Paper and Threads

I met my friends Pat, Melly, and Gwen in Brooklyn  on Friday to celebrate Melly's upswing week (week 3 after chemotherapy) and had a wonderful day wandering the Botanic Garden and the Art Museum.  It was my first visit to the Gardens - WOW!  The wisteria and tree peonies were unbelievable.  The website says there are 300 tree peonies in bloom!  Go see Melly and Gwen's blogs for their sketchbook pages and some photos from the day. 

I sketched a little (in pen) as I walked and Gwen taught us about the Chelidonium Magus plant whose sap was used as pigment in Medieval manuscripts.  The yellow squiggly lines and the yellow flower on my sketchbook page are all from the sap of the leaves when you break one off the stem!  Amazing!

After a lovely lunch on the patio in the Gardens, we walked next door to the Art Museum and spent most of the time sketching in the African Arts section.

Then we took a quick tour of Judy Chicago's Dinner Party and the current exhibit in the Feminist Art Center.  It was a fantastic day - and a very easy trip for me from Manhattan to Brooklyn by subway.

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Between live figure drawing sessions, I still work on my Carla Sonheim Drawing Lab faces, full figures from posemaniacs.com, and sketch hands from the American Sign Language website. 

The faces are usually drawn very quickly when I'm riding the subway or buses in New York City.  The trick of course is figuring out who is about to get off.  And people who are reading look like they are asleep.  I'm hoping that this extra practice will help me "pull it all together" when I'm trying to sketch live models.  For me it is the ultimate test of eye-hand coordination!

Hands Copied from American Sign Langauge Site and drawn with watercolor pencils.  I only have two more letters to sketch.

http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/handshapes.htm

Figures drawn from http://posemanics.com with watercolor pencils - the 4 colors that I am trying out for live figure drawing next week.

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The Meetup Central Park Drawing Group met at the Conservatory Garden for our usual Spring session - and I was attracted, as always, to the two beautiful fountains.  This time I only sketched one of the Dancing Maidens, not all 3.   Jesse, the group leader,photographs all of the drawings and uploads them to the website for the event.  Next time we return to Bethesda Fountain and Plaza.

By the time we moved to the south section of the Garden, the wedding around the other fountain had ended and I was able to paint the nymph and flute player.

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I participated in the Everyday in May Challenge for several years by uploading my daily journal sketch to my blog everyday.  It was a good way for me to combat my inner critic a little - because the quality and my happiness with the sketches varied greatly.  This year I decided not to post daily, but to post more frequently than my usual schedule of twice per week. 

Monday we took our 4 year old grandson to the Empire State Building.  His two siblings have been there and he wanted to go.  This page has a prepainted background and then a collage cut from one of the brochures they passed out there.

Tuesday I made my weekly drive to NJ to visit my 93 year old mother.  She fell in Nov. fracturing both her right hip and shoulder.  It was a beautiful day and we sat outside in the sun next to a gorgeous pink dogwood tree.  The background was prepainted, and the dogwood blossom and lady are collages.  The woman (Lady in the Park by August Macke) is one of the drawings I did at the German Expressionist exhibit during my 2nd visit.

Prepainted backgrounds and collage are part of Roz Stendahl's Strathmore Journal class this month.

Wednesday I took my husband and met friends back at the German Expressionist exhibit at MoMA.  I really love it and enjoy drawing my way from the beginning to the end.  These are two journal pages of drawings done yesterday.

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The Cezanne Cardplayer exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art closed last Sunday.  But before the paintings and drawings were packed up, I made one more trip to the museum to sketch from Cezanne's preliminary sketch of the "Cardplayer in the Blue Smock. "

I enjoyed sketching and painting the Met Cardplayer painting (one of 5 variants that Cezanne painted) over the last few years, This exhibit allowed me to copy the master's preliminary drawings - which was great fun.  Will this end my focus on one painting in the Met collection?

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