That Was Harder Than I Thought It Would Be

I spent the weekend at my friend's cabin, so there was a little more time than usual to play with drawing and painting. On Sunday, I got rather flummoxed by the bird house. While I am getting better with angles, I still have a long ways to go. Whatever I did looked wrong. Plus, my sketches made it look like part of the roof was visible, but in reality it was not. Rather than doing a complete sketch, my goal was just to figure out that corner and to complete a simple outline of the thing.

It took holding up my pen and thinking about a clock face to finally "see" the angles. My eyes alone weren't up to the task. My main problem was the tricky little line on the left hand side. This line, in equating it to the hour-hand on a clock, was about 12:30 or almost straight up and down. With all the other angles and visual information near this line, my brain would not accept or see this fact.

I'm pleased that I stuck with it, but when I was done with this one I also was done with the bird house for the day.

Good First Attempt

For last night's daily drawing, I went over and worked on sketching some of my neighbor's lilies in bloom. The mosquitoes were out, so I finished up inside sketching a cloth rose that someone gave me. Since one of the things for the next painting club meeting is flowers, I figured I'd try some flower sketches as a way to practice seeing a flower as a bunch of shapes.

I'm not sure what to think, although this sketch is slowly growing on me (and yes, I did mean to include a groan-worthy play on words).

There are so many shapes and details that it mostly felt like an accomplishment to not get completely lost. Back in May, I remember doing just that in a sketch of an iris bloom where I was looking straight down at the flower. I got lost and had to abandon that sketch.  The right side of the flower is a little on the flat side and I'm not sure that I captured all of the detail in the center, but I still think this was a worthy first attempt of a complicated subject. It has some good shapes. Plus, this was a good opportunity to play with hatching. One thing I learned was that it really helped me make the dark crevices on the left side of the flower dark enough.

I will return to this as a test subject for sketching some time in the future!

Boo Hoo For Me, But Not Really

The Urban Sketcher's Symposium is currently underway in Chicago. At one point, I thought seriously about signing up and attending. This is an international gathering, so frequently it is in far, far away places, but this year it is in Chicago. I love Chicago and absolutely adore the architecture there.

I grew up several hours south of Chicago.  Five to six times per year from the time I was a young child until I was a young teen, I would travel by train with my mom to downtown Chicago to spend the day. To this day the hustle and bustle of the Loop, including the trains running on the elevated tracks, makes a little place in my heart whisper "home", even though I've never lived there. While I don't make it back as often as I'd like, those early experiences formed some sort of imprint on me.

The older buildings in Chicago just "look right" to me. This is what started my love of certain styles of architecture, especially anything by Louis Sullivan. One of the stops on each and every trip was the Carson Pirie Scott store on State Street.  I didn't realize until well into adulthood that it was designed by Sullivan.

So there a bunch of urban sketchers in Chicago happily sketching and posting here on Instagram.

I made a deliberate decision this spring not to sign up for the symposium, because I am not ready. Mostly, I sketch one object at a time and I have not tried to sketch buildings, other than a very occasional sketch. At some point, I could see this becoming a big part of my sketching, but I haven't even started this line of learning. I am someone who leaps, but I was afraid that this type of immersive experience at this point could backfire and be too overwhelming. Currently, I am good with putting together one 6 week plan after another and figuring out where I should focus. I am getting my daily drawing done each and every day. The skills will come. While I am having more fun that I can describe learning to draw and paint, on the other hand, I am also very serious about this. I want to make good decisions about what I want to learn and how I want to proceed. For now, it is best to work the current plan and not get sidetracked by buildings.

In two to three months, though, I may branch out into buildings. I already have purchased several online courses on Craftsy about urban sketching and sketching architecture. I also plan to take Liz Steel's online courses. Until then, I may do an occasional building sketch here and there, but I hope to stay focused on what I'm sketching now, which is mostly cats, people, flowers, or replica toys.

In spite of feeling wistful from time to time when I look at the sketches coming out of Chicago, I believe I made a good decision this spring. Plus, I'm very fortunate and have some fun things to look forward to this weekend.

Flamingos At Como

I wish flamingos would not move around constantly! I really want to figure out  the beak shape and head shape, better. They are fascinating birds and the shape of their neck changes so much based upon whether it's straight or curved. Also, their wing span is pretty remarkable for the brief moment when they unfurl their wings.

Today, I went to Como Zoo to sketch and I worked mostly on the flamingos, although I did also venture off, briefly, to look at the big cats. Here is one page from the sketchbook. It's not the greatest paper, so for some reason it does not lie flat.

Tonight, I took time to do a self-evaluation of how my daily drawing practice has been coming along since June 1st and I established new goals for the next 6 weeks.

Cabin Garage Service Door

Finally, finally, finally, finally, I carved out an entire hour to paint tonight! Since my painting club is meeting tomorrow, I wanted one more piece on the theme of window/door/portal. Several weeks ago, I remembered a picture from one of the trips to my friend's cabin and I painted that. By the way, my friend's family just had a 100th birthday celebration for the cabin. The land and all has been in their family that long.

Even though I have not been painting for some reason, I was able to just sit, paint, and not fret about the outcome. It felt so good to mix colors and paint! I really need to practice painting in the 15 to 20 minutes and that I can carve out here and there, because the opportunities to paint for an hour just aren't happening. It's been hard to let painting slide to the side in lieu of drawing, but drawing is such a fundamental skill for this art-making stuff that I think it's the right decision to stick with that and squeeze the painting in when I can.

I also did my 30 minutes of sketching practice.  As frequently is the case, the cats were my models. I had fun playing with this sketch. It was a bit looser than usual. The cats moved a lot, so most of my other sketches consisted of two ears and the back of a head.

For the sketch, I used a calligraphy pen. I am learning how to use it and am starting to like the different line weights that you can get with it.

Simple Sketch

This was a very quick, simple sketch that I did while I was at the juggling convention. The reason that I wanted to post it was that it just flowed off of my pen. Usually, I am slow and deliberate and this one just seemed to happen. One of the reasons that I like it is that it was loose. When I was sketching at the convention, I felt tight and a bit constricted most of the time, probably because I knew so many participants but did not want to share what I was sketching.

As always it runs into lines that were the abandon start of a different sketch. The neck is a bit funky. In the 7 days that I was at juggling convention, I practiced sketching people every day and worked on trying to see how necks attach to heads and shoulders.

It Is Hard To Draw At A Juggling Convention

I was away at a juggling convention.  It is really challenging to sit and and focus on drawing at a juggling festival. It's a playground, where nothing really matters except for juggling. Okay, maybe it's okay to occasionally take a break to play pinball or ping pong, but mostly it's about juggling or going to juggling shows. At the festival, it's loud. It's distracting. I know a lot of people. It's really hard to focus. Still, I did get my 30 minutes in each day.

At some point, I had to basically remind myself to use unit of measure, since I was getting some wonky shapes.

Usually, I do not sketch children, but I made an exception. There were two pinball games that were at the festival and were free to play. I played quite a bit the first two days. On the third day when I wanted to sketch people who were not juggling, I decided to camp out near the pinball. At the time, only kids were playing, so I sketched them. After I was warmed up, I started one of a child kneeling on a chair. It is a bit of a mess since it runs into another sketch.