Posts in Category: sketching
Barb
Barb
Meet Barb!
Barb is a dear friend. She is beautiful, sincere, caring, intelligent, warm, generous, vivacious, hysterically funny, and has a gift of conversation like no-one else I know. Barb is also a psychic. I kid you not! Barb is a psychic entertainer extraordinaire. She and her company Barbara Meyers Psychic Entertainment are a feature on the Chicago party scene. Her stage name is Madame Zandra – imagine that! Barb will read your cards, your palm, and often just you, and will tell you how it is, no frills or sugar coating. Exceptional talent!
Barb’s portrait took me longer than planned two hours I am trying to limit my sketch portraits to. Perhaps I was worried about bad karma or Madame Zandra’s psychic wrath that I would call on my head if I don’t make her look beautiful. First I overdid the contrast, then I smoothed it over too much. I fretted over wrinkles, should I perhaps reduce them… I was wondering about lifting off a few pounds, so easy on paper… In the end I decided that Barb is gorgeous the way she is. Now let’s see if my ceiling will spring a leak in the next few days…
Graphite, Moleskine Cahier sketchbook.
Wilma
Wilma
Meet Wilma!
Wilma is a basset hound and a total sweetheart. Wilma is with Mike. Sometimes. They are not an immediate family, more like cousins. They visit. It’s complicated!
Wilma is amazingly talented. She can rotate her tail in a circular fashion when she is happy, which is most of the time when she is not sleeping. She also works as a vacuum cleaner wherever she goes, free of charge. You don’t have to worry about your food falling on a floor when Wilma is there, it will be vacuumed spic-and-span without you lifting a finger.
Wilma has a past. She is a hurricane Katrina rescue. She doesn’t like to talk about it, and we don’t know what her name was before she got separated from her previous family during the Katrina mess. We do know that she survived for a year on her own in Louisiana forest and swamp. When she was found she was completely feral. Her new human wanted to call her Katrina at first, but then thought the name would remind her of the unhappy past and called her Wilma (also a hurricane) instead. Brought back to civilization she took time to adjust, for a while she was stealing food and grabbing it from her human’s hands and plate, not believing that food is no longer a problem. But she got it after a while and now is more civilized and has better table manners than some humans I know. Still… she chooses to work as a vacuum cleaner when such is needed.
I am practicing my new cross-hatching technique for quick drawing, Wilma’s portrait took about 2.5 hours.
Graphite, Moleskine Cahier sketchbook
Mike
Mike
Meet Mike!
Mike is a dear friend, a wonderfully kind, intelligent and caring human being with a wicked and dry sense of humor. He is also a wonderful cook. This image is from our get together with a few other friends on Sunday, August 15th. For this day Mike brought a cheese-veggies-fruit platter to treat us all. We were very appreciative, it was all gone in minutes! I loved the double-cream brie with fresh plumbs!
The image is a quick sketch in graphite to try a new technique. Somehow I have it that sketchbook drawings ought to be quick. None of these 30…40…60… hours photorealistic drawings with meticulous layers. This is cross-hatching and done in 2 hours.
Graphite, Moleskine Cahier sketchbook
Day 2 of the Sketchbook Project 2011.
Meet Mike! Mike is a dear friend, a wonderfully kind, intelligent and caring human being with a wicked and dry sense of humor. He is also a wonderful cook. This image is from our get together with a few other friends on Sunday, August 15th. For this day Mike brought a cheese-veggies-fruit platter to treat us all. We were very appreciative, it was all gone in minutes! I loved the double-cream brie with fresh plumbs!
The image is a quick sketch in graphite to try a new technique. Somehow I have it that sketchbook drawings ought to be quick. None of these 30-40-60 hours photorealistic drawings with meticulous layers. This is cross-hatching and done in 2 hours.
Blue Angels
Blue Angels
The first day and the first sketch of The Sketchbook Project 2011 which is run by Art House Co-op, Brooklyn New York. A grand thank you to Carol King of Carol King: Painting, Drawing, Complaining who turned me on to this. This is going to be a lot of fun. And in the end my sketchbook is going on a tour and will be shown in several cities to be viewed by people. Is it possible to have more fun than this? Please don’t answer this, it was a rhetorical question.
I chose a theme “A day in the life”, my official bar-coded Moleskine sketchbook has arrived. And just as I began to panic about what my first sketch was going to be, the Chicago Air Show arrived and solved my problem. Here I have for you the Chicago darlings, our homeboys, US Navy fliers – the Blue Angels. Today, as every second weekend of August, they were doing a show on their FA18 Hornets, performing loops and dives over the Lake, flying at a “safe” 2 feet distance from each other after the unfortunate touch incident they had last year.
I also wanted to comment on the Moleskine Cahier sketchbook, the official sketchbook of the Sketchbook Project. The paper in the book is so thin that you can read a newspaper through it. While it is has a lovely buttery finish, the thinness rules out pretty much any wet media. Watercolor is out of the question, which is very disappointing. In fact a fellow artist, also a participant, tested a number of media on this paper and published results in her blog for our benefit – Moleskine Cahier test. I am going to have to get really creative with this paper.
Watercolor pencils (dry), Moleskine Cahier sketchbook
Carol King: Painting, Drawing, Complaining
Let’s have a show of hands!
Studies in drawing and construction of hands from Drawing Dynamic Hands book by Burne Hogarth. (Click a thumbnail to see a large version.)
I think hands are so important in figure drawing. At times more important for the expression than faces. Yet when drawing a hand of a model I am always guessing, have no idea what’s on the other – invisible – side. This book teaches how construct a hand, in any position. I am thrilled to know, not guess or suppose, where to attach a hand to a forearm, how to position fingers, how to curve them. Amazing how everything has a logical geometric explanation to it – the fundamentals. Burne Hogarth is a genius.
I have more hands drawn by now, but am too lazy to do more scanning. I will draw more still, am not done by any means. These are basic forms, measures and construction blocks. Later in the book he is getting into stresses, actions, foreshortening, communications, gesture and behavior. Fascinating. I have my work cut out for me.
Graphite, sketchbook
People watching in Metropolis
Mephistopheles. Actually just a guy I know from my gym.
Reader
There is a lot of art activity on this front, but I am not sure any of the results are worth posting. I have two portraits in the works, one in graphite and one in watercolor. The graphite may be finished soon… ish… and may get to be posted then. The watercolor one is in early stages, and it is too soon to tell whether anything worthwhile will come out of this.
I have gone to a life-drawing session again and am still wondering if I should post my charcoal attempts. I don’t particularly like them although the model was absolutely great. I am also studying anatomy, specifically drawing/constructing hands working from Burne Hogarth’s book Drawing Dynamic Hands.
To keep up with the blog amidst all this activity here are two sketches from Metropolis café which is next to my gym. There’s wonderful people watching in Metropolis, and I indulge in it while trying to catch my breath after working out or waiting for my daughter.
Watercolor, graphite, sketchbook
Faceless and forgotten
Female form 1
Female form 2
Just a few days before the time Leslie created her Fabulous Faceless Figures I did my own. Independent of her. Great minds and all that… Same wavelength… I then proceeded to completely forget about them. Today I was packing my sketchbooks to go home and found them. One is Micron pen, the other mechanical pencil, both sketched from small statues my mother has on her sideboard. There seems to be something profound in the absence of face.
Yours truly …
Self-portrait
Here it is – the first one. My teacher says it is a good practice to do at least one a year. For a fast sketch the likeness is reasonable. I hope people who know me will recognize this image.
Graphite, sketchbook
Happiness
Happiness
What is happiness? No-no, I am not going to digress into a philosophical discussion here, this is a prerogative of my dear husband who can address this question properly in his blog Empathy in the Context of Philosophy and do it justice. (This of course is a shameless plug – check it out if you dare :D!)
Reality is simple: happiness is a terrific haircut! Not in Paris, not even in cosmopolitan and fashionable Tel Aviv, but here in backwater Netanya, not even in its French populated downtown, but in the sleeping district Daniel Ayache, the winner of multiple L’Oreal competitions, makes magic with his comb and scissors. Here’s the proof – my lovely daughter stepping out of his salon, laughing into the tropical sun with pure delight. That’s happiness! And amazingly happiness wasn’t even that expensive!
Milky Way, Netanya
Patron in a hat
Woman in red top
Businessman
Our favorite coffeeshop here in the sleepy town of Netanya is called cleverly The Milky Way, Shvil Ha-Halav in Hebrew. They serve beautiful cappuchino and enourmously sized salads. Now they are also famous for being the first cafe where I braved sketching patrons. The man in a hat is a regular, I noted him a while ago, but didn’t sketch because I didn’t have a good view until this one. The woman in red had interesting multiple chins as I looked at them in profile. Between eating and talking she kept repositioning them making my work more difficult. I generalized the best I could. The last guy had a very busy and no nonsense air about him, he chatted briskly with his companion, then got up and quickly left while I had my head down to my sketchbook for a moment, I didn’t even see him going. This is all I had time to do while he was sitting there.