Paper and Threads

The Central Park Sketching and Art Meetup Group sketched at the Met yesterday - beginning in the Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand photography exhibit and ending in the American Wing.  I thoroughly enjoy these sessions because I'm forced to select a subject and then to sketch it quickly before we move on.

I saw the photography exhibit previously and loved Steichen's portrait of Stieglitz, so that was the subject of my first sketch.  The Museum website has a good podcast and all of the exhibit photos - so I printed out the Stieglitz portrait to accompany my sketch when I got home. 

I also had a few minutes to sketch others in our group while they were sketching other photographs.

We then moved to the American Wing for several more sketches.  For my final drawing, I sketched a tiny figure from a huge painting that completely lined a very large oval museum room.   The painting is a Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles  that was painted by an American artist named John Vanderlyn in 1818-19.  The museum website has photos of sections of the whole painting and you can click among them.  My man was one of many people in the painting that were strolling the grounds of Versailles.

Our Meetup group leader took a low resolution photo of me while I was sitting on the floor sketching - and it shows the very large size of this painting.

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I go to figure drawing monthly at the Society of Illustrators and still love it.  Tuesday night we had a male and female model and here are my 10 minute and 20 minute drawings. 

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I am slowly practicing drawing hands from photos on the American Sign Language site.  I am moderately pleased with these drawings, but when I am faced with a real model, and hands are only part of the challenge, I can't draw individual fingers.  Oh well!  

 Here are my most recent hand drawings.  And then I added some drawn from photos of one of my grandchildren's hands.The sign language hands were drawn with a watercolor pencil and then brushed with water.  My grand daughter's hands were drawn with a standard color pencil.

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I am still slowly working my way through the Carla Sonheim Drawing Lab entitled 100 Faces.  The majority of these are sketched on the bus or subway in New York City.  Among these six, however, there is one of Howard Jacobson, the author of the Finkler Question.  I was watching a YouTube video of him talking about his book and couldn't resist drawing his interesting face and hat.

I still haven't gotten past #40 Face - this is a slow project for sure....

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Here are two EDM challenges that are from Feb-Dec 2010 - 10+ months that I didn't do any last year.  I printed out and cut up the individual challenges and put them in a jar next to my chair - I can now select one randomly when I'm out of ideas for my daily sketchbook page.  These were both done after I selected the challenge from my jar. The actual challenge strip that was pulled from the jar is glued across the top of the page.

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