Paper and Threads

January 4th is the 9th anniversary of my blog and it is a good time for me to think about how I will spend the next year improving my skills and interacting with artists online art community and locally. 

Long Term Goals: Develop better drawing and painting skills on paper and with dye-painting and surface design on fabric.

Goals for 2015: To sketch and paint everyday, and to blog twice each week These activities give my retirement life some structure and provide enormous inspiration within an artist community. 

1. Take more classes online and in person to remain inspired:

I’m already enrolled in this year’s "Studying Under the Masters" course, but didn’t plan to start it until January.

I am registered for two Craftsy Classes one in Drawing and the other Watercolor.

I will take the Strathmore Class on Hand Lettering and Calligraphy, but have little interest in the other two this year.

I will register for Sketchbook Skool Semester 4 as soon as it is announced.

I will register for the Spring Semester at Fashion Institute of Technology, but won’t know which course I will take until registration day in January.

2. Continue to draw and paint locally: I meet regularly with the Central Park Drawing and Art Meet-up group, the NYC-Urban Sketchers Weekday Group, and my good friends Teri, Benedicte, and Pat. I would feel very isolated without them! There are multiple drop-in sites for Figure Drawing in NYC and I will attend one of them at least monthly.

3. Make watercolor sketchbooks, for daily drawing and painting and travel:

I will continue to make books - lots of books of different types.

I am registered for a Craftsy class on Dye Resists for making new bookcloth for my sketchbooks. I already have used many of the resists on a regular basis, but this class will restart my "dye lab" for 2015. I’m down to my last piece of dyed cloth!

I also need to make another batch of paste paper to use for covering bookboards and/or as endpapers.

All of these goals are really just a continuation of my goals for the last several years. I love the variety in my schedule and each of these activities brings me enormous pleasure. There will be other opportunities that I haven’t even imagined yet, and I will remain flexible and open to taking small risks! 

I'd love to read what others are planning.... 

Posted by Shirley at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

REFLECTIONS ON 2014 -  My main goal is: To develop better drawing/painting skills on paper and with dye painting/surface design on fabric.

Sketch everyday and blog twice each week: Although I didn’t sketch every day, I probably averaged one drawing per day based on some long drawing sessions. I attend many art exhibits with my friends here in New York City and always draw from the Masters. My blog is really important to me, and my group of online friends helps me remain inspired. I think I only missed my blog goal once in 2014!

1. Senior Scholar Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT):  Spring 2014 - Dye Painting on Silk 3 hrs weekly for 15 weeks

2. One day Paste-Paper class at Center for Book Arts in NYC; an Artist Transfer Paper Class by Lesley Riley and a Thermofax Screen Printing class at Quilt Festival-Houston.

3. Online classes - as a means to remain inspired and continue to learn on my own schedule, I took 5 online art classes, 1 online surface design class, and 2 online university classes on "Creativity" last year and learned something from everyone of them.

Studying Under the Masters with Jeanne Oliver. Each week I copied a Master Artist painting, usually converting their oil technique to watercolor, and then developed a second painting "inspired by" the specific artist we were studying. There is a category which includes each week of the 8 week course on my blog. I LOVED the challenge of this class!

Sketchbook Skool - Danny Gregory and Koosje Koene - Semesters 2 and 3: I chose these semesters of Sketchbook Skool because of the 6 artists that were included and was both inspired and educated by each one of them. I look forward to news about Semester 4!

Strathmore Workshop with Gaye Kraeger - My initial sketchbook drawings and paintings were inspired by Gaye in 2005 and led to my awareness of and participation in the Everyday Matters Group several months later. I’d love to spend a week painting with her!

Beautiful Watercolor Bouquet - a Craftsy class by Mary Murphy. I did this online class with my painting friend Sara when we were at the beach during the summer. We did lots of Wet-into-Wet painting which I love.

The Art of Dying - a Craftsy class by Jane Dunnewold. My first surface design classes were at Southwest Craft Center when Jane was the Chair of the Surface Design section. And I still learn something from her every time I meet up with her - in person or online.

My two classes on Creativity were offered free by Coursera, with faculty from Penn State for one and University of MN for the other. I remain interested in this broad topic and learned some skills to increase creativity and innovation from each of them.

Learn More Bookbinding Techniques - As a self-taught bookbinder I was thrilled to take a Basic Bookbinding class at FIT during Fall Semester (3 hours/week for 15 weeks), and made 9 different book structures and 2 books that I also wrote or sketched all of the content. This was an amazing experience and can be seen in blog posts within the category "bookbinding" on my blog.

Maintain a Community of Artist Friends: Lastly, I look forward to many more art "playdays" with my friends Teri, Pat, and Benedicte and will continue to attend the Central Park and Art Meet-up Group, the weekday New York City chapter of Urban Sketchers, and at least monthly figure drawing sessions at one of several locations. My friends make all of this even more fun.

Posted by Shirley at 8:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I went back to the Museum of Modern Art Toulouse-Lautrec Drawing Session again this week and these are 3 of the drawings I did.  The entire 90 minute session is tightly structured and we move from contour, to blind contour, to gesture, to moving gestures, and then some still poses.  These are poses of about 5 minutes duration - each with some change of props to create a café performer atmosphere.  The model is one of the actresses I sketched there before.

The drawings were done with a soluble graphite pencil and a waterbrush, and then photographed because of size. 

Posted by Shirley at 5:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Pat, Benedicte and I saw our second Bill Traylor exhibit last Friday.  The New York Folk Art Museum had an exhibit in 2013 and Betty Cunningham Gallery just had an exhibit.  We made it down to the Lower Eastside one day before it closed! 

Bill was born a slave on George Traylor's plantation, and continued to work there after he was emancipated.  At age 74 he moved to Montgomery Alabama and soon was homeless.  Charles Shannon, a young artist, met Traylor at age 85, sitting in front of a blacksmith shop drawing with a pencil stub.  He provided Traylor with art supplies for the next 3 years and bought over 1200 drawings from him.  This exhibit was from the Shannon Collection.

His drawings are owned by many major museums and I made a composite drawing of images I liked at both exhibits. 

2013: 

2014:

Posted by Shirley at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I made a book of my figure drawings for my end of semester FIT bookbinding project and will present it to the class tomorrow evening.  The Museum of Modern Art currently has a Toulouse-Lautrec Print exhibit and I sketched a figure from one of his prints during my first visit.  That drawing became the illustration that is embedded in my book cover.  The book cloth is hand-dyed fabric that I made.

The book is 24 pages long and contains a mixture of Toulouse-Lautrec quotes and 14 of my drawings.  The drawings were done during two MoMA drawing sessions during which actress models were dressed in café society clothes with props  Each session was 90 minutes and each of these drawings were not much more than 5 minute poses. 

The session started with an introduction to Toulouse-Lautrec and a combination of contour drawings and gesture drawings for warm up.  After each of the 5 minute poses, the museum educator walked around with a few of our drawings and made comments.  I already posted some of my drawings from the first drawing session.  These are from the second session. 

I'm thrilled with my book and the Basic Bookbinding class that I took this semester.  I was a self-taught bookbinder and learned so many tips from a professional. 

Posted by Shirley at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)