Paper and Threads

 Friday is the day that we take care of our Grandson Robbie - who will be 2 the end of July.  When the weather is nice, we love to go to the Boat Pond in Central Park.  But today it was raining off and on so we chose our back-up location - the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  All of our grandchildren love wandering through the big open space that houses the Temple of Dendur.  Today he threw at least 50 pennies into the large pools and kept us really moving as he explored.  Before we left the museum we went into the Egyptian Galleries to visit William the Blue Hippopotamus, an informal "trademark" for the children's program in the Museum.  William is only 8 inches high and approximately 4000 years old!

Posted by Shirley at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I am currently working my way through 2 art workbooks, one on watercolor skills and one on figure drawing.  Both authors are currently exploring "light and shade" in the lessons.  For my journal page(s) on May 10th, I moved my basic shapes around and redrew them.  Then I put in the hard shadows using watercolor pencils.  Finally I looked at the shapes to add the shading and was horrified to notice that I didn't really have a light and dark side that corresponded to the shadows.  I have two overhead track lights and two wall lights above my desk in my studio which really confused the lighting.  And I decided not to use the strong sidelighting that I used the first time I sketched these shapes because I needed to turn all of the other lights off and then couldn't see my sketch journal well enough to draw.  So I added some of the subtle shading that I saw, but it really doesn't correspond well with the true, actual hard shadows.  I will rearrange these shapes again one more time and use watercolor paints - not pencils.

I sketched a figure from my figure drawing book and then added watercolor to shade the figure.  I'm still having problems with proportions This is the rough WC paper that I added to my Michaelangelo Sonnet recycled book (along with several other types) and I hate it.  It is hard to use a pen on it and worse than that, it scans really poorly! 

Posted by Shirley at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

 Another long work day - and a quick sketch and painting from one of my photos of Montecatini Alta, Tuscany, Italy.  I love rooftop sketches and started to look for photos in my archive that I can use for practice.

Posted by Shirley at 9:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

 Time to start Lesson 4 in my Watercolor Skills Workbook: 3-Dimensional Form-The Art of Illusion.  The first exercise is "Drawing the Basics: cylinder, cube, cone, and sphere."  I set up the forms, put a light across the still life and sketched the shapes.  Next I may try to do them with watercolor shading - but not tonight. 

Posted by Shirley at 7:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Late day at work - so I decided to try PoseManiacs 90 second images for my daily sketch.  Wow, the figures were in tortured positions and 90 minutes went by very fast.  I did 3 of the images and then added my grand daughter's hands and feet to the page for more human figure practice.

Posted by Shirley at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)