Snow Day and Materials Testing

The sun came out today! Even though it is still cold outside, the Groundhog Day Storm is over.

I made sure to soak up the rays. The warmth felt good!

Plates of orange-buttermilk scones welcomed my family when they finished shoveling out. Lots of coffee and tea, too.

I am finding my graphite watersoluble pencils, in combination with a travel sized waterbrush, to be indispensable items for my sketch kit. As I work with them more and more, I am really drawn to the range of values I can achieve, in spite of the water. Also, it gives a painterly look to my value studies. Here is one I tried today:

On the right is a hawk that I see frequently at Fontenelle Nature Center. I omitted his cage from the sketch. He is injured, and I think he cannot be released into the wild. But he is stunningly beautiful. (So is his next door neighbor, the Barred Owl). This is a quick value study I did from a photo I took last week.

On the left is a previous composition sketch of cattails in a snowbank.

The new raptor exhibit out there is looking great. I can't wait for it to open.

Dodecahedron

As a supplement to their math textbook, my high school students are working from Thomas Hull's Project Origami. We are using his PHiZZ units to produce geometric objects. To show them how the units lock together, I made this dodecahedron out of wrapping paper scraps I had at home. I am thrilled with how it came out! The colors kept reminding me of something from childhood, and I finally remembered that these are the colors of the wallpaper of my room when I was little.

This is a beautiful object to hold and turn. I can't help it; I am going to build the buckyball structure next. The students are planning to build something even bigger.

More Studio Tests

More materials testing! I've decided to devote all of January to testing materials, since I have developed some new interests.

I have always loved tonal drawings. Leonardo's sfumato is something that I hope, one day, to be able to achieve in my own drawings. With this in mind, I picked up a block of olive green Derwent XL graphite to see what it could do. I liked it so much with the pear subject that I think I will go back and get the rest of the colors!

It is hard to show in a reduced size picture what this looks like in person. It's very moody, very smoky. I like it a lot!

Here is another set of testing. Quite a boring page, but I'm including it because it shows some of the playing around with materials that I do before I settle on a way of working. On the left, I drew a block of green, and sprayed it with water. It didn't budge, so I then dropped water on in large droplets. Nah. Didn't work. Then, I tried a color block with drops of  isopropyl alcohol- something I use frequently in my watercolor and acrylic paintings. Still no movement, so that was abandoned. Then, I dipped a brush in water and dragged it over the block and attempted to paint with it. It was hard to get anything to show up- quite unlike my watersoluble graphite pencils. I abandoned this idea, too.

The next test was drawing a small landscape, just like I did with the pear. This was better. The detail was lost in the photo, though, so I'm not including it here.

I think I liked the graphite block best for the still life of the pear. But I really, really liked it for that!!! I am going to try a few more experiments with different papers. I think I also preferred the sketch paper I used for the pear to the drawing paper used for the landscape.

I'll be posting more testing throughout the month of January. Thank you for reading, and stay warm!