Pencil Sketches

Thumbnail Sketches on Steroids

I pulled a handful of random photographs to do some thumbnail sketches. These were intended to be small value sketches  -  just planning shapes and lights and darks.

I hadn't done drawing just for the sake of drawing in a long time, and I got a little carried away with the size and complexity.  Such fun!  These aren't necessarily the value (darks and lights) patterns I would use if I were to do a painting of these subjects  -  the whole idea of doing thumbnails is to give you several choices with the composition and values.

Drawing from photos is not my favorite, but there are lessons to be learned from every attempt at drawing and figuring out what's what.  Besides  -  it's all fun.

Painting from Photographs

  The Old Lansing City Market

This is a demonstration I started in class, and they asked if I could finish it next week, but I don't think I can keep my hands off it.  I could hide it so I am not tempted.  Kind of like sending the potato chips to work in the trunk of my husband's car.

I'm working from a photograph that I took a couple of years ago before they tore the old (beautiful  -  to me) buildings down and rebuilt. With the photograph as reference I did a contour sketch including only the things I felt were necessary to say what I want to say about this particular scene.  I scanned the sketch, enlarged it, printed it out and traced it onto my watercolor paper.

I'm using the sketch as my reference now, not the photograph.  I have pretty much blocked in my lights and darks, and those are more important to me than the colors.  At this point, the photograph has more information than I want.

It's Friday already!  Who has some sketching plans for the weekend?

Reflective Surfaces

This is a very small watercolor of a tarnished silver cup on a checkered tea towel. We were doing small studies of reflective surfaces. I was going to polish the cup before class, but I really liked the warm reflection it had, with almost a rust color along the rim. The biggest challenge with the cup was to get the checks from the tea towel to look like a reflection instead of a pattern on the cup.

We never did get to the blue-green cruet with the pebbly surface. Maybe next time.

We have quite a bit of new, fresh snow. The kind that would have been so pretty back about December 15th. It's really not bad - it's fresh and clean, and today there was a little sun now and then. The Bay was beautiful. We have a long way to go with winter weather, but at least the days are getting longer. Tomorrow's class is going to be working from photographs. They aren't as much fun as the real thing, but they're great for editing and working out composition problems. And, we'll be a lot warmer.