Drawing baggage

Here's the beginning of my baggage drawings. There will be more yet.

 



 

 

My next theme for drawing is:
"Write twenty nouns on paper scraps and put them in a cup. Drawn one out and draw it; pull out another and put it in the same drawing. Repeat with at least five items."

Okaay... sounds interesting. Five things chosen semi-randomly in the same drawing.

Drawing marginalia

I've been sick, I've been travelling and then I was enormously busy. So much for drawing every week! But these things always happen, with this kind of project.

I did manage to draw some marginalia, though, in between all that stuff. I found I couldn't draw in a book - some things are just too ingrained. So I chose an old copy of a magazine called sturgeon from 2015. It contained an article about The Telepathy Project, a Melbourne-based duo of Sean Peoples and Veronica Kent. They are interested in the possibility of alternative kinds of communication, like telepathy and dreams and they carried out a dream project with Julie Rrap, a Sydney artist.

I found this quirky and interesting, and my marginalia reflects some of the elements of the dream diaries that Sean and Veronica kept during the project.

  

 






















What did I discover from this exercise? Well, marginalia is hard. The scale is tiny, of course. The magazine has a wider margin than I'd have found in most books, but it was still quite small to draw something in. I think something abstract, pattern-related, would be much easier than trying to draw little images.

Next time, I'm not using the random generator. I need to do some drawings for a project I'm working on, so my theme is going to be baggage. Not mystical emotional baggage but drawings of the bags people all over the world use to transport their essentials of life.

Drawing left-handed

I was struck down by an evil lurgy, so I've done nothing creative for a fortnight. Sigh.

But I have drawn some animals with my left hand, the last drawing challenge before it all went south.

First, a Hairy Eary Thing, as a warm up exercise:

Every part of this was with the left hand, including the shade-and erase on the creature's back. Using an eraser with the left hand is harder than using a pencil!

Then I drew a frog-like creature, as inspired by a frog drawing from my god-daughter many years ago. (She'd be surprised at what I keep!)

I suspect her five-year-old drawing of a frog was more frog-like than mine! Pen drawing is scary. I tend to go for simple outlines, because I'm scared of doing texture with pen lines. Something new to overcome.

Then I decided to stop fooling around and try to draw a frog left-handed from a photo (not having any pet frogs, I couldn't draw from life).

I'm actually quite pleased with that. I'm not sure I could draw it any better with my right hand! Though you'll notice I didn't draw it in ink...

Next week's challenge?

Draw marginalia in an old book

 

OK, this is going to be a real challenge.

I don't draw in books.

I don't do altered books.

I just don't.

Waah!



Imaginary creatures

The next theme generated in my personal drawing challenge was

Draw an imaginary creature

 

Themes like this always feel  such a doddle to me. It's just doodling, isn't  it? Which is just as well, because I didn't have a lot of drawing time or the energy for it this week. But I want a mix of quick, don't think too much drawings

 

In the end, I made three drawings. I deliberately kept them quick, because last week's one  was so careful and trying to be accurate.

 

I thought, what if rocks came to life, coalesced and walked away? So here is my rock monster.

 

He's a bit tidier than I wanted and not quite as massive. But distinctly rock-like.

 

Then I just doodled a sea monster. I've done a lot of sea monster drawings and doodles so this was a bit of a cop-out.

 

I really like my last one, because, in drawing really quickly, I seem to have captured a mood.  It was a left handed drawing too - sometimes that gives really interesting results.

 He looks terribly pleased with himself, doesn't he?

I thought I'd share my themes ahead of time, so anyone can jump in and draw along with me. Just send me a link in the comments, so I can come and look. My theme for next week is: -

Draw any animal with your left hand

(Darn, could have saved up my third one for a rainy day...)

Drawing

I really struggle with drawing, so I've decided to try to do it more often in the hope I'll get a bit better. If I want to keep working in the way I am, I need better drawing skills.

The most difficult issue is always deciding what to draw. I'm bored with still life drawings - I've been around long enough to have drawn a full dinner set of cups and plates and the entire fruit bowl several times over! I checked out some of those websites that suggest topics for you and most left me uninspired. So I decided to compile my own personal list, though there might be some overlap). I'm using my random number generator app to decide which one to draw, so I don't just stay with safe options.

Today's theme was Draw a statue. So I did.

This statue is on the tomb of Harry Houdini. I must admit I tried to make her more like a human being than a statue, because this pose interests me for a work I want to make one day. I may not end up using it that way but that's why I even know what the statue on Harry Houdini's tomb looks like!

More quick sketches

Textile progress has been slow here lately, but I have managed a few more sketches, of things I see in my travels.
Lunch at a friend's house
Puddles outside the library

Quick sketches

I decided I'd experiment with some quick line drawings and water colour wash, since these are the media I'll be taking with me when I travel overseas later in the year. So I'm just doing quick sketches from memory of things I have been doing each day. Some have captions, some don't yet. It's really more about mood that representational drawing. ATASDA people covering the library books.
Drafting my daughter's wedding dress on a grey day
Shopping with my darling mother-in-law - I often think we must loook like Fatty and Skinny! Not sure why this one came out so grey, though it was a grey day. I really enjoy her company.
Erica and I went to the Hunter's Hill Quilt Show yesterday and they had these beautiful little quilts hanging up in the sunshine. It's an an old sandstone building with these beautiful semicircular steps, made just for the pleasure of the shape.

Just too damn busy!

Sorry, no Scatterdays this week, though I did have some ideas. The K thing I like the smell of is my kitchen, especially on Friday when I made tomato sauce, pumpkin soup and chicken and vegetable soup. Mmm! My K hobby is, of course, knitting, and you could have seen my lovely rose red jumper, which just needs assembling and a collar. I expect it will appear here when I have some sitting-down time that's not at the computer to finish it. And while office things were a challenge, since I don't go to an office, I did think of keys, which I used to have when I did, and, in desperation, klebestift, which is the German word on my gluestick.

But I can share some drawings. I always want to draw much more than I actually do, so I'm trying to use those in-between times to draw. Today's in-between time was waiting for the virus scan to confirm that the sneaky little virus I picked up online (not via email) had been soundly dealt with by my sharp-toothed anti-virus software. This one interested me because of the difficult angles that weren't sharp but rounded:
I'm not very happy with it but that's the point of drawing - to get better at it.

I called this one Xray heron. The bird is backlit by strong sunlight relfecting off water and you can see the pinions overlapping and even some of the bones in the wing. I didn't expect to capture that translucence (and I didn't) but it was fun to try to draw it. I imagine angel's wings having this kind of relationship to light.

Back to the Honey

I finally had a bit of time over the weekend to get back to Like Honey from the Rock. I know I'd make heaps more progress if I just focused on one thing, but that isn't how it works around here! I stitched a lot of the lighter purple foreground, which is bringing the whole thing more towards purple, as I planned. I'm very happy with how it's going, though I have considerably widened the range of thread colours I own, in the course of making it!

I also did some drawing this morning. I wanted to experiment with drawing directly onto the computer. I really like how this turned out.

Of course I should have been doing something else. Sigh.

Busy afternoon

Progress has been made on several fronts today, so I'm a happy camper!

I printed out the images for Like Honey from the Rock onto fabric and I printed out images for Forest onto fabric. For once, everything went smoothly, the printer didn't balk at printing on the thicker fabric-freezer paper combination and the prints are just as I expected. I also finished a drawing of Miner's Cottages in Broken Hill. It's not a good scan but I'll share it anyway. It deliberately has no background, as I plan to use it for a textile piece in the future.



I've had a little rethink of Where I Live, so I think I'll take another path with that one. Similar but different!