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. 

One Last One

Here's the last one for Art 4 Shelter. I decided to paint from one of my recent bird pictures. 

Trumpeter Swan - Crex Meadows Wildlife Area 

Have I mentioned lately how much I love the Neocolor II crayons?

More Bird Pictures

Yesterday, I ventured out to Crex Meadows State Wildlife Area in Grantsburg Wisconsin with a friend to take bird photos. I got the chance to practice taking pictures of birds in flight. Obviously, I still need more practice since I barely captured either of these birds before they flew out of the frame.

These are the only photos I editing by cropping them. They looked slightly less ridiculous with some of the blank sky removed on the top, bottom and to the left of both birds. Although I will say that both photos do convey a sense of movement.

In truth, I did have a number of inflight pictures turn out and here are several of my favorites. 

We were not trying to disturb any of the birds and were always a fair distance away, so the 60x zoom camera was much needed. Even so, there were a bunch of times that we saw trumpeter swans in flight. The first time, I was looking to the south at a pair of sandhill cranes and I heard the movement of air behind me. It didn't sound like the wind and the sound wasn't that close, but the sound made me turn around to see a couple of trumpeter swans flying behind me. They flew in a large circle around and to the front of us. 

I took about 400 pictures yesterday. I am showing great restraint by not including a lot more of them.

I can't help myself. I have to point out that this next photo was post-coitus.

While there were also raptors, ducks, loons, and other birds, the swan pictures turned out the best overall. 

Urgh, Urgh, and URGH!!!

My April art project is to do a little prep work related to gestural figure drawing, so I can try to do 100 people in 5 (or 7 days) in May.  This has been a one-week challenge by some urban sketchers and I decided to use this idea as a way to push myself, but in my own timeframe since they did it in March. Their timing did not work for me given the pandemic, the weather here in March, and my skill level. 

I’ve been doing a lot of prep work and have been looking at the pages related to gesture drawing in the book “Figure Drawing Design and Invention” by Michael Hampton, looking at some videos on Proko.com and Artprof.org and finally working through a Craftsy class by Suhita Shirodkar.  

I purchased this Craftsy class and a lot of others in the past and I have never worked through them. For a long time I had this weird hang up that time spent on drawing or painting should be focused on the active doing part. That never left enough time for learning, unless I was taking a scheduled class.  The internal critic is a sneaky bastard which has a bunch of different ways to try and derail progress.  Things are going much better now that I frequently split up my art-making time between learning and doing.

In this Craftsy class, I just rewatched a video of how to quickly capture a gestural sketch of someone walking towards you. I had to stop the video, stand up, and, slowly, exaggerate the process of walking to have the placement of the shoulders, hips (especially the hips), and the front and back legs make sense with how the instructor drew them.  When I was doing this, it made sense, but I know I am going to have to go back and do this slow exaggerated walking a bunch more times to create the body awareness that will make it easier to actually see.

It’s both funny and extremely aggravating that I have to work so hard:

1. to see what is happening when I am trying very hard to look, and 
2. to recreate it in my own body when I’ve been walking around my whole life.

It’s kind of annoying to realize how little body awareness I have and to also have my brain go on overload when I am trying to process what’s happening in a video of someone walking at a normal speed towards me.  

Also, I’m finding it hard to be gestural. I’ve mostly been doing loose outlines, when I’m trying to be gestural.  I am barely starting to understand how to get more gestural and am very slowly making progress.

All of this may sound negative, but the flip side is that I am thrilled with deciding what I want to learn and pushing myself to do it.