This Weekend

I had a lot of output this weekend, since I was away for an arts and crafts focused weekend. We stayed in a state park. Everyone did their own thing, so there were many different activities going on. I brought up knitting, acrylic, watercolor, and drawing. Since there wasn't any WiFi, I got a little behind on my Sketchbook Skool class, but I don't mind and it certainly was not a problem to not have WiFi. All that meant was that I did not do much drawing from life, since I needed to watch the Sketchbook Skool assignments, but I did a little bit of  everything else. Plus, the Sketchbook Skool class that I am enrolled in, Seeing, goes for six weeks and I was bound to get behind at some point!

I did do a few quick sketches, although it was hard to concentrate. There was a lot of hubbub in a small amount of space. Hopefully as I get better drawing skills, that won't be a problem. these tangerines could have used more work and some corrections, especially to the top one. Still, I enjoyed trying to capture the values and shapes with different directions of pencil marks. 

While I worked on a double-knitted hat for a friend, my main goal was to start a scarf that I intend to finish and enter in this year's state fair. The pattern is called winter birch. It's two-color brioche knitting and it's the most complicated thing that I've done. With two-color brioche, you have a "separate" front and back. For the front, you work across with one color of yarn, slide back to the beginning and work the other color of yarn. For the back, you essentially do the same thing. On top of that every row in this pattern is different and there are about 1,000,000 symbols (slight exaggeration) to look up to see what you should be doing. I got about 3 inches done before I figured out that I made an error the last time I was working a row on the front side with the light-colored yarn. That means I have to rip back 4 rows to make the correction. At the time I made this discovery, my brain was too fried. When I took the brioche knitting class from Nancy Marchant, she cautioned not to do brioche when you are tired.

With unlimited time, I finally had time to try a grand experiment! Many years ago at Art 4 Shelter, I purchased the following pen and ink, called "House Cat" by the artist, Mary Lingen. It's completely done in hexagons. I love this piece. I had it framed and it hangs upstairs.

Nope, it's not by me. It's "House Cat" by Mary Lingen.

Some time last year I read a blog post where a person talked about drawing little circular shapes that touch each other and just letting the overall shape grow in whatever direction(s) you want. I don't remember where I found the blog post, but it's a really meditative form of doodling. You get these beautiful shapes. It also does not require any thought, so it works in meetings where you are bored out of your mind, but have to pay attention. 

I've been wanting to try and do a value study using circles, just to see if I could do it and see what type of result that I would get. This piece is 5" x 7". My source picture was 8" x 10" and already had grid lines on it. I decided "what the heck" it will make the dimensions a bit off or weird, but let's see what happens.  

I did another one.

I liked having a background, so I went back and modified the first one.

These were really fun. I really enjoyed the process, but they did take quite a bit of time. Each one took a couple of sittings. My intention was to use bigger circles, but somehow small circles came out of my pen at the start of both drawings. 

I played with watercolor a tiny bit, but I'm not willing to show the results! Here is an acrylic painting for Art 4 Shelter. 

Lastly, I made another attempt at painting Sadie. This is an 8" x 10". Since I don't paint dogs that often, they are hard. It took many tries to get decent eyes. I feel like my paint strokes are getting a little better, but oh, that nose.  It could use work.