Paper and Threads

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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Last night was my first session at Society of Illustrators for 2011 and one of my art goals for this year is to move toward use of watercolor while drawing figures.  I decided that a good place to start is the 20 minute poses - and to use a watercolor pencil and then brush in the watercolor pigment with water.  My paper buckled when I added water, but I cleaned up the scan buckling lines a little with Photoshop before posting these.  Next time I will take watercolor paper for these experiments.  Stay tuned to see how long it takes me to move to watercolor and paintbrush - I move slowly....

I still did my first 20 minute pose in 9B graphite.  The contrast was increased a little for posting.

These are the other two drawings - drawn with a Caran D'Ache mahogany watercolor pencil and then painted with water:

Open this link, if you also clicked on the Society of Illustors link for Sketch Night in the first sentence:

http://www.paperandthreads.com/2010/11/figure_drawing_and_illustrator.php

Joan was sitting right next to me!

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Our small, but active, Journal Study Group, had two guests this past Wednesday - Gwen Diehn and Vivian Swift.  Gwen is an honorary member now that she has a grandson in Brooklyn and we always look forward to her visits.  Her husband Phil usually joins us for the day's activities and on Wednesday he took this picture of the group. 

We had a long brunch at Landmarc in the Time-Warner building at this great table for 8, discussed everything art-related, and passed around sketchbooks.  Gwen is a fabulous bookbinder so we also needed to consult her on several upcoming projects.  There was eating, laughing, and a great exchange of ideas.

From the Left:  Benedicte, Pat, Teri, Me, Vivian, Melly Gwen

After brunch we walked across the street to see the current exhibits at the Museum of Art and Design (M.A.D.), followed by late afternoon coffee, tea, and ice cream in the Museum Cafe for some of us.  Vivian left us mid-afternoon to deliver the manuscript of her new book to her publisher!

The Global African Project is the current large exhibit at M.A.D. and most of us gravitated to this tableau by Black Coffee (the brand for 2 South African designers) for sketching. 

I sketched one of the figures and the dog, followed by a figure and costume by Missoni Spa from 1990.

I feel so fortunate to have such an inspirational group of friends in NYC.

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