Paper and Threads

I am still doing daily drawings from my imagination as part of a 100 day Drawing Project.  Some days I have to just draw a squiggle and go from there, and they are mostly dreadful drawings.  Other days ideas flow as I'm drawing and these silly little people appear. 

I drew a table and added the "patient."  Then I decided it must be a physical therapy session and added the therapist and the room details. 

I started out drawing a car, and then wondered where it was, and a gas station materialized.

Are these cartoon faces able to express emotions?

Last Friday I went to a "Working Rehearsal" of the New York City Ballet and did a few quick sketches from the Mezzanine before the lights went down too low to see my sketchbook.  I just redrew what I remembered and the 3 dancers morphed into my imaginary people!     

I'm having fun drawing from my brain to my tiny notebook and will periodically show a few drawings here on my blog.   But it is hard work!  And I really need an encyclopedic store of images in my brain from what I drew previously.

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There is a free, outdoor Figure Drawing session in Battery Park City at the tip of Manhattan every Wednesday afternoon from May through October.  Yesterday was the first session, and many of the artists, and the model, were old friends.

The model is Donna - an incredible, colorfully dressed, experienced model.  I prefer the younger models who are dressed in tank tops and leggings so I can draw their full posture, but yesterday Donna was dressed in so many layers and colors that I had to pull out my watercolors for the longer poses.

This is the 5 minute sketch - in graphite.

There were also two 10 minute sketches and one 30 minute sketch, which I did in graphite and then added paint.  But I missed the lines after painting, and brought them home and added India ink lines with my flexible nib over the watercolor.  Over and over I find that line is the most important element for me in art.  I prefer drawings to paintings, and ink and watercolor to any other paint medium.  And among oil paintings, I gravitate to the paintings with definite black lines in the paintings, like Matisse and Beckmann to name a few of my favorite artists.

For this 30 minute pose Donna added yet one more scarf, a deeper auburn color over her bright pink one.  Her dress was a multicolor print and I simplified it to only capture the colors. 

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For my homework for Jonathan Twingley in Sketchbook Skool 4th semester, I did many pages of imaginary drawings and then selected a few, cut them out, and made a collage.  The background was created with paste paper that was leftover from my bookbinding projects. 

I loved this week, both the ink blots to make into imaginary drawings, and the pages of imaginary drawings that I did each night for the collage.  Thank you Jonathan Twingley for "Stretching" me.

Posted by Shirley at 9:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My classmates in Drawing I at FIT:  I finally finished my composite drawing from my Drawing class.  Each week, when I finished the assigned drawings, I would add 1-3 classmates to this page.  The drawings were done very quickly with 4B graphite and then photographed because of the paper size.

The Central Park Drawing and Art Meetup Group at a Portrait Party met at a rented studio here in Manhattan last weekend.  We had no rules, and some participants sat for portraits and alternated the person "in the chair," and others just sketched members as they were sketching.  We had approximately 45 minutes for each session, and then went out in the neighborhood for a final sketch.  I did these with my Sketch and Wash graphite pencils, but then decided not to add water. 

Meetup Portrait Party  First Session

 Meetup Portrait Party Second Session

My only goal when I do these composites is to not have everyone looking the same - meaning that I have observed and tried to individualize their features. 

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I am slowly completing Jeanne Oliver's Studying Under the Masters, Part 2.  In this online class, contemporary artists study under a Master by learning as much as possible about them, their work, and their lives.  They choose one artwork to copy and then try to incorporate some of the skills and techniques learned into one art work of their own.  Each apprentice shares all of their research on video and demonstrates, in detail, their painting process.  I took Part 1 (9 Master Artists) in the Winter of 2013. and already enrolled in the final Part 3 class which begins in May.  All of my paintings are done from oils done by the Master and converted by me to watercolor.  I have a blog category with my copy and original for each Master in Part 1 and Part 2.

http://www.paperandthreads.com/studying_under_the_masters/

British Artist Robin Fingher chose Australian Artist Brett Whitely as her Master and I chose one of his ink drawings to copy because we are just beginning to do ink drawings with ink washes in my FIT Drawing Class.  I used my new flexible nib by Brause and struggled with some beginner issues with blobs - one close to one eye!!

These are the Master Drawing on the left (called Vanessa) and my copy on the right.

For my original drawing, inspired by Whiteley, I chose to recreate one of my figure drawings from the Toulouse-Lautrec sessions at MoMA. 

It was great fun combining ink lines with ink washes (as opposed to cross-hatching) and I did two drawings using the same technique at my drawing class this week. 

This was a still life created by our professor with 3 mannequin arms, one foot.

And this was one I put together for the second half of our class.

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