Posts Tagged: portrait
Marcos
Marcos
Meet Marcos!
Actually that would be Dr. Marcos Modiano Esquenazi! What a spectacular name! I met Marcos at Dr. Goldberg’s outing. He is a second year resident at Rush Hospital in Chicago specializing in psychiatry. Marcos is a comedian, you can probably tell from his visage. I will not retell his jokes here because this, with exception of some artful nudity, is a family rated blog. But I did laugh until my cheeks hurt.
However I will quote another one of my daughter’s precious reactions: “Who is this?! Is he single?!”
Graphite, Moleskine Cahier sketchbook
Peter
Peter
Meet Peter!
I am continuing with the day of the outing at Dr. Goldberg’s. The first person we saw upon arrival was Peter. He was the Master of the Grill. Now, me and my husband, we are smart :D. We have over thirty years of education between the two of us :D. And if we learned anything really worthwhile through all these years and all these schools, it is who the most important person at an outing is. That’s the cook! So we stayed with Peter and tried to get into his good graces.
We learned that Peter has a Masters degree in Psychology, but decided that he likes feeding people better than mucking with their minds. Shows some good judgment! So 20 years ago he opened a meat and sausage store. He makes his own sausages and smokes and cures his own meats. For the outing Peter had for us freshly made Polish sausage and bratwursts grilled to perfection and lightly smoked chicken blackened on a grill. You should have been there…
Graphite, Moleskine Cahier sketchbook
In other important news…
Today, September 6, my little blog turns 1 year old. To be honest I am amazed that I kept on with it steadily for this long. I am also amazed with the wild statistics of it. As of this post
10599 times people viewed something on these pages!
655 comments were left!
93 different countries have visited and left their flag on my map!
52 times I made a piece of art and had something to say!
Also something that cannot be enumerated – my wonderful new friends whom I met in blogosphere during this year. Thank you all for your patience, kindness and friendship.
Happy Birthday, Pencil Scribbles!
Pencil Scribbles visitors
Dr. Goldberg
Dr. Goldberg
Meet Dr. Goldberg!
Dr. Arnold Goldberg is extremely distinguished. He is an MD. He is a Supervising and Training Analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. He was a director of the said Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis for many years. He is a Professor of Psychiatry at Rush University Medical College, Chicago, IL. He is an author of Misunderstanding Freud, The Prisonhouse of Psychoanalysis, Being of Two Minds, Moral Stealth and author or editor of more than thirty other books and articles. He has more titles than you can shake a stick at … possibly too distinguished :D.
Here Dr. Goldberg hosts an outing for psychiatry residents he is currently teaching. My husband is in the program, and that’s how I got to be there. As many highly accomplished people Arnold is an easy and humble person, full of crackling self-depreciating jokes. At the outing he had us all in stitches with stories of his service in US Army. Captain Goldberg was a part the “Doctors Draft” and served as US Army psychiatrist in the late 50s, between the two wars.
I showed this portrait to my daughter, and here’s her reaction: “He is adorable! Too cute for words!” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Graphite, Moleskine Cahier sketchbook
Jeff
Jeff
It was a beautiful Monday morning. The sky was blue, the air – cool, the lake – turquoise… It could as well be a dark and stormy night, because it was on that beautiful morning my husband’s laptop decided that it is time change careers… to that of a boat anchor. It was dead, it wouldn’t boot. We attempted resuscitation. Short of mouth-to-mouth we did everything we could. We actually persuaded it to boot up, but it was not convinced. It was thinking deeply and meaningfully about each key stroke and seriously considering checking out again. It was time for a computer doctor.
Enter Jeff. Jeff is an ER doctor in a computer clinic PC Solutions. Our nearly comatose laptop got admitted, assessed and diagnosed. It needed an organ transplant, a hard drive. Luckily a new hard drive was available without a waiting list, and Jeff skillfully performed the surgery. No recovery time, no heavy drugs – our laptop got a second life and is happily zooming along. Jeff is a hero!
Here Jeff is advising me that no further upgrades or parts would be needed, everything should be working fine.
Graphite, watercolor pencils, Moleskine Cahier sketchbook
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.
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!
To love and to hold
To love and to hold
In my mind this painting of hands is a portrait, so I am putting it up with a “portrait” tag. Hands are often as expressive as faces, and sometimes even more so. While working on this painting I realized that I love painting hands and will be doing more of that.
For people who are interested in technique, this is done in glazing method and limited palette, although I used a different palette for each of the hands. As I was planning the painting and making color swatches, I couldn’t come up with a set of primary pigments that would give me the tones on both hands. Of course I ran to my teacher with my difficulty, and she pointed out that the hands have a different color temperature in the reference – one is cool and one is warm. And suddenly it made perfect sense: I used a warm primaries for the top hand and cool primaries for the bottom one. And in the end I married the two by bringing the warms to the cool hand and cools to the warm one, but in small areas, to unify them.
6.5″ x 8.5″ (16 x 22 cm) watercolor on paper