Paper and Threads

Hand Drawing Practice:

I try to regularly draw hands because I'm so bad at them.  Last September I decided to also draw the American Sign Language alphabet from photos on an ASL website.  I use a watercolor pencil to sketch and then add water to get shading.  This is something that I do when I have nothing else to record visually from my life that day - so I'm only half way through the alphabet.  It isn't obvious to me that I'm getting any better with faced with hands during live figure drawing.  Maybe I need to sketch 10,000 to achieve competency.

Posted by Shirley at 9:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Our cousin (see last post) also has a wonderful sculpture collection, and while having my morning coffee, I chose this mother-and-child piece by Ruth Bloch to draw.  There were other mother and child sculptures, by different artists in his collection, but I remember being with him one time at Art Expo in New York City when he bought a piece from Ruth Bloch - so I felt a tiny connection with her.  The legs of this sculpted chair are as long as the mother - so it is a beautiful freestanding piece of art.

I guess I'm not done yet with my current focus on motherhood.

Posted by Shirley at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

We stayed with our favorite cousin last evening in Philadelphia and really enjoyed seeing his lovely art collection again.  I adore Picasso drawings and like to quickly copy them trying to learn how he captures so much in so few lines.  Here is a very quick sketch of one of Larry's Picasso drawings.

Posted by Shirley at 7:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I finally finished Chapter 3 in the Bert Dodson book Keys to Drawing!!!!

These two pages were done and should have been uploaded yesterday, but I was too tired after a very long (7:15AM-9PM), but wonderful, day with two of my grandsons.  Eight month old Zach is crawling really fast and pulling up on anything, even trying to climb, so he requires constant attention.  But he is a really happy baby - and it is wonderful watching his development.  Four year old Robbie is a master builder of extremely complex multiple level Geotrax train systems and can build for hours when he comes home from pre-school.  He has a wonderful design imagination and is extremely fast - and when he finishes another complex track he usually has 5-6 remote controlled trains navigating the system at once. 

The first drawing is of a foreshortened head.  I did it using a light grid because I knew it was the only way for me to capture even a slight resemblance to my pretty grand daughter Sydney - who was eating a snowcone when I took this photo.

 This page show some emphasis of facial characteristics which is the final page (but not a project) in Chapter 3.  These were all drawn from faces in my figure drawing group this week.

There are 5 more chapters in the Dodson book - which is a very sophosticated full course in drawing.  I was stuck at one place in Chapter 3 for too long and will try to make more continual progress.  But I have no deadline and learn so much from the projects.

Posted by Shirley at 9:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Last night I went to Figure Drawing at the Society of Illustrators in New York City.  I think some of the people that I see there regularly go twice each week.  I'd love to go twice each month, but will probably never go more frequently than that.  This time I took my 9B woodless pencil and stumper that I played with when I was reading Bill Rankin's Fast Sketching Techniques book and loved using them for the longer poses.  Here is one page for 2 min, 5 min, 10 min, and 20 minute poses.  My new sketchbook is slightly bigger than my scanner and the person sitting next to me created charcoal dust periodically that drifted onto my page - so I cleaned them up as well as possible.

Two Minute Poses for each Model (2 of 20):  

Five Minute Pose (1 of 4):

Ten Minute Pose (1 of 2):

Twenty Minute Pose (1 of 3):

Posted by Shirley at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)