Paper and Threads

I still have ephemera and a few photos to add to my London Travel Sketchbook.  But I decided to end my blog entries from our trip with two other types of pages that I usually include.  

Two X Two inch Grid:  I regularly set up one or two pages to create a set of very quick paintings of something that I liked for each day.  Several of these are from restaurants during dinner, others are from locations we visited, and two are from purchases I made.  The terrace house door was from the place we stayed with our daughter and her family in 2006-7, and we enjoyed walking down the street past the house  to relive those wonderful memories with our family.

Some Daily Notes:  I added a chart to write some notes for each day of our trip, and also added icons for the weather.  This is one of the three pages as an example.

Inspiration: I collaged this illustration from Gourmet magazine to the last page of the sketchbook.   It is from many years ago, and I decided to add it as an example of a wonderful painting of a place.  My husband and I went to Europe for the first time in January 1970, spending a full 2 weeks exploring the City and the theater scene.  Piccadilly Circus was so memorable to me that I saved this for almost 20 years until I refound it and made it part of our visit this year.

The artist's signature says John Lawrence 1995, and I just learned that he is an English Illustrator born in 1933. 

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We moved on from drawing on toned paper with Conte, and in our last class we watched a demo, and then sketched models with light pencil, shaded with a brush and dilutions of ink, and completed the drawing with a bamboo/nib and ink.  I've done this once before, and find using ink on an easel a bit of a challenge, especially for pens that are upside down.  But I love it!

Model 1

Model 1 

Model 2 

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I am still practicing drawing figures in action from photographs.  These are my "art after breakfast" drawings, first started during my 6 weeks with a fractured wrist on my domiant hand, and now done because they are a very quick way for me to draw something almost everyday as I am finishing my coffee.

My grandchildrens' summer camp posts 100s of photos every day and these were ones I sketched.  Each one was sketched on a quarter sheet of scrap copy paper.   I selected these poses from those I sketched and collaged them to a sketchbook page.  The one with the sunglasses is my 15 year old grandson Henry. 

I then remembered that I had a book entitled  The Human Form in Action and Repose by Phil Brodatz and Dori Watson (1966).  The next two sketchbook pages are collages of drawings from those photos.  The pencil lines are my quick gesture line, and then I draw the figures in ink.

I loved the figure photographed in multiple rapid action shots while jumping rope. 

I'm busy cooking for 19 for Thanksgiving, and was happy that I had this blog post waiting for such a busy week.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL WHO CELEBRATE OUR AMERICAN HOLIDAY! 

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We rented a wonderful apartment in South Kensington, a charming section of London.  This is the door of the house, one in a row of identical houses, most probably containing multiple apartments.

It was a beautiful day when we went across the Thames to see the Royal Watercolor Society Exhibit at Bankside Gallery.  I loved taking a few minutes to draw/paint the roof of St. Paul's Cathedral.  We then walked back across the Millenium Bridge.

Gloucester Station was our local Tube Station and it was wonderful because the Circle, District, and Piccadilly lines all stopped there.  That meant that we could take the Underground from Heathrow Airport directly to our neighborhood.  There were many restaurants, coffee shops, food stores, and bakeries right around the station - a great convenience. 

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I went to the airport very early in the morning because of road closures for the New York Marathon and another one of the early arrivals took a long nap - and I had time to both draw and paint him. 

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