Takeoffs and Landings

Given that I have a gazillion pictures from yesterday at Crex Meadows Wildlife Area, I just have to post more.

Here are some takeoffs. 

Here are a couple of landings.

My dad was a hobby pilot and I spent a lot of time with him in a 4 seat airplane. From that time, the words "XXXX, you have been cleared for take off or XXXX, you have been cleared for landing" are seared in my memory.

Three Long Necks

Yesterday, I spent the day with a friend at Crex Meadows Wildlife Area in Grantsburg WI and took a gazillion pictures. When this was happening, I took as many as I could, so I think of them as a series. I have better, clear individual pictures, but this set draws me in. 

Maybe it's because of the closeness after all of the social distancing of the last 14 months. 

What I Have Been Up To Lately

Saturday was the first of 4 weeks of taking Suhita Shirodkar’s class called People Alive. The class is on Zoom and she is a well organized and good instructor. The first week is about capturing silhouettes and adding details with an emphasis on less being more. You would use these types of people in the back of a urban sketch. It’s a continuation on my overall project to work on figuring drawing. 

I only play with watercolor occasionally and it's been at least 12 months since I've picked them up, which has added some additional challenges. In Saturday's class, there were 3 building blocks to the overall concept we were learning, which means I can focus on one new building block for 2 days before moving on. This is the best example I have so far of a simple silhouette with some details added. Tomorrow's new concept is to work in more than one color.

Yes, it's an elderly couple leaning towards each other and walking together. 

The other thing I've been up to is tearing down paper for pamphlets and finishing several pamphlets.  Both of these are approximately 8” x 6” with one in "portrait mode” and one in “landscape mode”. Both contain Arches Text Wove paper. The covers were made from a full sheet of linen card stock paper. The texture mostly comes from several layers using bubble wrap. 

I don't think I've ever met a bright color combination that I don't like.

What To Keep and What Can Go

I went through a lot of my drawings and most of them went away in this morning's recycling. The sketchbooks and loose papers were starting to take up too much space and there was not a reason to keep most of them. This blog captures what I want to capture for the most part, since it’s good to be able to look back.

There is a difference in looking at a picture of what I created with my hands versus looking at the actual thing and because of that, the things I kept take me back to a place I wanted to go and want to be able to return to, for now. In making this determination, I kept the bar very high, so I did not keep much.

Since both of my gray cats are gone, I kept some of the drawings of them. I also have kept the very first painting I ever did of a cat and Ella was my subject. It’s not very good, but it was the best I could do at the time and it makes me smile when I look at it. I posted about it here.

This is one of drawings that I kept. It goes back all the way to July 2017, so it was about 1 1/2 years into the drawing and painting journey. I posted about it here. It's a small, simple drawing, but it brings back very good memories.