This drawing of Edgar Degas did not turn out how I’d hoped. His head is shaped weird and his hair isn’t anywhere near fabulous enough. But while I don’t share everything in my sketchbook (because wow there’s some atrocious experiments in there), I decided to go ahead with this one. The longer I go since I drew it, the less horrendous it looks to me. I mean, it’s still not great, but it doesn’t make me cringe so much anymore.
Monet
Journal52 – Week 9
Journal52 – Week 8
Strathmore Artist Workshops
No pictures today (I procrastinate because my scanner is a pain), but I wanted to share a free video series I’m enjoying: the Strathmore Artist Workshop Series.
You may be familiar with Strathmore sketchbooks – I know I own a few. Turns out they do more than just make paper. Every year they release a free set of workshops and this year I’m finally actually watching them. They’re very low-pressure. The first workshop is called Sketchbook Fury: The Art Ninja’s Guidebook, and it’s taught by Graham Smith who for some reason reminds me a little bit of Anthony Bourdain. Maybe it’s the voice.
I’d worried that these would be nothing more than ads for Strathmore products. They’re not. While you can’t miss the brand-name sketchbooks in the videos, the focus really is the art and the process of drawing. And while I of course can’t speak for the other workshops offered, Smith’s videos have been much more about inspiration and motivation than teaching specific techniques. And that’s fine; there are plenty of other videos out there for that.
It’s a pleasantly different style of art workshop video. Check it out.
Journal52 – Week 6
This week’s Journal52 theme was “Above My Head” so I drew the contents of one of the “plant shelves” in my house – little nooks near the ceiling in all the upstairs rooms. This one is in my study. I removed the captions from the scan, but the objects are, in order:
- A lantern my husband got from his sister
- A stein I bought my husband when I was in Belgium. I didn’t draw it here, but the top of the lever to open it is shaped in the form of Manneken Pis.
- A glass mug belonging to my husband. The silver emblem has his initials engraved on it, but I don’t know where it came from.
- A vase I procured in Muncie, Indiana, during college. I couldn’t quite capture the pearlescence in marker but it is beautiful.
- A mule deer skull found in Flagstaff, Arizona.
My walls aren’t actually that purple – they’re a far more muted purply-gray – but I love that marker color so much that it ran out of ink. Alas.
Materials: Staedtler triplus fineliner, Prismacolor markers.
Fathers of Aviation
I continued the joke and ended up drawing Orville Wright on Tuesday. About a week later I drew his brother Wilbur. These are not subjects I ever would have considered drawing. I’m not sure what happened to their eyes. A conversation I had with my husband while drawing Orville:
Me: Pretty sure one of the fathers of aviation didn’t have derpy eyes.
Him: To be fair, one of his eyelids is droopier than the other one.
Me: Yes, but both his eyes are pointed in the same direction, unlike his depiction in my sketchbook.
Oddly, I drew Wilbur one night because I was feeling anxious and needed to quiet my brain. Some people use adult coloring books to de-stress; apparently I draw dead people.
Uncle Bob
This is my grandmother’s brother Bob. I never met him (he died more than 25 years before I was born), but I had a decent photo of him in my genealogy files. I think this drawing looks more like my friend Jose than Uncle Bob, which is a little trippy since I’m fairly certain Jose has no Iowan in him and Bob definitely has no Puerto Rican blood.
Matisse
After drawing Thoreau on a random Thursday, my friend Six said that last she heard, Sundays were Matisse and Tuesdays were Orville Wright. Following up on her joke, I said that I’d thought Mondays were Matisse, so I was a day late with this one.
Finding a reference photo for this taught me that I know exactly nothing about Henri Matisse. I was surprised to find any photographs of him at all, having assumed he lived a good hundred years before he did. Turns out a bunch of famous painters had their photos taken. I guess that means I have more folks to draw.