Paper and Threads

There are many wonderful, artistic fences in our neighborhood, but New York City is much too cold to wander around and spend time outdoors sketching.  So I opted for a really simple sketch of the fence for our apartment building service entrance.  Most apartment buildings in the city have a main entrance and a service entrance - or multiples of both depending on the building size.  The service entrance is used for deliveries and remains locked much of the day.  What is sometimes surprising to folks who live in other parts of the country, everything, or almost everything, can be ordered and delivered to your apartment.  My personal favorite is our fire wood delivery man and the Christmas tree delivery guys because I love the holidays in the city.  Even all of the very good restaurants deliver right off of their regular menu, although if I'm eating that well, I want to enjoy the restaurant ambience for those prices.

Posted by Shirley at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

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.

Posted by Shirley at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

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.

Posted by Shirley at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

Posted by Shirley at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

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! 

Posted by Shirley at 8:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)