Paper and Threads

I'm still drawing figures (mostly dancers) from photos to practice sketching their body positions.  I take ballet barre once each week when I can (I hate all other forms of exercise) and then pick up a postcard advertising a dance program and sketch the photo while I have a cold drink.  We pick up my grandson Robbie at nursery school at lunchtime, so I have some time to paint these while I'm still at the dance studio.  I'd love to work live, but ballet dancers are in constant motion.  I've made no progress on adding faces so far this year and their hands are still pretty awful, but I know that constant practice is important.  Here are some of the ones that I sketched in July.

I also copied several more Seurat drawings onto the modern equivalent of the paper he used and here is the last one I did.  I usually don't draw only in pencil, so using his drawings as inspiration and experimenting with the Arches MBM 105 grain paper and some of my pencils is fun.

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EDM Challenge #180:  I had a really difficult time with Challenge #180 - Draw Something in Your Favorite Color.  I did a Color Project after being inspired by Laura several years ago and you can see both of our many entries by going to the category list on our blogs.  How could I possible select one color when I love them all and don't consider any drawing done until I add watercolor washes.  Then one evening my son sent me a photograph of my newest grandchild Annabelle's delicious pink feet.  It was then that I decided that I had to sketch and paint them for this challenge in honor of both of my grand daughters.  Sydney lives in a pink room with pink comforters and quilts and for years seemed to only want to wear pink clothes. 

EDM Challenge #181 Draw a Trash Can:  I couldn't find any interesting trash cans to draw until I walked around a corner in my office building and saw this behemoth - in a hallway where some room renovation was being done.  I wish the colors were more interesting!

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My husband and I were married midway through medical school, but lived in Philadelphia and Chicago until we graduated.  Then I joined him for post-grad training at the University of Chicago and we moved into our very first "adult" apartment together.  It was a lovely modern apartment in one of two buildings that sat on a landscaped island in the middle of E 55th Street.  Friends used to call it carbon monoxide island because the two lanes of traffic on E55th Street separated to go around the apartment complex.

 I have only a few photos from our years there - one taken during a snowstorm when the buildings were silhouettes and the other taken of just one corner of the building showing the architecture.  I'm not pleased with my page composition, but know how I will position these images when I work more on this series.

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I didn't know that I liked J.M.W. Turner until I saw the Tate Britain "Hockney on Turner" exhibit of his watercolors last srping.  Now I'm really enjoying the Turner exhibit at the Met.  This is one of the few blockbuster exhibits at the Met in which sketching is not prohibited, so I try to quickly sketch one watercolor each time I visit and paint it later - trying to stay loose.  There are three complete rooms of watercolors interspersed among galleries full of his large oil paintings.  He has a very precise, very tight style in the early works in the first watercolor gallery. then a looser style in the second, and mere impressions of a burning Parliament in the big series of the fire in the third gallery.  Here are 4 small sketchbook paintings I did over the last few weeks.

St. Florent - le - Vieil on the River Loire: 1832

Inspired by The Burning Houses of Parliament: 1834  I originally painted this for the cover of my big Reference Photo DVD, but decided to collage it into my sketch book.

Lori and I sketched several Turner watercolors on our sketchcrawl on Saturday - and I just painted mine.

Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute, 1835

Castle Conway: 1798-1800

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My New Friend:  Last Saturday I spent 6 hours on a sketchcrawl at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Lori - an Everyday Matters Yahoo art group member that I only previously knew through her blog and email.  I have thoroughly enjoyed every day spent with members from our wonderful group and love putting a face to a name - as well as holding their sketchbooks in my hand and watching them work.  We met for breakfast at a local restaurant and then escaped from the New York City heat at opening time of the Museum.  We started at the Turner exhibit - I LOVE his watercolors and this was my 3rd time to visit them this month.  We sketched from Turner and then sat at the table containing the HUGE books from the exhibit and added some water to our pencil sketches with our water brushes (only pencils are allowed in these exhibits if they even let you sketch at all!).  We were so cold by the end of the exhibit, we went up to the Sculpture Roof Garden to see the Jeff Koons sculptures and warm up.  We then toured the section featuring African, Central and South American artifacts and each sketched different masks and ceramic figures.  After lunch in the Museum cafeteria and lots more talking, we ended the day in the 19th C. European painting galleries.  I now have 6 journal pages to finish, converting quick sketches in pencil into ink/watercolor wash drawings.  Lori, who is in NYC on an art grant, still had several more days of lessons and experiences. 

A quick photo of us as we were ending our day (Lori on the left and me on the right):

My Old Friends:  After leaving Lori, my husband and I drove to my hometown in Northern NJ for dinner with my oldest friends - 4 women who I first met in elementary school.  Our 6th group member lives in Florida and we secretly were hoping that she was going to arrive and surprise us!  Even my 7th grade homeroom teacher - and our high school class advisor - joins us for these dinners!

From left to right: Judy, Me, Nora, Mary Ann, and Nancy.  Nora and her baby sister Nancy (not the Nancy pictured above) are among my most faithful blog readers and Nancy told me that she wanted to wake up yesterday morning and read about my fabulous dinner and party at their house.  Sorry Nancy, yesterday I spent hours and hours backingup our desktop/laptop computers to our new terrabyte external hard drive and never had time to upload this photo.  My only photo of Nancy was in mid-sentence so I thought she would prefer that I mentioned her instead....

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