Paper and Threads

The weather in New York City made it easy to hibernate and work on many projects around my apartment.  But my lack of sensory input from my city environment made it necessary for me to dig deep and challenge myself to find anything of interest for my daily journal page.  I know, I know - I could have added more apartment drawings to my precious watercolor journal, but I didn't!  

I am still working through the Carla Sonheim Drawing lab book and did two of her labs.  In the first, I searched for some bug shapes on Google images and then decorated them with Pitt pens.  In the second, I quickly gathered 5 books from one bookshelf, just as quickly flipped them open and chose something to sketch, and then put the drawings on one page.

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I am slowly practicing drawing hands from photos on the American Sign Language site.  I am moderately pleased with these drawings, but when I am faced with a real model, and hands are only part of the challenge, I can't draw individual fingers.  Oh well!  

 Here are my most recent hand drawings.  And then I added some drawn from photos of one of my grandchildren's hands.The sign language hands were drawn with a watercolor pencil and then brushed with water.  My grand daughter's hands were drawn with a standard color pencil.

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I am still slowly working my way through the Carla Sonheim Drawing Lab entitled 100 Faces.  The majority of these are sketched on the bus or subway in New York City.  Among these six, however, there is one of Howard Jacobson, the author of the Finkler Question.  I was watching a YouTube video of him talking about his book and couldn't resist drawing his interesting face and hat.

I still haven't gotten past #40 Face - this is a slow project for sure....

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Almost 2 1/2 years ago I took a weekend book binding class to learn how to make a cased-in watercolor sketchbook.  Before that I was recycling old books, using their covers and sewing in watercolor paper signatures.  But I wanted to learn how a full watercolor journal was made by a skilled bookbinder. 

The book we made in class is bigger than any I used previously and too big for me to use as my daily sketchbook.  So I decided to dedicate it to paintings of my apartment.   But somehow the project became too precious.  I added only one page in 2009 and one page in 2010 and I constantly put off using it because I don't want to spoil it.  I need help and an attitude readjustment. 

Here are my two pages:

Our living room fireplace 

An antique golden oak draftsman's table  - now used for storage of supplies

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Sunday was our January Meet-up Central Park Sketching session at the Natural History Museum.  The group leader, Jesse Richards, does a fabulous job selecting places within the Museum for 30-45 minute sketches and when we started in the Asian Mammals section, we had the big room almost all to ourselves.  Here is the baby tiger that I loved in one of the exhibits.

The Ocean Life section, under the blue whale was quite dark and I had problems seeing the paint colors as I added them on my Common Loon. 

This Mammoth was drawn with a watercolor pencil and then brushed with water to shade it.  It is a sketch of a mammoth sculpture that is part of the huge mammoth skeleton exhibit.

The Meet-up website, in the link above, has 90+ drawings from the participants for anyone interested in joining this group.

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