the fall.  We lived in this house for 18 happy years. 

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I still try to draw figures regularly, while regularly avoiding my 2008 Goal to draw more faces.  Here is a quick soluble graphite drawing that I did this week.  I was attracted to this magazine photo by the opportunity to also draw a horse.

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My son and his wife in Washington DC have two cats - his and hers from before they were married.  So this sketch was made from a photo of Sammy meeting baby Annabelle and her stuffed Jellycat Bella shortly after she was born.   

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I loved searching for shells on the empty beach on our morning walk.  We usually arrived about one hour after high tide and on our walk one morning we found 3 very clean parts of a fish skeleton at the water line - a head, one large vertebra, and one small vertebra.  My daughter and grandchildren were equally interested in examining the backbone and asked us to look for more for a collection.  But none were found.

Another morning a Monarch butterfly accompanied us on our entire walk.  Just before we left, I was able to take a photo while the butterfly landed briefly on the sand.

We loved having morning coffee after our beach walk on the back deck under the umbrella.  My sketch is missing the bottoms of the 3 chairs across the table - it just got too complicated for me spatially.

Our final day - my masking fluid and tool for putting the mask on the paper, a beach rose, one of the seagulls immediately before flight, and my youngest grandson's sippy cup which was sitting in front of me while I was sketching.

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We spent almost one week with our daughter and grandchildren at a summer rental in the Hamptons and I was able to complete my recycled book that I dedicated to summer vacation travel.  Selected pages will be uploaded over the next few days.

I loved the "Creative Matrix" idea in Dory Kanter's book Art Escapes and then decided to try it when Martha of Trumpetvine Travel posted hers as a calendar from her recent vacation in the woods.  Here is the first page of mine.

The house lawns were mowed the first afternoon we arrived, and I was shocked to see fully formed mushrooms, that were twice as tall as the grass, appear the very next day.  They were very delicate and disappeared completely by the following day.  I'd love to know the type of mushroom - research must be done.

My husband and I walked two miles on the beach early each morning and collected shells and other "treasures."  The road to the beach is on a narrow strip of land between the bay and the ocean and I loved a deserted, weathered, wood shell of a house that was up on stilts at the edge of the bay.  It was possible to look right through the windows and doors that were not boarded up.

We occasionally met someone on the beach walking their dogs, but except for them we shared the beach with the seagulls.  I read that there are 80 varieties of gulls and wondered about the three patterns of coloration of the gulls we saw.  Here is one of the gulls and the shadow that he cast on the sand in the bright sunlight.

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We were at the beach with our daughter and grandchildren for a week, and I finally found a bench I wanted to sketch.  We had shrimp tacos for dinner at LaFondita in Amagansett, NY and the garden sculpture company behind the restaurant displayed this granite and wood bench on the edge of the pond.  The wood was weathered like the traditional benches along the streets near the beach and the composition and balance between elements was extraordinary.  If only I could have studied and painted the grain on some of the wood.  The brown-pink painted square behind the bench is my painted background for the sketch.

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The image that I kept returning to for the EDM Challenge "Draw Something Dangerous," was my precious little 3 year old grand daughter Sydney who can now ride her two wheel bike without training wheels!  She rides it on a quiet street in front of their summer house with adults all around her, but she is soooo tiny on it!

My sketch doesn't show the joy on her little face, so here is one of many pictures taken while she whizzed by.

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This is the next entry for my "Our Homes" series of sketches.  I really wish that I had taken more photos of our houses, but this is something that I never considered while we were living there. 

After several years in Chicago we moved to La Jolla, California to finish our training.   I was pregnant with our first child and lived in a little cottage overlooking the ocean during the next 4 years.  The house was small, but we had a fabulous brick patio built into the mountain behind us.  The weather was so nice most of the year that it became the family playroom for our sons.  All 3 of our children were born there (my daughter 14 days before moving day) and then we moved to yet another part of the country - Texas. 

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We just returned from several days with friends in their family summer home overlooking Silver Lake in NH.  Anyone that knows my blog realizes that I paint very few landscapes, so I forced myself to upload a sketch that I did from their porch overlooking the lake.  This year I'm trying to work on figures and faces, maybe next year I can work on trees in Central Park, NYC.

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We saw this truck parked along 79th Street in New York City when walking to nursery school last Spring.  My grandson, who loves Superheroes, was fascinated by the truck mascot that was wired onto the front grill - spiderman dressed as a Mets Fan!  Fortunately I had my camera with me so took a picture of him. 

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I'm still drawing figures (mostly dancers) from photos to practice sketching their body positions.  I take ballet barre once each week when I can (I hate all other forms of exercise) and then pick up a postcard advertising a dance program and sketch the photo while I have a cold drink.  We pick up my grandson Robbie at nursery school at lunchtime, so I have some time to paint these while I'm still at the dance studio.  I'd love to work live, but ballet dancers are in constant motion.  I've made no progress on adding faces so far this year and their hands are still pretty awful, but I know that constant practice is important.  Here are some of the ones that I sketched in July.

I also copied several more Seurat drawings onto the modern equivalent of the paper he used and here is the last one I did.  I usually don't draw only in pencil, so using his drawings as inspiration and experimenting with the Arches MCM 105 grain paper and some of my pencils is fun.

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