Snowy day, drawing time.

a messy desk

This week has been an adventure. My desk is full of projects, but I have to admit I am loving the mess. I'm done with the monarch caterpillar munching milkweed, and moving on to a line drawing of obtusa oak- I learned it as Quercus obtusa, but I believe it is now classified as Q. laurifolia.


And then I will move on to the silver maple keys.


It is so peaceful to draw at my table as the snow falls outside. I hope this day finds you happy and warm.

Milkweed Progress

Yesterday, I decided to stop in and check on my favorite milkweed patch at a local park. There were a few flower buds trying to open, but for the most part, the buds were still tightly shut.

Next to a patch of crown vetch, I saw an Eastern Tailed-Blue butterfly, and got a picture. They are so small (almost as small as my thumbnail!), but I love the muted color of the upper wings and the bluer underside of the wings.

I am also trying out a new sketchbook. I thought I'd like the mixed media paper, but I'm finding it's not ideal for my pencil work. I think we artists hope we can ask one paper to do everything, but in reality, that is an impossible request! It is a very nice paper, but not ideal for what I am asking it to do. My Pilot Kakuno fountain pen is fine when writing on the paper, but I generally use that to take notes on the opposing page. I'm still a pencil gal. After trying to fiddle with the resolution and contrast of my scan, I can see why a lot of sketchbook artists have gone to ink with watercolor wash- it is harder to share pencil drawings.

But I sketch primarily for myself. I have always used my sketchbooks to inform my formal paintings. And I love pencil. I was the first thing I picked up almost 30 years ago, and I still love the way graphite glides on paper, and the feel of the wooden casing. This sketch was done with a 2B, which is a bit of a concession for me to share online. In the past, my primary pencil was HB, because I love the silvery tones.

Here is the page. The watercolors did not want to scan well, either. I didn't scan the opposing page with all my notes. There I recorded things like color notes, absence of milkweed bugs (at least that I could see!), and the smell of yellow clover nearby.

Stretching

Today was the kind of cold, rainy, grey day that forces you to stay indoors, even if you are anxious to go outside.

Fortunately, as the days get longer, my indoor plants are responding with flowers.

For a while now, I have been trying to decide how to move forward with sharing more of my drawings. Pencil drawing comes naturally to me. When I pick up a pencil, I am not thinking about how the tip will respond on the paper, or how the line will look. I just know... from many years of practice.

But pencil is difficult to reproduce. If I want to share natural history drawings, pen is a much better choice, even though I think the look of pencil is more lifelike.

So I've been playing around with pen drawings. I am stretching into territory I don't want to enter, really. But art that is real involves some risk. Sometimes you have to just try it.

Today, stuck inside, I picked up the Lamy pen that has been giving me headaches. I have been struggling with it, wishing I had a technical pen (which is on my list to try next, because I think it will be much more suited to my style!). The problem is not with the pen. It is with my tendency to press hard on the nib... with predictably disastrous results when you are discussing fountain pens! But today, somehow, I managed to lighten up a bit. I even managed to get a blind contour drawing of my African Violets done without feeling as though I had unleashed a squid full of ink at the paper.

I'm using a very dark brown ink by Sailor in the pen. I still don't care for stark black; my eyes rebel while I am drawing if I use that on white paper. Interestingly, when I spilled a bit of this ink, the color was bluish black. The stains on my fingers were black. But the ink is definitely a dark brown, a sepia to be more precise.

It is water-soluble, so I have more options to explore.

All in all, not a bad rainy day project. And I am still exploring reductive drawing, and enjoying it very much. More on that to come.

60 MPH Drawings

This weekend, I had a chance to practice speed drawing again, since I was not the driver of the car. This is a fun exercise that I started doing while taking road trips, to try to develop my visual memory. I suppose they could also be called 55 MPH drawings, or 75 MPH drawings, depending on where you are!

They are not going to be careful, detailed drawings, which is the point. When I pick up a pencil, I sometimes find myself in engineer-mode, drawing entirely too much detail. For this exercise, I hold the pencil further back. I look at the landscape, and get the drawing down as fast as I can. I have a notebook full of barns that I saw on I-40 years ago. It is very difficult for me to draw architecture this way, but I think it really helped my visual recall to practice. This, in turn, helps when I am trying to draw something like a bird, that can fly away suddenly.

I am now starting another notebook for another interstate. This view is of a railroad track through a marsh.

The tiny notebook is my travel notebook. I have a drawing-in-progress next to it, to show how I use these travel sketches. This additional drawing can then be developed into a painting. I think by reworking it while my visual memory is fresh, I can identify what it was about that landscape that caught my eye. In this case, I was surprised to find that the telephone or electrical wires (not sure which it was) caught my eye... not at all what I expected.

I don't judge these drawings the way I would something that I worked on site, or from a photo. If it has captured the excitement I felt at the moment, I consider it a success. It may or may not not look exactly like the actual landscape. Give it a try the next time you are a passenger!