Monday, February 24, 2014

Urban sketchers February meeting...

.. was yesterday at the MMFA. Great turnout, maybe 25 people or so. I had planned to sketch the view I from a window, but I ended up in the antiquity section. First, I drew a pagoda - pen and watercolor.

Then a camel - Prismacolor col-erase pencils with collage and watercolor applied at home.
And lastly, a horse of sorts:
It makes me laugh...and reminds me of Dali somehow. I added the  grid and the yellow background because I wanted to maintain the surrealistic feel of the sketch. Looks like I will have to do some animal studies after all ...or just go with the flow and see what kind of creatures I can come up with. After all, if I dreaw a "correct" horse, it would be just one of zillions of horses ... like this, it is unique ... Isn't it nice how people rationalize anything and everything?!

Sunday, February 23, 2014

TV gesture studies



These were done while watching "Columbo". They started as moving gesture studies.

Friday, February 21, 2014

Bourgie Hall

In preparation for the upcoming meeting of the Urban sketchers Montreal at the Museum of fine arts, here is my interpretation of the Bourgie Hall.
I am playing with exaggerated and distorted perspective as part of the assignments for class. I might adopt this mode of rendering architecture for good because I know I will never be able to draw an exact reproduction of a building. Or of anything else. And I don't even want to. What I want is to construct journal pages that are "me" - whatever that means.

This sketch makes me think about fairy tales somehow... of course, I gave up trying to draw all the bricks, but maybe this was not such a great idea because the texture would have unified the sketch.

Saturday, February 15, 2014

The bea(e)t

I have a lot of homework for the drawing class. One of the things I have to practice regularly are control exercises and pattern making using various tools: pencil, pen, brush pen, brush etc. To get more practice, I decided to sketch only in pen for a while. I love color, but sometimes I think that rushing to add pigment is a bit of cheating. It is much harder to work out a full scale of values using only pen or pencil. 

I needed a "victim" and I found a docile one ... in the fridge: the beet. I kept thinking about the beat - and in a way drawing has its own beat, mostly silent , made of the hush of the paper when hand and pen sweep over in an elegant motion to and fro ...


Thursday, February 13, 2014

Dynamic Drawing - 2

Second week of the course - topic du jour: intro to Pentel pocket brush and sketching a tai chi master in action. I decided to use the brush for the gesture studies, and the result is not what was intended.The gesture studies should be done with one uninterrupted line, not an easy task if one does not master the brush. I tried to focus on sketching the folds in the clothes and the tassel of the sword to suggest movement. I am starting to notice a certain looseness in the line and an itsy-bitsy feeling of letting go the expectations of how these studies should look like... microscopic feeling ...




Saturday, February 8, 2014

Flowers and coffee

Last Sunday, I stopped for coffee and cranberry chocolate scone at my favorite coffee shop in the village.
I used the opportunity to sketch using pen only as a way to practice hand control and texture. I drew the flowers from the saucer in pen and then at home, drew them with the pentel brush.

Friday, February 7, 2014

Dynamic Drawing 1

After expressive watercolor (class not given this semester at Syn Studio), it was time for dynamic drawing. We started with gesture drawings of moving subjects. Tough job... in spite of all the reading I did, Nikolaides among others ... there is a disconnect between hand and brain. The most I was able to master was the use of stick figures because the subjects (ballet dancers from a short clip found on youtube) were moving way to fast. But this is not the idea.

Steps are much easier than that. In fact, there is only one step: put pen to paper and do not lift it until the sketch is complete. Do not draw contour lines. Draw the big shapes. Suggest movement. Easy-peasy.

The first week we had a model - dynamic poses of 3 - 5 min. She chose a sequence of about three movements (lifting a box from the floor and placing it on a shelf, that sort of thing) and repeated it for the duration of the pose.

It took me a good chunk of time only to get over the impulse of drawing the contour lines first and then be stuck there. I used pencil on newsprint, but after a while I switched to woodless graphite. The pencil lines were to thin and pale where the graphite is thicker and it slides easier over the paper. I selected a couple of sketches that represent better the requirements of the exercise.


This course has homework too. Control exercises and pattern to get uses with various tools. More moving subject studies. Doodles. Pentel pocket brush is new to me. I think I will use it to add accents to ink drawings, but maybe with time I will change idea.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

500

Quite an impressive mark  ... 500 posts...

I am glad I "made it". I started the blog with huge hopes for its development, but since then I had to lower my expectations drastically. I like being able to browse through the posts and remember what I did and when...kind of like a diary. Lack of time prevented me from updating the blog more often, learning to use all these gadgets to take better pictures and so on. Most importantly, lack of time prevented me from making art on a regular basis instead of the haphazard way I go about it now. And this my friends makes me a bit sad. I was hoping to see more progress in terms of skills over these many years. I do see change in what I chose to focus on and some skill improvement. But like a fellow classmate said last fall - there is plenty to learn, enough to keep up busy till 80+...plus it is said  that creative activities help ward off Alzheimer's...I'll be doodling away!

Many happy blog posts, Blog!

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Redpath 2

These are the remaining sketches from the Redpath museum. I used colored pencils and watercolor pencils.


Next time I will pay more attention to the composition and also sketch bigger. I guess I was grateful simply for having been able to finally drag myself to the meeting (it's been a year since I decided to go and every month there was something stopping from attending)