Prompt a day - the end

For the month of July I subscribed to Kelly Kilmer's prompt a day. That will sadly be over today. I liked that it forced me to do something every day, even though half of my pages are not finished. Some have only the paint layers done, some have the images added but most of them have no writing. I'll have to go back and finish them. I need to find my camera - it has been missing in action since I came back from vacation (broken - fixing needed ...) so that I can take few pictures.

I "improved" the screw I drew yesterday - added some pen and white gel pen highlights, as well as a zentangle. I just discovered those - and of course I had to try. I was playing with these some 30 years ago, except I was not calling them zentangles ...

Draw a screw ...and a bird ...

...otherwise known as EDM #226 and EDM #125.
The screw - pencil on baby moleskine. The face and the bird - Carandache Neocolor, watersolluble graphite on altered book pages. This was an exercise from Pam Carriker's workshop "Shades of grey". The workshop was a lot of fun and helped me start using the brush pen. However, doodling does not come as easy as I thought. I am mostly doing the same things over and over again. I guess I have to practice letting go ...

Pursuing portraits

I signed up for this class at the beggining of July. Painting faces is always somewhat scary. I enjoyed the class and learned few useful tips from Pam, which I think changed my faces for the better. At the beggining, she suggested parcticing portraits in graphite. I did a few but I do not like my black and white portraits too much. I find that they lack personality somehow. I prefer the painted ones. These are the first ones - painted on a spread in one of my journals hosted in a Reader's Digest atlas.

Strawberry fields

EDM Challange # 24 - draw a piece of fruit.
I chose strawberries. They look like a cross between berries and apples I suppose. The three ones are pencil on baby moleskine (the baby pages bleed if I use ink). The other ones are ment as an abstract study. I bought Laura Reiter's book Learn to paint abstracts. One of the chapters talks about how to take a real object and transform in an abstract painting. I suspect the strawberry may show up in the mear future in a different incarnation ...

Draw a lamp

This is the lamp in my room at the Homeplace ranch. These sketches are in my hand made notebook. I took different papers (watercolor, St. Armand papers, found papers, cardboard) and had them bound with a spiral bound. I like to have differnt textures and colors as background. If my drawings aren't great at least the background has some color :) EDM #2

Drawing from movie

I tried once to draw from the TV while watching a movie. I stopped the dvd and drew the main characters. Although I have to confess that more I check the EDM Superblog and more I feel like giving up sketchin all together and stick with other mediums/activities. I am not that good enough at ths ... sigh ...

Two-for-one

On the way to Calgary, I had breakfast at the airport. I had to be there at 6am so I decided to grab a coffee and a sandwich at Moe's. This is a quick sketch of the glass of water and the sandwich. This way I killed two birds with one stone: EDM #162 and EDM #25. Plus, no way I will ever draw my breakfast again. I cannot even open my eyes before breakfast let alone draw it. I also drew a bedouin from a a picture in the newspaper/ I liked more in black and white and I did not pay attention to the pen which turned out to not be water proof. So the ink smudged and I messed up his lips ...

Weekend update

Everybody says to go out and draw! Ha ...that takes a lot of courage let me tell you. I sort of did it yesterday. I went by the lake and sat in a quiet place. Nobody around! I tried to draw a car parked accross the bay and the result made me laugh. But I decided I have to own to good, the bad, the ugly and the in between. So here it is my laughable car:



In the evening,I drew my new running shoe, always with my left hand.
This is how it looks like:

The bagel

One of the exercises in Danny Gregory's books is drawing a bagel. I did not have a bagel so I drew a pita bread. And suprisingly, I managed to draw some of the flax seeds and oat flakes too ...

Draw a button

I guess this one qualifies as a 2-in-1 - it a metallic button (#89 and #32). I have hard time shading in pencil and adding reflections on a metal piece is even harder. I am having hard time with the shades of gray in life in general too!

I am glad the week is over and I am looking forward to a quiet weekend doing more painting.

Latest shopping therapy experience

I went on an "artist date" downtown to buy few supplies. And while I was there, I decided to look for a poetry book by Leonard Cohen. Just like that...well almost. It was a succession of serendipitous web finds that prompted me to look for his writing and music. And while I was browing the books, I also found Rilke's poems. It's been more than a year I think since I keep "bumping" into Rilke in different contexts.
To make the long story short, here is the result of the therapy session:
Twayla Tharp The creative habit
Leonard Cohen The book of longing
Rilke Letters to a young poet and Sonnets to Orpheus

Draw a book

I drew one of the books I bought during my last shopping therapy session. I keep "running into" Rilke for a while now. It seems that almost everything I read mentions him. So when I saw the books lined up pretty on the shelf, I could not resist. I had however to refrain myself from I buying all 4 of them!



A while back I drew the cover of a magazine and the watercolor pencil box:

...and the blog is risen!

I decided to give it another try. It was more difficult than I thought to keep up to date with the posts, and that for various reasons (life got in the way, most of my sketches are too bad to be posted and so forth). Last week I enrolled in two online classes and I am painting something every day almost, trying different things. My sketching is alive and well, halas not as good as I would like it to be. So I have accumulated some content to post here. But the decisive factor was that the EDM superblog now accepts new blogs. So my plan is to join EDM on facebook and superblog. It is scary because my drawings are not as good as those I see on EDM...

This is EDM Challange #4 Draw a cup: