Paper and Threads

I had several hours of sun at the beautiful Biltmore pool before the temperature in Florida plunged to the 50s and the blizzard of 2006 started in New York City.  We actually had "snow envy" because we were missing the winter fun in Central Park.  The tower on the beautiful old Biltmore Hotel must have been sketched and painted thousands of times, and it was a challenge for me to work on this 4.5 X 6" drawing.  A hotel employee told me that many artists sketched it from the golf course, head on, instead of from this angle as it rises above the other rooflines of the hotel.  This seemed like just the "perspective practice" that I need.  I used my new Daler-Rowney travel set of watercolor paints and medium and small Niji waterbrushes for the first time.  These traveled well, in contrast to my Pigma micron pens which leaked during the plane ride.

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This was an impossible challenge for me because I'm struggling regularly to draw realistic body parts. I couldn't decide how to shade the lips using pen and ink so this page was done with a smudgy 2B pencil.  It will be a long time before I can figure out how to draw an open mouth with exposed teeth.  Preliminary efforts were great dracula look-alikes!  Several of the lips were from magazine photos, one is a self-portait, and the remainder are from photos of my grandchildren (7 months, 13 months, and 2 1/2 years).

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I attended my first Sketchcrawl Friday February 3rd.  It was organized by Patti and Danny Gregory at the Rubin Museum of Art which is a new Manhattan museum that features art from the Himilayas.  It's a gorgeous space and the art was inspiring.  I filled 5 pages of images that I abstracted from the paintings, clearly more in my "comfort zone" than sketching the very ornate, small sculptures.  The sketch above was one tiny portion of a very large painting from 17th C. Tibet to which I was drawn because of the stylized clouds.  I did the sketch with a Pigma micron 05 pen and added watercolor washes at home.  I wish that I could have met all of the other artists, and I really wish that I could have seen their work.  Hopefully most of them will post their sketches to the EDM group.

I loved this little fish - created in a transparent orange pigment over a dark background with white highlights.  The same fish appeared scattered around the border of the painting several more times.  I can't wait to recreate him on paper or on silk in a quilt journal page.

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I see this rooftop many times each day, but never previously considered it a scene for sketching.  Although I used only pen for all but one of my sketches in Sorrento Italy (see earlier entries from Moleskine journal), I recently started laying out lines in my sketches in pencil, usually because I had the time to play with lines a little more now than when I was standing and trying to draw in just a few minutes during our trip.  There was a wonderful exchange this week on the Everyday Matters group (and Danny Gregory's Everyday Matters website) about using pen versus pencil/then pen and I decided that I would do this sketch without allowing a pencil to touch the page.  I still have lots to learn about watercolor, but I found this quick sketch to be fun to do.

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This is the first opportunity for me to sketch a section of our new library.  My husband and I have watched the MacNeil-Lehrer (now Lehrer) News Hour since it was first broadcast.  We never got home from work in time for the national news, and enjoyed the more in-depth coverage of their reporting.  Our whole family are all also Law and Order fans, but I couldn't imagine how I could sketch the rapidly changing scenes in one of their episodes!  Maybe in my next lifetime!

Laura inspired many of us to sketch interiors this month and I decided to try another one from my apartment.  This is our wood-burning fireplace which hasn't been used yet this year because the winter has been mild.  The previous owner of our apartment bought the mantle which is one of my favorite possessions. 

Posted by Shirley at 8:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)