Yesterday was our 44th wedding anniversary. This is a quick painting that I did of my husband when we were at the beach last week. And the second page is the bottle of champagne that we consumed with friends on our anniversary yesterday. There were 3 couples at the beach last week and a total of 144 years of marriage among us!
I am still working on my Carla Sonheim 100 Faces Drawing Lab project - and several weeks ago sketched 3 third graders during a brief, 10 minute, orientation to their local Barnes and Noble Children's Dept. I was with different classes each morning for 3 sessions, so these 3 were sketched on sequential days and then painted at home.
My Own Book Fund is a volunteer activity of mine, and we visit 3rd graders to discuss reading and books, then meet them at a local Barnes and Noble where they each purchase books totaling $50, and end by visiting their class one-two weeks later for presentations about their favorite new book. They are so excited and so cute, and this year I think I was attracted to girls with great hair and bows and/or head bands.
My favorite report this year (not one of these 3 girls) was the student who stood up and told me that she was going to compare and contrast the Dork Diaries with the Diary of a Wimpy Kid - both very popular series with this age group. And then she presented a number of conclusions. Impressive!
My husband and I spent a long Memorial Day weekend with our son, his wife and our 3 year old grand daughter Annabelle in Washington DC. When she was born, I started a sketchbook for her and I routinely fill one page each day that we visit. It is part travel sketchbook and part visual journal of our days together. I completed 4 pages during this visit and I'm including them in this post. Prior pages can be seen by clicking on the Washington DC category at the bottom of the right-hand side bar.
The sketchbook is a 10" x 7" Cachet Linen watercolor sketchbook - the same one that I used for all of our trips to London. I can work on both sides of each page, but there is a little buckling that you can see when the page is scanned.
We watched the Pixar movie "Cars" our first morning and she requested that I draw and paint "Mater."
We took Annabelle to the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall and while my husband took her through her favorite simulators, I sketched an aerial airplane and painted it later from a photo I took.
One morning I took Annabelle to buy art supplies and thought that she would love using the Crayola Paint Brush Pens. But after she used the first one, she insisted on using the other new brushes and Crayola pan watercolors I bought - and I couldn't convince her that the brush paint pens weren't markers!
It was really hot in DC all weekend, and Annabelle spent several hours with one of her friends in an Arlington playground with lots of waterplay. I sat in the shade and did quick sketches of her, pail in hand, to record the event.
I'm posting the three 20 minute sketches - all done with watercolor pencil, then clear water, then watercolor paint around the images. My paper is bigger than my scanner, so all 3 pages were photographed and I couldn't get rid of the blue gray color of the paper, even with Photoshop levels.
I was fascinated with many of the images on prints in the German Expressionism Exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. At each visit, I made some quick sketches of some of the figures in the prints, and this week made two of the dancers into stamps. The first test of the stamps was made on this journal page.
Jane Davies posted some lovely mixed-media art with gesso, acrylic paint and freezer paper resist on the Sketchbook Challenge blog. I went to her video link on her blog and tried to duplicate it, but it failed. My freezer paper image, an outline of 6 of us on Team 5 at an NYC scavenger hunt, didn't stick properly and paint went under the resist. So I dried it, turned it over, and glued it down as a collage.
I definitely will try this again, and will probably use paper Frisket instead of my old freezer paper.
