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.

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.