Not Much To Share

My art-making has not been occurring daily, but I have been drawing and/or painting here and there. I  don't have much to share. Currently, I am working on an 11" x 14" painting on paper. It's one of those that I feel more like I'm fighting with than creating. I've painted over sections. While I am determined to finish it, it won't get posted here. As negative as this may sound, it's been good to paint large for a change.

Last night, I did pull out my watercolors and just did an imaginary pear, as an excuse to play.There are a lot of layers in this. I played around with essentially making hatch marks with the tip of a round brush when the painting was still damp and liked the effect.

That led to going back to an earlier pear and layering over that one and playing off to the side.

I still don't get this medium, but will have a chance to play with it when I'm out of town for a week starting on Thursday. It's easier to bring watercolors on a plane.

Cross hatching in the drawing side of the world has not been enjoyable. I think I am stretching too far outside my abilities, so it's time to take several steps back, since I am determined to learn.

At lunch time, I watched one of Alphonso Dunn's videos. He has a lot of them. I have watched a few in the past and they are good. I just don't always have the patience to sit and watch. Anyway, I think I'm going to trying drawing objects as their most basic shapes and experiment with cross hatching in the basic shapes to get better at the mechanics of cross hatching and seeing how to follow the shape / form of an object. There's no pressure to draw the object, just the shapes within the object and there's certainly no pressure to finish a drawing.

For painting, I could use some sort of focus, but I think that will have to wait until after I'm back from next week's trip and the MONDO juggling and unicycle festival is done.  

If You Knit, Just Go Buy One Or All Of These Right Now

Kristin Nicholas, who started me on my creative journey has reissued the patterns, which were my first entry point. These patterns taught me how to play with color and pattern and I can't say enough good things about these patterns. You can either purchase them here or on Ravelry.  They are the patterns which are part of "The World Knits Collection".

There patterns really did change my life. I wrote about them on my blog back in 2016 and in 2017.

Sadly, the specific yarn is no longer available, but don't let that stop you.  Cascade 220, Valley Yarns Northampton, or Knit Picks Wool of the Andes would all work splendidly.

This Might Makes Things More Or Less Complicated

I decided that I wanted a place to post photographs of things I've noticed in my day to day life and that doesn't seem to fit in this blog. This blog is mostly about drawing and painting. As a result, here is my new blog for photography and maybe some simple journaling.

That Was Silly (In A Good Way)

If I only have time for one activity, I’ve been drawing. I didn’t draw yesterday, until right before bedtime and I was on the lookout for scissors, since they have an interesting shape when they are in a container. The first pair which caught my eye were in a ceramic mouse which sits on top of the kitchen sink.

First, I did a rough, quick drawing, trying to feel out the shapes. I even started with some light, geometric shapes to try and get the relative size of things.

Next up, I decided to take focus on the neck and face and so a little quick shading.

Looking at this, now that I’m done, I can see that it would be better to angle the lines of the shading better carve out and represent the planes of the face. When I was in the moment, I wasn’t thinking about that.  

Overall, it felt silly in a good, light hearted way to give this a try and gratifying to feel like I have some building blocks to try and tackle more. The best thing I can do is just keep up and continue to make drawing and painting a priority in my daily life. It’s better to do 15 minutes every day than to do 2 hours once per week.

How Often To Post Or Not Post?

As often happens after I paint something I really like, I either manage to not find time to paint for several days afterwards and/or I don't care for what I paint next. Both of these can start a bad habit, which also includes not posting what I have been doing which is probably the worst of all. It starts this feeling that something has to be "good" or "worthy" in order to post it and nothing meets the ever increasing higher bar of  good enough or worthy enough when I get out of the habit of posting.

Bah, to that. The intention of this blog is to capture the journey. While I am not going to post every painting, I am going to think hard when I start to have 2-3 paintings and I start to feel unsure about posting any of them. 

Here's yesterday's pear. I liked it about 3/4's the way through, overworked it, really did not like it, worked it a bit more, and brought it back a bit.

#366 - Leaning Pear - 6" x 6" - hardboard

Drawing Direction

I haven't had specific goals or direction with either drawing or painting. Given that, low energy from the never ending cold, and a full schedule, my commitment has been sporadic. Yesterday, I think I discovered a direction for my drawing. While I've been practicing cross hatching, I don't have the skill or stamina to approach a full drawing.

Yesterday, I worked from home and at lunch time I arranged several peppers and tried to roughly draw their shape and relative position to each other. Back when I took Carl's class at Wet Paint, he showed us rough drawing and feeling out the shapes. I kind of get it, but kind of don't, so I'm practicing that as well. This represents a good combination of things I want to work on, including shapes, relative size, and position.

After that I took one part of one pepper and worked on a separate drawing of that piece with cross hatching.

I think I found my drawing goal for the next 30 days.

What Was Old Is Now New

I recently had a birthday, but I am not talking about me. Do not dispose of your old leather shoes if you like them. I repeat. Do not dispose of your old leather shoes if you like them.

Behold, my beloved, old, worn, purple pair of Keen shoes.

What was old is now new.

These new-looking, fun, shoes, which now look vaguely like a goofy pair of bowling shoes, are thanks to Angelus leather paint and Wet Paint, where I purchased my supplies. I used their leather preparer and deglazer and paint (which is an acrylic paint - - woo hoo! - - two thin layers). Before I wear them, I will do 1-2 thin layers of acrylic finisher. After that, I can use regular waterproofing stuff. I've heard good things about the durability of this paint, but I thought I'd use an old pair of shoes for my first experiment.

If any local friends want to play with this stuff, let me know and we can make a date!

Hummingbird Happiness

I started this on Friday and finished it yesterday, since I worked it slowly in bits and pieces, and didn’t even paint on it yesterday. Today, I redid most of the non-flower part of the feeder. My values were off a lot in this part. I had painted it too dark, since I didn’t want to believe what my eyes were seeing. When I checked it against a value finder, I could finally “see” how off I was. On Friday night when I was at Kat’s studio, she helped me “see” that I made this same error with the background of my recent painting of Dorian. When I made the background lighter, the painting worked much better. Darn eyes or, more accurately, darn brain, which wants to get in the way.

#364 - Cabin Hummingbird - 6” x 6” - hardboard

This is my favorite hummingbird painting, so far.

It may be a cop out that I didn’t paint the background, but I like the black gesso. It’s dramatic. Plus, the actual background was a lighter brownish-red and I didn’t think it would add to the painting.

Floating Pear

Yes, the pear is floating, but the point was to work on cross hatching today and yesterday. I started on the left side and tried, VERY, VERY HARD to figure out which direction to make the cross hatch marks to denote shape (without much success). It’s one of those things which seems like it should be simple and it’s just not.

Somehow, I eventually got a little looser in the brain and stopped trying so hard. I also switched to the right side, which turned out better.

Tonight, I worked on it a bit more. 

The plan is to work on cross hatching, not finish drawings, so I will move on tomorrow. I am determined to improve my cross hatching!

The Latest

It’s been a productive week. I am making an effort to draw and paint every day, while also finding the balance between pushing myself to do it without becoming too militant about it. For drawing, my plan is to work on drawing a simple object with crosshatching each day in January. So far, I’ve done two drawings for the first 4 days of January. Here’s one.

In addition to getting better at crosshatching, I want to figure out better which direction to crosshatch when building a particular shape. This does not come naturally to me at all. I hope this will cross over into better paint strokes.

Here is the last painting of 2019 and the first one of 2020.

#360 Mandarin - 5” x 5” - paper

#361 Yellow Pepper - 5” x 5”

My 17-year old cat, Dorian had surgery on Thursday. I am so grateful that it all went well. She has to endure 11 days of wearing a cone, so she can’t disturb her sutures. Once she is past that, she should be happier and healthier. I am so relieved that surgery was successful, that I decided to do a painting of her. She is one of my favorite models. I love to paint from pictures of her and to take pictures of her. However when she was a kitten, I used the flash too many times, so she almost always scowls or has a fierce expression for the camera. 

I liked the drawing.

The painting is okay. I didn’t like it last night, but today it doesn’t seem so bad, except for the whiskers. 

#363 - Dorian - 6” x 6” - hardboard