Paper and Threads

One of the joys of my visits to the Royal Academy of Arts in London is seeing the prints of Donald Hamilton Fraser's ballet dancers in the Museum Shop.  I purchased a "postcard book"  with 18 of his postcard size prints of dancers during one of my visits and I tried to capture his sketches in ink with watercolor washes as part of my figure drawing exercises.  I love ballet, I love dancers, I love sketches and painting of dancers, and especially his prints which I knew nothing about before visiting the Royal Academy this year.

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One of the watercolor projects from Chapter 1 in Anne Elsworth's book (Watercolor Skills Workbook - 10 easy lessons) is mixing watercolors to match master paintings.  I chose this Picasso piece (which was done in pastels) and used my regular palette of primary watercolors to mix each of the colors that I could see in the print.  This is a fabulous way to train your eye and I hope to do more of these projects as I work through her book.

I am now done with the projects that I want to do from Chapters 1 and 2 - and ready to move on.  I need to plan my way through these exercises and projects slowly if I want to enjoy them.  I think I was previously unable to appreciate the 10 lessons because I was trying to rush through the book.

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I would never have thought of photos of yoga classes/instruction books for my figure drawing practice during 2007.  But Christeen http://christeensblog.blogspot.com/ on the EDM group has some great yoga sketches that she did and I found a perfect second hand book to use for photo images.  I won't stop sketching ballet dancers, although I don't upload many of them because I'm copying sketches by Donald Hamilton Fraser that I bought at the Royal Academy of Art.  I love his style and wanted to try to learn from him through studying his dancers - all of whom are caught during moments between practice or performance sessions.  Here are a few of the first sketches of yoga poses.

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Last weekend (3/16-17) we had freezing rain and snow - precluding even walking because of the winds.  This weekend was much warmer and New Yorkers ran a marathon in Central Park and filled the playgrounds on Sunday morning.  We met our son, daughter-in-law, and grandson in Hippo Playground in Riverside Park.  He loves the slides - and I was warm enough to sketch the hippo sculptures.  There are buds on the trees and the early spring flowers have stems about 4" above the ground.  This is as close as we have gotten to "fresh"  - wonderful fresh air to cure winter cabin fever.

There are two groups of hippo sculptures - that children climb on and adults sit on.  Here are two pictures that I took of the "animals."

Very few New Yorkers even pay attention when I'm sketching, and while I was sketching the hippo head with open mouth, a woman kept talking to her friend and actually put her foot right up into the mouth obscuring my view.  And I was standing not more than 4 feet from her! 

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In 2003 I purchased Winsor-Newton watercolors in primary colors and Anne Elsworth's book entitled Watercolor Skills Workbook - 10 easy lessons.  However, it wasn't until July 2005 that I partially retired and in September joined EDM.  I'm finally starting to slowly go through the 10 lessons - and doing a few of the exercises and projects.   

Lesson one recommends a basic palette and then outlines exercises to mix secondary and complementary colors.  I mixed Winsor lemon and French ultramarine to make green and then added varying amounts of cad red to mix complemetaries.  These were used to paint houses from a painting by Camille Pisarro (The Hermitage at Pointoise - posted March 13th).

 I'm now posting 2 projects from lesson 2: 

Project 1. Drawing a still life on mirror tiles: I took several items from my china closet and sketched them on a round mirror.  It was fun, but I'm not sure I would know this "busy painting" is because of reflections in a mirror if I didn't know it.

Project 2.  Painting the silhouette of buildings:  This is a painting of the Tower of London rooflines from a photo that I took during our October visit.  I loved doing this project and will probably paint more photos from the series of photos that I took that day!

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