One of my assignments in Sketchbook Skool was to illustrate a recipe. I’m no cook, so I wanted to do hard-boiled eggs. My husband said that was a cop-out, and made me draw pumpkin pie. So here it is, the recipe off the side of the can of pumpkin:
If I were to do this over, I’d make the ingredients larger. I underestimated the amount of space I had to work with.
Happily, while I finished up coloring this, my husband actually made the pie. It was delicious.
I attended my very first official sketchcrawl this past Saturday. We started at the Maine Avenue Fish Market, then moved a little way down the shoreline to the Capital Yacht Club.
Drawing objects from a distance is very hard for me; I’m used to drawing still life mere feet away, or even photographs right in front of me. Plein air sketching is a new challenge. So because I have a tendency to over-explain/defend my drawings, I’m just going to present them without comment.
In conclusion: I had a good time and enjoyed the company of the artists very much, even if I felt more than a little bit intimidated when we all shared sketchbooks at lunch. Oh well – everybody has to begin somewhere!
When I was a kid, I anthropomorphized everything. Seriously: I even attributed personalities to the cards on computer solitaire. These days, inanimate objects tend to take on my current mood. For example, drawing boxes bores me to tears:
And drawing round objects in perspective frustrates me to no end:
I wasn’t really going anywhere with this. Just wanted to share. Do you anthropomorphize inanimate objects in your life?
You can certainly do worse than copying the masters, but sometimes it feels a little weird to create art of other art in a different medium. For example, while the rest of my Basic Drawing class at The Art League in summer 2010 was creating spheres and cubes, my instructor wisely gave me (who alone had experience with charcoal, evidently) something a little bit more interesting to render:
My first attempt didn’t turn out too well, so I rotated it and tried again:
That was a little better, but the sad truth is that no matter how faithfully I copied it, it remained a pretty ugly statue.
Warning: there’s a lot of nudity in this post. Just so you know.
Though I have not yet actually participated in a SketchCrawl, I am a member of SketchCrawl Washington DC. It was through this group I heard about Draw ’til you drop, a marathon drawing event put on by Visarts in Rockville, Maryland, this past Saturday, January 14. (Hat tip to the very talented Ricardo Pontes for letting me know about it!) I probably wouldn’t have gone but a friend went ahead and registered us both, and I’m so glad she did. It was quite the experience.
The format was simple: 12 hours, 6 models. Each model did five 5-minute poses, then one long pose for the other 90 minutes (minus some for breaks, of course). I figure I drew for about ten of those twelve hours, and by the end of it I was pretty spent.
I arrived an hour late, but that was more than enough time to capture the first model’s long pose.
I was still warming up, but she came out all right. I could have stood to redo her hands, though. They’re a touch on the small side.
A lot of people were doing amazing things with charcoal and conte crayon and heaven knows what else, but I found I was happiest with my plain old #2 pencil, and ended up sticking with it the entire day.
The second model was a man – the genders alternated all day, actually – and he did a lot of interesting short poses. I didn’t scan in most of my five-minute sketches because they came out pretty terrible, but I liked this one all right:
He was thin but had good muscle definition. His long pose was seated. I know we’re artists and aren’t supposed to care about these sorts of things, but I was kind of glad I didn’t get the full crotch view for this one.
Most of my drawings show people facing to the right because that was the front of the room, and few of the models faced the folks in the back. Which wasn’t a big deal – we were certainly allowed to move around the room – but I stayed put because I was comfortable. See, when I walked in I didn’t see any of the plastic folding chairs everybody else was sitting on, so I grabbed an upholstered divan from the corner that was probably meant for the models. I doubt I would have lasted half as long had I not been sitting on a cushion.
Anyway, by that point my friend and I were hungry so we grabbed a delicious lunch at Lebanese Taverna. When we got back, the next model was in the middle of her long pose:
I liked this pose. It was such an interesting angle to be drawing from. It’s kind of hard to tell from my drawing, but she was lying on a bunch of pillows. I hope I hadn’t inadvertently stolen her divan.
The next man was even thinner than the first. My husband said my drawing looks like Ricardo Montalban as Khan.
I replied, “Congratulations, you now know what he looks like naked.”
Now, I’m a very impatient speedy artist, so I routinely finished my drawing within the first or second session of the long pose, and I rarely feel like drawing the same thing twice in a row. So I did a close-up of his head:
His hair was a little strange, with long bangs starting from a very receded hairline and combed forward over his eyes, but I did my best.
The last woman of the day seemed new to the modeling world. Unfortunately, she was neither muscular enough nor curvy enough to provide much in the way of shadows, so I found her difficult and unsatisfying to draw. I started out drawing her long pose with pencil, then busted out my pen and watercolor pencils to pass the time. However, I wasn’t using watercolor paper, so my poor sketchbook got pretty wrinkled:
By that time I was getting a little bored with drawing and my energy was flagging in general. There was still another full session after I finished this, so I drew the guy next to me:
He did not actually look like Beethoven-as-a-gangster in real life. And his drawings were gorgeous.
The final model breathed life into the last two hours of the day. His short poses were interesting and athletic, and he did a seated long pose in a position I’m not sure I could have gotten out of:
He was interesting enough that I drew him a second time:
…and somehow managed to shave several years off his age. Very weird. But I think I did a little better on the hair this time around. He had very complicated – but awesome – hair.
And that was it! Afterward my friend and I headed over to Dogfish Head in Gaithersburg and ate way too much yummy food. Good times.
Final tally: 10 hours, 9 finished drawings, 20 five-minute sketches, and a whole heck of a lot of great practice.
On Easter Sunday I was minding my own business when suddenly I stepped off a curb wrong and completely screwed up my ankle. No bones were broken, so the ER staff diagnosed me with a sprain, put me in an air cast, gave me crutches, and sent me on my way.
The trouble with having a sprained ankle is that people think it’s synonymous with a twisted ankle. It’s not. By medical definition I have “just” a bad sprain, but in my case that means I have multiple tears in multiple ligaments and tendons. Two doctors, four braces, and nearly three months later and I’m still limping along, now (finally) awaiting surgery to fix the tear in the tendon.
But I’m not posting to whine. (Well, not just to whine, anyway.)
I’m posting to share some of the awesome that has been bestowed upon me during my recovery. First, my sister made me a present: a grumpasaurus to cheer me up. I love him, and he currently disapproves from atop my bookshelf. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my husband quickly snapped him up and put him in a comic:
by theshaggyfreak on deviantART
From the start I’ve been a touch embarrassed at injuring myself so grievously doing something so mundane. It also gets a little old answering “what happened?” over and over (and over!) again. At some point I decided to start lying, and even better, tell each person something different. My friend Yibble was particularly intrigued by my story about being pushed out of a plane by a Nazi while alligator wrestling and ended up drawing a rather amusing cartoon of the event:
by Illishar on deviantART
A note on the costume: Yibble texted me to ask what I was wearing while skydiving and alligator wrestling. I told her 18th century garb, naturally. I mean, what else does one wear for such occasions?
I’m terrible at picking out presents for people. I’m not bad if it’s just a random little “hey I saw this and thought of you” kind of gift, but when it comes to Big Gifts for birthdays or Christmas or Major Life Events, I’m pretty hopeless. My family makes it easy, sharing wish lists with each other each year. Some people think that takes something away from it, but the way I figure it, if I see something that would be perfect for Mom, I’ll get it for her, even if it wasn’t on her list. I usually give my parents wish lists that are fairly long – not because I expect lots of gifts, but because I want to be surprised.
So you can imagine my terror at the prospect of Christmas gifts for two of my closest friends, Kate and Cookie. I wanted to get them something awesome, but I am just so awful at finding really great gifts. What to do?
Luckily, I happened upon a little inspiration one afternoon. Kate is a big fangirl of, well, a lot of things, but Harry Potter in particular. She’s a card-carrying member of Hufflepuff House and is quite active with the Harry Potter Alliance, a charity and activism organization created by fans of the series. I thought about the house crests, then pondered some of her other interests, and suddenly I was making lists and sketching and crossing-out and doing over. It was great. I started with the Hufflepuff Crest as seen in the movies because there was more room for embellishment. After a little discussion with Kate, who had absolutely no idea what I was up to, I came up with the following drawing:
Included here: Harry Potter, Eeyore, Washington Capitals, Highlander, writing, LBGT issues, BookCrossing, Markeroni, Virginia Tech, LEGO, Doctor Who, The Hunger Games, and Star Trek. Did you spot them all?
Now I had my momentum, so I moved onto to Cookie’s. She was a little more difficult because while she has plenty of hobbies, they don’t lend themselves quite so well to logos as fandoms. But I think I persevered.
Included here: BookCrossing, Bingo, Markeroni, PostCrossing, homeschooling, crochet, Girl Scouts, and assorted crafts. The dog in the middle is her mascot, Chip.
Both pictures were drawn with regular pencil, inked with black Copic Multiliner 0.3, and then colored with Prismacolor colored pencils.
What about you? What would go on your personal coat of arms?
Tip of the day: never take a nap while your wife has her art supplies out.
Sleepy Bill by *melydia on deviantART
My husband gave me two sets of Copic markers from Otaku Fuel for Christmas and another set for my birthday, plus my parents gave me a set of Prismacolor markers. My dear husband fell asleep on the couch while I was drawing, so I decided he was the perfect victim subject for trying out my new markers.
And you know what? It’s a pretty decent likeness. Â Even more amazing, he thinks so too, and even made it his Facebook profile picture. :)
Thing-a-Day has begun again for 2011. The concept is simple: create one thing each day of the month of February. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to be complete. I tried last year and failed about two weeks in, but I’m trying again. I’m going to attempt to have most of my “things” be drawings, but there will doubtless be days when I opt for something else. Everything will be posted over at posterous, but all new posts will be linked on Twitter too.
I’m feeling confident this year. Gustavo didn’t take very long to draw, and I really enjoyed it. My husband is always after me to do more drawing, so I know he’s thrilled for me to be participating in something like this.
What about you? Are you participating?
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