"Red and Yellow Bouquet" (oil pastel; 9" x 9")

"Red and Yellow Bouquet"

Art making is fun, but can be fatiguing.  You paint all day; by the end of the day you feel pooped out.  The last thing you want to do in the evening is more art-making.  That is why so few professional artists I know of sketch daily.  I can come up with only two names!  After a hard day of painting, which is in many ways drawing with a brush, you don't feel like picking up a pen or pencil and draw for fun.  You'd rather watch TV or read a book.  Or go to bed early.  Quite a few artists create illustrated travel journals, but don't expect them to keep it up at home. 

I am embarrassed to admit that I was not an exception.  Until a few weeks ago, I used my home-made journals as scrapbooks for printouts of my blog entries and family photos.  All I can say for myself is that I have been keeping a pictorial journal for more than five years; the current book is Vol. 42! 

But my beautiful journal books with Fabriano 140 lb watercolor paper were meant to be more than the receptacles of photo printouts.  I was supposed to fill my journal pages with drawings, paintings, and insightful comments.  Perhaps, that was the problem.  I may have been intimidated by the high-quality material; how do I mess it up with insignificant sketches?  A terrible dilemma it was. 

One day, I was rereading Danny Gregory's Creative License.  He said something about how trees died for us and that's why we must "waste" our sketchbooks by drawing things inside.  A light bulb went off!  I have stacks of sketchbooks, pens, and other art supplies that haven't seen the daylight for ages.  What am I hoarding them for?  For afterlife?  It was time to use them up!

Here are some of my daily sketches--some done from life, others from photos--I want to share with my readers.  Several led to paintings.  You see, creativity thrives with practice. 

"Flowers from My Garden" (pen and wash)

"Smithsonian Castle Rose Garden" (pen and wash)

"Limes and Lemon" (pen and wash)

"Pink Hydrangea" (watercolor and water-soluble crayon)

"Snow White and the Huntsman" (water-soluble pencil)

"After Shirley Trevena's painting" (watercolor)

"General Stonewall Jackson's Equestrian Statue" (graphite)

"Ducks" (Micron pens)

"Clock Tower at Ellicott City, MD" (Micron pen)

"Cherubs at National Gallery of Arts" (watercolor)

"Limoncello Bottle" (pen and wash)

"Flute Concert" (Micron pen, 5.5 x 7")

The very last image was drawn during my daughter's end-of-the year flute concert at the Levine School of Music ten days ago. I noticed a boy who was playing with his flute while sitting out advanced pieces. He was bored out of his mind; I wasn't because I was occupied! You may notice that some sketches are on a page with my blog entry or photo. I tried to be imaginative to come up with an image that fit the odd shape and shared a theme.

Now the question is this: how long will I keep up with my daily sketching?  A month, six months, a year?  I hope forever!

"Sarah" (graphite and chalk; 16" x 12")

Today was the last session of Lisa Semerad's figure drawing (short pose) class at the Art League School in Alexandria, VA.  To top off our nine-week forays into the fascinating world of figure drawing, we were assigned to a two-hour-long pose with just a bit of instruction about different kinds of paper and drawing tools.

I chose a warm, mid-toned Canson Mi-teintes paper, since it seemed to match her skin tone fairly closely.  Getting the pose down wasn't hard.  The challenge for me was to get hatching right.  Last week, Lisa showed the different types of hatching--simple, contour, planar, and cross--and told us to practice at home.  Have I done that?  Of course, not. 

And working with white chalk as well as graphite made things really exciting (i.e., confusing).  The paper provides the mid tone; graphite pencils, darks; and white chalk, the highlights.  If you mix graphite and white chalk, you get a disgusting blue gray!  They don't come into contact, excpet where there is an abrupt change of planes from dark to light.

Two hours was a long time for us, a luxury--enough time to get the drawing right, add values, work the environment which the model occupied into the composition, and fiddle.  The model's right knee got a whole lot of white highlights, for instance.  It comes forward too much.  Oh, well.

Portrait Drawing Class with Lisa Semerad II



"Rupert Murdoch" (pencil and white chalk on scrap booking paper)

Drawing of a mouth (Nupastel on paper)

Lisa doing a demo of noses

My turn at noses (pencil on paper)

Eyes (pencil and white chalk on Canson Mi-teintes paper)

The portrait drawing class with Lisa Semerad at the Art League School in Alexandria, VA is over.  It went so fast that everything is all blurry.  One day we were learning to draw mouths, then in the next class, noses;  on Thursday, Lisa taught us what to do with teeth, eyes, and ears, and turned us out of the classroom!  I think this is definitely the case of "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing."  She told the class to avoid art books that promise "tricks" of doing this and that easily.  There are no tricks in art, just good old practice.  Yes, ma'am!

I loved the technique of graphite pencil and white chalk drawing on toned paper that she showed us in the last class so much that, while I was watching TV last night, I did a drawing of Rupert Murdoch, who is embroiled in scandals in Britain for his News Corporation's nefarious phone-tapping, police-bribing deals.  His haughty, disdainful expression is something else, don't you think?  The choice of gray art paper with random Alphabet letters was serendipitous.

Hands and Feet (graphite on newsprint; 18" x 24")

"Hands" (graphite on newsprint)

When I was painting "At the Aquarium", I had a hard time painting the hand of the figure.  Initially it looked like a rubber glove, not a hand.  The great masters are famous for their hands (and feet); you can tell an inexperienced painter from her awkward hands.  This year I decided to improve my figure drawing by taking classes, and to kick off my plan I took the Hands and Feet Workshop with David Carter at the Art League School in Alexandria, VA this weekend. 

In the mornings the five students diligently studied bones, muscles, and tendons; in the afternoons, we drew hands and feet from slides and a model who happened to be also the instructor.  The above drawings are results of the workshop.  There is no way one can learn all there is to know about the drawing of hands and feet in one weekend.  But I am happy to report that I no longer have the phobia of these extremities.  As David said, all it takes is knowledge, observation, and practice.