Sketchbook Revival

I received an email in May about an online "Sketchbook Revival". For 12 days videos from different artists were made available. Many of the artists shared pages from their personal sketchbooks, and demonstrated one technique or another. The videos covered many different art forms. They included making & binding books, pencil sketching, bold graffiti designs with markers, water color sketches using traditional water color as well as water color pencils, using regular colored pencils, botanical drawings, collages, and several others. I didn't have the opportunity to view all of the videos as we were in the throes of getting ready to leave Florida and my time was limited. However, the program reignited my artist-wanna-be fire! One of the artists, Liz Steel, shared watercolor sketches that she creates when she is traveling as a way of remembering her trip. Wow! What a fun thing to do. I am going to Europe toward the end of September and decided it would be wonderful to document my travels with my own sketches... and to be able to do this, I need practice. Lots of practice! Therefore ... I purchased a few different journals so I could experiment with the types of paper. I bought a nifty travel watercolor set, and a few extra brushes. I did get some markers and colored pencils as well. I made a commitment to sketch... every day! I am loving it. When I return from walking the dogs I pull out my box of journals and art supplies and sit down to create. It is a wonderful part of my day... and I have completed 44 different sketches to commemorate our travels, share what I see when I walk the dogs in the morning or simply things that strike my fancy. I have missed a few days, here and there, but I have done more in the past few months than I probably have in the past few years!

Here are some of my favorites!

Among my first sketches... watercolor pencil, water colors, marker & pen
3.5" X 5.5"

Watercolor and pen
3.5" X 5.5" 

Pen & watercolor.
I am a huge fan of how the oyster turned out. I'm not sure why!
3.5" X 5.5"

Watercolor & pen.
I was trying to capture the haze in the early morning.
3.5" X 5.5" 

Watercolor & pen
5.5" X 8.5"

Watercolor & pen.
This is my first attempt at doing people in wc.
5.5" X 8.5"

Watercolor & pen... and a lot of artistic license!
5.5" X 8.5"

Watercolor pencil, watercolor & pen
5.5" X 8.5"

Watercolor
I was not happy with the background. This is an area needing improvement!
5.5" X 5.5"

Watercolor & pen
5.5" X 8.5"

Watercolor & pen
3.5" X 5.5"

Watercolor & pen
3.5" X 5.5"

Colored pencil
5.5" X 8.5"

Only watercolor.
No preliminary pencil & no pen!
5.5" X 8.5"

Only watercolor.
No pen & no preliminary sketching with pencil
5.5" X 8.5"

All sketching accomplished with watercolor
5.5" X 8.5"

 My confidence is growing. The drawings most often do not turn out the way I envision them, but I  see progress and I usually find something in each that pleases me.

#30: Shasta

Inspiration:
While taking the online Drawing Cats and Dogs class I practiced by sketching dogs that belong to my friends.  Shasta was especially intriguing with her short hair and her coloring. I created one drawing and shared it online. She went nuts over it, and asked if I could send it to her... she'd even pay! (I didn't charge her.) I decided it would be fun to surprise her and include another drawing... or two. 

#30: Shasta

9" x 9" pencil on vellum

What I like about the drawing:
I love the pup's expression. To me, she looks like she is inviting the viewer to come play with her.  I feel like I was able to show the dimensions of her face by using more strokes, creating a darker area. I am pleased with the background. I like the variation I achieved with smudged pencil.

What I might do differently:
I am not certain that her ears are accurate. Again (and again, and again...) I must move away at several stages of the drawing process to assess my work. I used very little shading by smudging the pencil. I think that might have helped differentiate areas of different color.

What I learned:
Val Webb (course instructor) says that the eyes are the soul of the picture, and I agree. Val puts them in, first thing. It certainly does make the drawing come to life, right away! I am not a patient artist. I don't like taking a lot of time with my work. I want to see it... NOW! Were I to take more time, step back more, and revisit the work another day I think my work would be more refined. I also find that view a picture of the art work helps me get that "view from a distance." I shall try looking at a picture of my work on my next piece.

Profiling

In class #2 with Joy Schultz we learned about the placement and proportions for parts of adult faces in profile. We practiced drawing ears, working with lines and shadows to show creases and depth, and then went on to create a few profile sketches.

The top two faces, and the one on the bottom right were drawn in class. The upper left picture caused some amusement among the folks in the class as we tried to decide just what this girl was so mad about! She looks really pissed off! I hadn't noticed it, myself, until Joy picked it up and commented about her expression. That shows the importance of stepping back from your work!

Despite the mess, I enjoy working with charcoal. Joy keeps saying how lovely it is because you can move it. And, she is right. I find there is a lot more latitude with charcoal than there is with pencil. (The two sketches on the middle, right of the picture above - the one with the guy who looks somewhat Spockian, were drawn with pencil.)

Today I played around with another sketch. I am getting much faster at blocking out the basic shapes of the face, both full on and in profile. Here is my sketch quite a bit beyond the blocking-in stage. I am well into the details here, but there are huge changes between this image and the next.

Of course, adding hair makes a huge difference in the appearance of the sketch.  But additionally, I realized the line of the jaw was too harsh, so I softened both the angle and the shadow. After completing thinking I had completed the sketch, I wanted to play with something different for the background. I do wish I had taken a picture of the first attempt. I was trying to copy something I had seen in a sketch that used rough, horizontal and vertical lines. It looked terrible, so I smudged in out with my finger, took some of the charcoal off the upper right corner, and added some on the lower left. I also blocked out the area to make her neck look shorter. At this point I was just thinking of it as background. However, when I stepped away and took another look, I realized that it could be a shawl or shirt collar. You can see the subtle changes I made in the bottom shot.

In addition to the changes in the shawl, I also took away some charcoal in some areas of her hair, and added more charcoal to other areas. I decided if the light was coming from the front, just to the right of the woman, there needed to be more lightness on the top of her head. For the same reason, I added more shadow under her jaw, and below her cheek. At some point I realized her eye was far too large. Due to the grace of charcoal, I was able to remove much of the back 'point' and reshape it, and the eyebrow.

Each time I come back to the sketch I find another area that doesn't please me. However, sometimes I find that trying to make a correction in one area causes harm to another. At some point (will I figure out where that point is?) the artist must decide she is finished.

What I like about the sketch:

I am really pleased with the shading under the jaw and along the woman's neck. The shading on the lower part of her face makes her look older, which was my intention. However, the upper part of her face looks very young. I do like how the background adds more depth.

What I might do differently:

Although I like the background, the way that I left it around the top of her head leaves somewhat of a halo effect. I might try making it a bit more consistent in color. This poor woman has an unfortunate nose and a long chin! I was trying to create something a bit different than sketches I had created in the past, which I did, but I might make her features a bit more pleasant to look at. Hair is still a challenge. I don't feel that my end result shows the waves and a bun as I envisioned. 

What I learned:

This sketch really impressed on me the freedom charcoal affords in making changes. One subtle example of this is the line of her nose. The darkness and width of the line seemed overdone, especially considering that the background was darker. I was able to remove the line, to some degree, to make it less harsh. I also wanted to refine her jaw line. What I originally had was not only too long, but it was very square and 'blocky'. I refined the shadow, which changed the appearance of the jaw and chin.

Fun With Faces

I am taking another class with Joy Schultz. She is working with us over 5 weeks on using charcoal to draw faces. In the previous course I took with Joy, our first day was all about drawing faces with charcoal. The concept I took away from that class was to focus on the shapes and intensity of shadows, and don't worry about the lines of the eyes, nose and mouth as we think they should be. That helped me as we did some free drawing of faces, working without any example, just putting down something from our mind. Our focus was on the basic proportions of the face as seen straight on. In addition to the placement of the basic 'pieces' of the face, I also tried to think beyond the lines of the components and try to determine where shadows and shapes might lie.

At the end of class we had all created at least two drawings. Here is a shot of the final drawings from some of the class participants. My drawing is the one on the top left of the photo. The lady with short, dark hair. We decided she looked like a flapper from the 20's!

Throughout the week I have made an attempt to practice several drawings a day. My intent is not to come up with a finished piece, but simply to practice placement and proportions of the components of a face. 

I've also made an attempt to try to get some expression in the face and to have it look less 'plastic', as well as to get some dimension. Below is a pencil sketch I made. I haven't decided whether I like one media over the other, but I do like that I can carry a sketch book and pencil and work without creating as much mess as comes with the charcoal. If I am going to sketch in charcoal, I need to go someplace where I have prepared the area to contain the charcoal crumbs and dust. Pencil can be used anywhere!

Whew! This fella's eyes need some work! (Funny how a photo gives me a different look at my work!) I know that our faces are not truly symmetrical, but I have noticed that the eyes I create are often far too dissimilar. I'll do some more practice on simply drawing two eyes, trying to get them to approximate each other. In the "Rogues Gallery" picture below, you can see where I had done some practice previously in drawing two ovals.

I am not that great on finishing the drawings. I lose patience with my people pretty quickly, and when I'm not happy, I just move on instead of trying to revise the image. I am thinking that perhaps I don't know what, exactly, is making the face not pleasing to my eye, and thus I don't know what to do to correct it. I wonder if it has anything to do with the proportion not being correct, thus making the face look freakish. Hmmmm…. That makes me wonder if purposefully creating a drawing with something askance might make it garner more attention. Viewers might be drawn to it because of it's subtle freakishness. 

This is my Rogues Gallery, showing many of this week's faces.

In our next class we will be drawing the profile of faces. Then, later, we will sculpt a head and use that to get the proportions correct as we draw faces from different points of view. 

Classy!

I discovered that one of the local community colleges offers classes for adult education. Only one of the art classes fit into my schedule. It is called, "A Dip into Art". The instructor, Joy Schultz, explained that we will have the opportunity to 'dip our toes' into different artistic media. Each week will focus on something different: charcoal, pastels, watercolor, acrylic, mixed media, and pen and ink.

In our first class we experimented with charcoal. Joy inspired us by saying that art is simply 'mark making'. We tried making marks with a piece of vine charcoal. We tapped it. We swiped it while holding the charcoal on its side. We tried dark marks, and marks that varied in intensity. We rotated the charcoal, and made long sweeping arcs. While making marks, Joy talked about composition, texture and value. Almost everyone drifted into making lines, then shapes and then creating something from our marks. 

Then Joy showed us some charcoal sketches by John Singer Sergeant. She discussed different techniques he appeared to use. I was getting a bit nervous, as I was already thinking where this might be going! She let each of us pick a picture, and draw it. Oh! Horrors! "I can't draw a face!" she explained would be our first reaction. "But," she went on to say, "don't look at what you think should be there, concentrate on the shapes you see, and their texture and value." 

I had (and continue to have) some difficulty with the proportions of the face. But, all-in-all, I was quite pleased with my first attempt.

My first charcoal portrait suffered a bit from being folded, but you can basically see what I accomplished. It looks OK… until you see the original:

Well, obviously I need practice! So… this week I have done just that. I have found a number of Sargeant's pencil and charcoal sketches to try to copy. I guess if I keep trying, I'll only get better. As we know, practice makes perfect!

Two attempts;

pencil and charcoal

My charcoal and Sargeant's charcoal