Paper and Threads

We live in corner building and I was able to sketch/paint 3 fire hydrants just around the corner - along the side of our building.  The one on the top left stands on the sidewalk right in front of the building, the big one in the middle is on the sidewalk along the curb, and the one on the bottom right is actually on the wall of the building.  Two of them are beautifully polished brass, but I'm still not able to accurately capture reflective surfaces.  Maybe next year!

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This week we are staying at our daughter's apartment with our 2 year old and 1 year old grandchildren while they are out of town.  Even though we could have gone on a nature walk in Riverside Park, we somehow only managed to walk around several blocks in the neighborhood before naptime.  We did find lots of stuff: a dried seed pod, green flower petals on a branch that fell from a tree, several peanuts that were left for the squirrels under a bench. a small pebble that my grandson loved, a dried piece of tree branch left over from autumn, two pigeon feathers, and the ubiquitous yellow caution tape that is around every sidewalk project in New York City.  We had so much fun on our outing that I wanted this to be my EDM Challenge #63.

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I attended my first Sketchcrawl Friday February 3rd.  It was organized by Patti and Danny Gregory at the Rubin Museum of Art which is a new Manhattan museum that features art from the Himilayas.  It's a gorgeous space and the art was inspiring.  I filled 5 pages of images that I abstracted from the paintings, clearly more in my "comfort zone" than sketching the very ornate, small sculptures.  The sketch above was one tiny portion of a very large painting from 17th C. Tibet to which I was drawn because of the stylized clouds.  I did the sketch with a Pigma micron 05 pen and added watercolor washes at home.  I wish that I could have met all of the other artists, and I really wish that I could have seen their work.  Hopefully most of them will post their sketches to the EDM group.

                                     

I loved this little fish - created in a transparent orange pigment over a dark background with white highlights.  The same fish appeared scattered around the border of the painting several more times.  I can't wait to recreate him on paper or on silk in a quilt journal page.

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I see this rooftop many times each day, but never previously considered it a scene for sketching.  Although I used only pen for all but one of my sketches in Sorrento Italy (see earlier entries from Moleskine journal), I recently started laying out lines in my sketches in pencil, usually because I had the time to play with lines a little more now than when I was standing and trying to draw in just a few minutes during our trip.  There was a wonderful exchange this week on the Everyday Matters group (and Danny Gregory's Everyday Matters website) about using pen versus pencil/then pen and I decided that I would do this sketch without allowing a pencil to touch the page.  I still have lots to learn about watercolor, but I found this quick sketch to be fun to do.

Posted by Shirley at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)