Paper and Threads

The Central Park Sketching and Art Meetup Group went to Tudor City, in Manhattan, this weekend.  It is a lovely apartment complex with quiet parks embedded among the buildings, and it overlooks the United Nations Plaza.  Here are the two sketches that I did while we were there.   

The Tudor buildings have wonderful architecture and I was captivated by this stained glass window, with gold lights shining through.

For our second sketch session, my friend Benedicte and I sat on a bench overlooking the UN Plaza and sketched the buildings.  The group will next sketch in Battery Park, another place in the City that I don't know very well.

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I took a class with 2 of my art buddies this week, in which we learned how to make Thermofax screens that can then be used to transfer images to paper or fabric (with fabric paints or thickened procion MX dyes).  You can see details of our day here in Rayna Gillman's blog and a humorous recounting of the day in my friend Pat Gaignat's blog.  I'm the one in the gray shirts in these photos. 

I took lots of black and white images with me to make screens, but I was most interested in getting screens with images of my pregnant model from figure drawing.  I also made screens from designs that I can use for background surface design, screens from some of my stamps, and screens from photos I took of Manhattan.  While in class I tested some of the screens with Profab paints in my watercolor sketchbook and on fabric - and couldn't wait to go home and try printing with thickened dye on fabric for quilt journal page #6.

Here are the 3 journal pages that I made - very quickly and with very little thought.  But it gives you some idea of the images I can now print. 

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Thursday evening at the Society of Illustrators is with "costumes."  At my last session, both models were dressed as gun molls - and sketching was much more difficult than usual.  Here are several of my drawings that were "least bad."

Two Minute Poses:

Five Minute Pose:

Ten Minute Pose:

My current sketchbook is too big for my scanner, and I can't prevent the shadows on these drawings without transforming them in Photoshop like I did in the middle pose.  While drawing these, we were listening to a 3 piece jazz combo - a real treat that is part of the experience at the Society of Illustrators.

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The Central Park Sketching and Art Meet-up Group met in Brooklyn Heights, on the Promenade, to sketch.  The view of lower Manhattan is wonderful and it is hard to remember that the World Trade Center Towers were twice as tall as the tallest buildings in my photo. 

I sketched just the buildings at the very tip - trying to figure out how to best represent all of the windows.  The tiny little orange object at the far left of my sketch is the front of the Staten Island ferry, pulled into the terminal.

The Brooklyn Bridge is also part of this glorious scene.  For my last sketch of the 3, I sketched the Manhattan towers of the bridge.

This sketching group now meets twice each month - and this year moved out of Central Park on many occasions.  By scheduling one day each month on Sat. (11AM-2PM) and one on Sun, I usually can get to one of the sessions.  Yesterday four of us from the Journal Study Group were there.  I'm so glad that I went, because I rarely go to Brooklyn even though it is so close.

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Yesterday my husband and I went to an open rehearsal of the Philharmonic Orchestra in NYC - with Itzhak Perlman playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.  While my husband waited on line inside Avery Fisher Hall, I sketched the new Lincoln Center Plaza Fountain with State Theater behind it.

I'm trying to fill up one of my first recycled books and it has paper that I hate.  And my scanner also hates it and the buckling of the paper shows as dark shadows. 

It is great fun to see the Orchestra and Conductor dressed in jeans and T-shirts - and to hear parts of each piece several times while they work on it.  I'm getting better at sketching people who return to the same or similar positions frequently so I decided to sketch the Music Director, Alan Gilbert, while he was conducting the first piece.  Then I sketched the Concertmaster.

After sketching at the morning concert, I felt like sketching more and went to Figure Drawing at the Society of Illustrators last night.  Before the models appeared and while the jazz group was setting up, I did a quick small painting of the bass player.  Sketches from figure drawing will be scanned and uploaded later....

My blog has been down several times in the last week, and my poor son, who maintains the server it was on, had to come home from several long days at work and try to fix it.  Last night he moved it to a new server, so I think it will be OK.  Isn't he amazing?  Although he is a self-taught computer guru, he is a busy physician and was packing for morning flight with his wife and my fabulous grand daughter Annabelle.  A public thank you and a big hug for JJ. 

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