Paper and Threads

Anna Denise Floor has beautiful watercolor journals of her family life.  Early in her project she started to develop layouts for her pages and showed us the five major 2 page spreads she uses as guidance.  She draws from her imagination, capturing special moments of life, and I really enjoyed her sketchbook tour in our Whimsical Class.  Our homework was to use her "storyboard layout" and show 5 things about us.  We were supposed to limit our pages to two colors, and I really didn't want to do that.  So here is my full homework spread - photographed whole because it is too big for my scanner - and two "half" pages which I scanned with overlaps. 

Left Side of Page:  I illustrated and wrote about 1. my MD degree and my career, 2. Bookbinding to make watercolor sketchbooks that are the size and paper I like,  My life as a 3. Quilter and 4. Seamstress. 

Right Side of Spread: Repeat of 3. Quilter and 4. Seamstress, and 5. Drawing and Painting in watercolor sketchbooks.  I included my imaginary characters Axel and Alice because they first appeared in my imagination and homework for Fabio Consoli's homework in the Sketchbook Skool class IMAGINING. 

Posted by Shirley at 6:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mike Lowery, graphic designer and Children's Book Illustrator, was the artist teacher for week 2 of Whimsical.  He did several demos online, and after each one he suggested that we try the same techniques. 

Shapes  His lifetime goal is to draw for 30 minutes every day, and when he stares at the blank white page, with no ideas, he uses a fat marker to make shapes, and then draws around them.  These are mine.  I loved this 5-10 minute exercise!  I know that the Christmas Tree costume would never originate in my imagination except through an exercise like this.

Portraits:  Mike was drawing Richard Owen, the man who created the name "dinosaur," for a children's book on dinosaurs.  He used an actual photo and simplified the portrait to match the style of his illustrations.  I used a photo of Albert Einstein for my simplified drawing.  The blue color is due to marker leakage through to this next page in my sketchbook. 

Developing a Story Character:  Mike was developing an animal character for a special project and showed us how he created a duck named Carl The Duck.  It took many steps and drawings for him to develop a duck with personality.  This is my first iteration of a character - a squirrel - still to be worked on to develop a squirrel with personality.   If I don't ever arrive there, I wanted to post step 1.

Icons:  Mike showed us pages of icons he developed, and for our homework asked us to develop a page of icons - 10, 20, or even 150.  I chose to draw my favorite kitchen tools, even though I really need experience drawing icons for cars and taxis - to feel more confident about adding them to urban sketches of NYC. 

Posted by Shirley at 6:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I enrolled in another multiteacher Sketchbook Skool class (Whimsical) and watched the new class each week for 5 weeks.  But I didn't have time to do the homework then and just now restarted the online class. Rebecca Green, a children's book author, asked us to either draw a character from a favorite book, or illustrate a scene from a book. I love Paris and follow a series of Paris mysteries by Cara Black.  I just finished one and decided to draw my vision of the main character - Aimee Leduc.  She owns a cyber security firm, but regularly becomes a private investigator. 

Aimee Leduc - Private Investigator

Cara Black's Book:  Murder in Saint-Germaine.  Cara Black sets her stories in individual arrondisements of Paris, and Aimee lives on Ile St. Louis and travels the city on her "faded" pink Vespa.

Drawing from observation is so much easier for me than drawing from my imagination.  I'm hoping that these illustrators help me improve my skills so I can eventually make a short book about my imaginary characters Axel and Alice for my grandchildren. 

Posted by Shirley at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today, while I'm in Houston Texas for the annual International Quilt Festival, I wanted to share two links for quick drawing inspiration.

Link #1  Draw Tip Tuesday:  Koosje Koene, one of the co-founders of Sketchbook Skool, presents quick tips for artists on her You Tube channel every Tuesday. 

https://www.youtube.com/user/koosjeko1975 

I watched her draw a crowd, showed my 8 year old Grandson Zach the video, and then sketched my crowd, with him watching, on a page in my "imagination" sketchbook. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkGSzb5-og4

Zach gave me suggestions for the animals!  And hopefully will draw his own crowd in his Sketchbook.

Link #2:  Art Projects for Kids

On the same day, I did a black cat project with Charlie (age 5) and Zach (age 8), to make for Halloween decorations.  This idea came from a blog I follow called Art Projects for Kids. 

https://artprojectsforkids.org/blog/ 

Here is the blog entry I saw:  https://artprojectsforkids.org/black-cat-collage/

I sketched the outline of the cat and cut it out.  They traced my cat and cut theirs out, and all 3 of us made the collage with a black Sharpie drawn  scene behind it. 

Here is a photo of our 3 collages. 

From Left to Right:  Charlie, Grandma, Zachary. 

Posted by Shirley at 5:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nina Johansson was the artist for our final week of the Sketchbook Skool Imagination Course, and we saw her One Year Imagination Project, and a demo of how she approached each day.  She used a Moleskin Datebook Planner and did an original drawing, with ink, on every single page.  Each one of the drawings is a little masterpiece, and she demonstrated how she approached the drawing, which was also awesome.

I'm still trying to generate ideas and art for my imaginary character Axel.  If I can accumulate enough drawings, maybe I can make a book for my grandchildren.  In these drawings, I was inspired by a star, and sketched a child's bedroom with glass stars hanging from the ceiling, a star-making workshop, and an advertisement for stars for sale.

Our homework was to draw from our imagination every day for 7 days to establish a habit.  She believes that we need to develop muscles for our imagination.  Two summers ago I sketched from my imagination for 100 days, and I believe she is correct.  I am only posting 3 drawings, and hoping that I can finish some others this very busy week. 

Posted by Shirley at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)