Paper and Threads

I love the drawings of Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) and today joined my friend Melly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to draw some of them for the second time.  My first drawings were posted here.  The exhibit ends April 18th. so I will even have time to return for more.  All of the drawings were done with a Caran d'Ache aquarelle pencil (Mahogany).

 Study for his painting Jealousy - and for me More Hand Drawing Practice:

Head of a Young Woman - and for me the challenge was getting the correct angle for the head: 

Study of Crossed Legs - and for me lots of crosshatching for shading

Posted by Shirley at 9:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

 We took our 6 year old grandson Henry to the 3rd Young People's Concert in this year's series at the New York Philharmonic and a fabulous Spanish guitarist was the soloist with the orchestra.  We were sitting too far away for me to see his hands, so I sketched him from one of his website photos for my daily sketch.  His hands really were in that position, but it reminded me that I need lots more practice drawing hands.  I am slowly drawing each letter from photos on an American Sign Language website and I decided that it was time for J and K.  Pablo Saenz Villegas was drawn with my water-soluble Pilot Varsity pen and then brushed with water.

American Sign Language letters - drawn with a watercolor pencil from photos on a website.

Posted by Shirley at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Even though I appear to have the same pen as other members of EDM, my pen ink runs when I add a watercolor wash.  These two drawings dried for 15 and 30 minutes respectively and you can still see where my wet brush touched the ink.  It might be due to the Fabriano soft press paper that I use, but since I don't plan to change paper, or the way I work with ink and watercolor, I will just have to accept this!

                  Drawn from a book of Picasso "One Liners"

           Drawn by pausing the fantastic polar bear video that was shown during the Olympics.

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I love watching the Winter Olympics and spent large blocks of time glued to the coverage.  Probably because of my lifelong interest in dance, and specifically ballet, figure skating is one of my very favorite events.  As I was getting ready to watch the Women's Short Program, I was surfing the NBC Olympic website and found this photo of Mirai Nagasu.  I fell in love with this perky, skilled, 16 year old while watching her skate at Nationals several weeks before.  Although she was being considered the US hope for the future, she appeared to be in a group with other world class skaters already.  I loved the entire coverage of the Women's event and have never been so impressed as I was with Kim Yu-Na's free skate on Thursday evening.  But I was even more thrilled that Mirai finished in 4th place!!   

Posted by Shirley at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

I made my 3rd watercolor journal with another piece of fabric that I dye-painted - this time striped using corn dextrin resist with procion MX dyes.  This is  a 6 X 8" watercolor journal containing Fabriano Artistico 140 lb Soft Press paper - 6 signatures with 2 folios each.  The bookcloth was prepared by fusing my fabric to Thai mulberry paper using Wonder Under - see more about the method here.

I used color-coordinated MiTientes paper as end papers. 

There is still one more piece of fabric that I made in this first batch, and since I'm now using a big roll of Fabriano Artistico paper, I will make a 4th book to gain more experience handling the big pieces of paper instead of the usual 22 X 30 inch sheets.  There are 48 single pages in each book so will have enough watercolor journals on my shelf to last 5-6 months!

Posted by Shirley at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)