Paper and Threads

I love my friend Bunny's photos from her trip to India and look forward to sketching and painting some of these interesting people in their beautifully colored clothes.  It is a joy to look at her albums for specific photos for my figure drawing practice.  This year, as I practice, I will continue to add faces to my figures.  Older readers of this blog may remember that I sketched figures or faces, but never together, through much of 2008.

View from the Bus - Delhi to Jaipur Road:

Man in Village Next to Samode Palace:

Jaipur - Elephant Ride to Amber Fort:

I still have several more figures that I would like to paint from Album #3 - and then 12 more albums to go!   Thanks again Bunny.

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I'm so happy that I brought a few of my favorite shells home from the beach this summer.  I sketched and painted many when we were taking our morning walk, but our grandchildren played with most of them and I saved very few.

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This last week I spent two mornings sketching at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Deborah, an EDM member who lives nearby, joined me on Monday January 19th to sketch.  We previously conversed by email, so we sat and sketched and talked for several hours before moving to the museum cafeteria for lunch.  We chose the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas because there were benches nicely positioned in front of the primitive art.  Here are three of the artifacts that I sketched, colored with watercolor pencils, and then "painted" with my Niji waterbrush although I knew that this was bending museum rules slightly.  The watercolor pencils allowed me to replicate better the very unevern colors of this huge wood sculpture. 

Yesterday I met Jane, one of my new friends from Danny Gregory's recent illustrated journaling class, at the Met.  I taught her how I recycled old books with watercolor paper the previous Friday and she brought 3 fabulous books that she just finished to show me.  I sketched Aphrodite in the Greek and Roman galleries before Jane arrived, and then a primitive "Seated Figure" from Mali (13th C) in the Montebello exhibit as we toured it.  Both of these were also done with watercolor pencils and then finished with my Niji waterbrush. 

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One of my dear friends and her husband spent at least a month visiting their son and his family in India.  I know we will never be there on vacation, so I asked her to share all of her wonderful photos with me.  I plan to slowly look at all of the digital photo albums she shared and to draw and paint some of the people.  Here are my favorite photos from the first 2 albums.

Dehli:

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Learning more about drawing figures and faces is still a primary goal for me in 2009.  One of the members of Everyday Matters (EDM), the online art group that I belong to, posted links to out of print figure drawing books by Andrew Loomis and I'm working my way through the first chapter of Figure Drawing For All Its Worth.

Here are journal pages that I did of ideal male proportions - trying to embed these landmarks in my brain.  The anatomical drawing is a piece of an end paper in this book I recycled.  My angst re: gaps between signatures using 140lb watercolor paper can be seen here.

I love drawing and painting ballet dancers - all from photos because I'm still not able to sketch moving bodies.  This was drawn from a photo in the NY Times last week.  Obviously, I shouldn't have tried adding facial features in this tiny little face - but I'm posting the disappointments as well as the pages that please me.  The drawing inspired us to get Ny City Ballet tickets for February, to brighten an otherwise cold, dreary winter.

I still had to do a daily journal page the other evening, and this painting, on a postcard from a local Manhattan gallery, was sitting right next to me.  I love trying to learn from other artists by copying their lines and painting styles - oil to watercolor conversions.  I didn't know anything about Jean-Pierre Cassigneul, but subsequently learned that he was born in 1935 and is a well known French artist - with a painting in the upcoming Christie's Impressionist and Modern Auction.  Here is my fast copy of his beautiful oil painting.

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