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Tomorrow I'm leaving for the International Quilt Festival in Houston, followed by a business meeting in San Antonio, so I wanted to complete this week's EDM challenge before I leave. EDM Challenge #94 was Draw a Spoon. This week it is Draw a Fork. I posted the two of them together because they are a wonderful pair of salad utensils - shiny silver that I still can't capture.
Nina Johanson, a member of the Everyday Matters (EDM) Yahoo on-line art group, posted a message about this website in November 2007 - and I looked at it and bookmarked it for future reference.
http://www.gis.net/~scatt/sketchbook/links.html
It is an index with links for sketchbooks that are on-line - many from Master Artists and many from contemporary artists. Scattergood-Moore, the artist that maintains this website, has done a wonderful service for all of us who love to learn from the Masters and be inspired by some of our contemporaries. Bookmark it on your blog and spread the word about this excellent resource.
I've been drawing/painting daily since January 2006 and now have 23 completed sketchbooks. I love books and rarely draw or paint anything that is not on a watercolor journal page. Sometimes my daily page is more like a visual journal or travel sketchbook, but most often I'm working on specific skills that I want to develop, practice, and remember. I sketch from drawings of the Masters, trying to copy their lines so I will learn from them, and rarely attend an art exhibit without sketching at least one piece that is in the exhibit. But I also draw and paint my grandchildren's toys to connect with them on a different level.
I'm not sure how often I looked at the sketchbooks that are linked on this website over the last year, but recently I noticed links to blogs of many EDM members in the Index and an invitation to submit your sketchbook URL for consideration to be listed.
We didn't have any peanuts in our house - and I couldn't find anything to inspire me to do this challenge when it was posted - until yesterday. I then decided to learn more about how peanuts grow and looked at information and images on the web. This is a painting of a plant with its flowers and peanuts. I really didn't know that peanuts grow underground from shoots that arise from the above ground plants. Very cool!
I continue to practice drawing faces and figures from photos - and did these 4 during October. I selected this photo because of the foreshortened right arm and was happy with the arm drawing. Not so much with the eyes.
This drawing was done from a runway photo. I saw and loved a Klimt-inspired gown in the window of Oscar de la Renta's store on Madison Ave. This is the image of the dress from the runway - but I didn't even try to reproduce the fabric design.
Two faces drawn from magazine advertisement photos.
The Virtual Sketch Date photo was just perfect when I was deciding what to draw and paint for my daily journal page. I usually only do the EDM challenges, but this is the second month that the photo for VSD was irresistable.
I am very busy in Oct, Nov, and Dec - anticipating all of the Christmas sewing and quilting that needs to be done. So like Santa, I put out a call for reindeer help.
My son Jason had a pet iguana during college and most of medical school. We all grew to love Pablo as long as he was safely looking at us from his fabulous terrarium that was built by my son. This photo was an excellent inspiration and challenge for me - especially drawing a figure with a face!
My husband and I worked as volunteers all Saturday morning sorting books for the upcoming Goddard Riverside Book Fair and then spent the afternoon watching our grandchildren enjoy the Halloween Fun Fair that my daughter organized as a fund raising event for their nursery school. After carving a pumpkin with my grandchildren at dinnertime, we came home and collapsed. I almost didn't do a journal page for Saturday - and then picked up my sketchbook, a washable graphite pencil, and a photo of Lin's kittens and did a very loose sketch in the few minutes before bed. I try to sketch daily and rarely, if ever, will give in to being too tired or too busy. But some days, a 5 minute sketch like this seems like a huge accomplishment.
A hard challenge - and I'm not sure how or when I should reveal the full drawing....
I don't think that this should be very hard, based on the portion I chose to include, so I will post the full version as soon as there are a few comments.
Casey immediately saw that this detail was from a train engine - so I'm adding the full drawing today to finish the challenge. My daughter chaired the Halloween Fun Fair for the nursery school and one of the highlights was a train ride for adults and children in the New York City playground that was used for the event.
Here are 3 of our grandchildren enjoying the day.
I picked up this leaf and nut from the sidewalk in Capitol Hill, Washington DC, last weekend. These huge trees lined the street all around the park and there were multiple nuts that looked like acorns until you noticed that the caps were really spiculated - not at all like a traditional oak acorns. On the left is the inside of an empty cap and on the right a drawing of a cap with the nut facing up. The cap actually has the spicules covering it entirely.
The leaves were as long and narrow as I depicted, but the veins were actually symmetric - and I didn't manage to keep them that way when I painted the leaf. I have no idea how the leaves were placed on the branch or what the bark looked like. None of the tree identification web sites helped me identify this tree, so I'm hoping someone in EDM can do it. Lin?
We spent the Columbus Day weekend with our youngest grandchild in Washington DC. When she was born I started a Cachet Linen watercolor journal for our visits to DC - the same journal that I used for my 3 London travel journals for my other grandchildren. I try to do a visual journal page for each day of our visit,
We went to the annual Navy Day when we arrived Saturday, but Annabelle slept through it while my two oldest grandchildren, who were also visiting DC, had a fabulous time climbing on huge military vehicles. But she now loves her Exersaucer and while we were babysitting for her spent many happy minutes playing in it. Here is a cropped version from my position in a nearby chair.
Sunday morning we took Annabelle for a really long walk around Capitol Hill and saw Halloween decorations whereever we walked. One house even had pumpkin vines tied up to their wrought iron fence and many pumpkins in various stages of growth. I captured one of the bigger pumpkins and the vine in one of my drawings.
On Monday we took Annabelle up Pennsylvania Ave to buy some new books for her and then I visited Capitol Hill Books (in a row house across from Eastern Market) for the first time, to survey their incredible collection of used books. I found a book about the history of Chelsea - in London - which is where we stayed during our year traveling back and forth to London to visit my daughter and her family. It was a great read for the train coming back to NYC. What is not in my drawing are the stacks of books that completely obscure the front windows upstairs and down. Yet inside the collection is wonderfully organized over 3 floors. A must visit now for me for all subsequent trips to see Annabelle.
We were in Washington DC this weekend visiting our youngest grandchild. I took some great photos of floating vehicles at Navy Day in the DC Navy Yard, but when we got back to my son's house, I found this really cute Dr. Rubber Duckie among Annabelle's bath toys and decided that this would be my answer to the challenge. One duck - 4 views.
My three year old granddaughter Sydney loves to draw and color. She was exhausted last Friday evening - after running at least a mile through Central Park climbing the big rocks while we brought her to our apartment from Nursery School. After dinner she went to bed, and then about 30 minutes later carried out this fabulous lion drawing!
Yesterday I met a good friend between the New York Public Library lions and quickly sketched one to post with Sydney's lion. I used a watercolor pencil to do the drawing and then "painted" it to get the shading.
My daughter and granddaughter brought me a lovely bouquet last week and I managed to draw and paint two of the 3 types of flowers while it remained fresh. I have no idea what type of flower this is - it really was almost hot pink and I never quite achieved the correct color.
They mixed in many ornamental cabbages among the roses and the flowers painted above and these were really fun to paint. I used a watercolor pencil to add the purple veins.
We have flower beds around the trees on the sidewalk in front of our New york City apartment and the summer flowers are overflowing the space. It is getting cool enough that they won't last much longer and holiday greens will be spread over the area this month.
I love Margaret's doodles and especially how she frames many of her paintings. So this is an homage to Margaret who inspires me as I take this journey. I will never be able to share her patience doing fill-in pen work,, but would love to learn her use of color and composition.
Seemed very fitting to be drawing the back of this $10 bill while thinking about the historic House vote that hopefully will occur today.... Living in New York City, it is easy to see how lack of credit is going to affect the middle class as much as those that work in the financial district. I'm excited about the possibility of keeping Mayor Bloomberg for 4 more years - to skillfully navigate the decreasing budget available to keep this amazing city afloat. And I've never been one to endorse Republicans....
Re: the challenge: This was hard work. I was going to comment on how well Sandy had drawn both sides of a bill, when I looked at our new member's (Speck) drawing of many paper bills!