Category Archives: Domestic Sketching

Can Shari Teach Me To Paint?

Posted on by

While the COVID pandemic generated a bunch of negatives, there have also been positives.  For instance, because Shari Blaukopf couldn’t travel or do her in-person workshops, she decided to produce a series of video watercolor workshops and made them available on her website.

I bought several of them and will probably buy more because the pricing makes them irresistable.  There’s only one problem.  Buying them didn’t make me a better painter.  And while watching the videos taught me a bunch of stuff, this didn’t improve my painting abilities much either.  Surprise, surprise.

Seems I’ve actually got to move a fuzzy stick around… a lot, if I’m going to improve and I’m not good with fuzzy sticks.  My approach to “painting” has been to do a complete pen and ink drawing and then to quickly add local color, being sure to stay “inside the lines.”  Most of the time, my paint detracts rather than enhances the original drawing. Painting Shari style isn’t like that at all (grin).

Shari starts each of her workshop studies with a pencil, drawing outlines of the major components.  I’m not much of a pencil-driver either, but a pointy stick is a pointy stick and so I have no trouble with this step.  Here’s my first attempt at painting a Victorian window:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s not horrible, but it’s not even close to Shari quality.  My brushwork is sloppy.  I expected that (see above about my fuzzy stick management), but it’s the other stuff that suggests I wasn’t paying attention.

  1. Shari explains how to mix paint to the right consistency.  I was anything but consistent.
  2. Shari showed me how to create the dark red shadow color.  Mine isn’t dark enough cuz I got caught by the watercolor “drying up.”
  3. And oh my goodness.  Shari talks about painting linework with a rigger brush.  I couldn’t get a paint mix that was dark enough and yet wet enough to do it at all so I resorted to a fude pen instead.

I love how she presents these workshops, though, and with more time with my fuzzy sticks, I just might figure out how to do it.  Hope so.  Thanks to Shari for making these workshops available.  With my help I bet Shari CAN teach me to paint.

Small Figures Make Great Sketching Subjects

Posted on by

Lots of us are dealing with COVID isolation by sketching our backyards and stuff in our kitchens.  We’re no longer locked down and it’s pretty safe to move around because people are reasonable and we’re all wearing masks.  Still, I’m reluctant to spend much time sketching on the streets.

I took advantage of the fact that I have a collection of Schleich animal figures.  If you’re unfamiliar with them, they are very detailed and well-painted figures and each if beautifully proportioned, unlike so many of the animal figures made for kids.  I’ve bought many of mine from art stores but the satisfying ones I got for pennies at local flea markets.  Here’s a batch that Chantal gave me for Christmas.

I was about to watch a baseball game and so I grabbed my panda bear and drew him while the Blue Jays played baseball.  A great combination.  This is in my Hahnemuehle Capuccino notebook and rather than using watercolor I grabbed a black and white colored pencil to add some “color.”  Pandas are very accommodating when it comes to color.

Squash On The Run

Posted on by

We’ve been having a lot of heat lately.  I guess it’s mother nature’s way of telling me that I complained too much when spring didn’t come soon enough.  Anyway, the result has been a lot of growth in our new vegetable gardens.

One result is that our butternut squash is attempting to escape.  It jumped the wall of the garden and is now running along its edge, using the garden wall to hide its actions.  I had to sketch quickly because it is growing fast, but here’s my capture of the action.

Life In The COVID Lane

Posted on by

I’ve got to say that COVID isolation is both positive and negative for me.  It’s great that both my wife and daughter are home all the time, a real bonus for a retired old guy like myself.  It also gives me some time to get a bunch of house repairs done, a long list of which has accumulated during my two years of bad health.  And COVID isolation my wife time to rebuild and work in her garden which was neglected as she ferried me to doctors for those two years.

In spite of my telling her that it’s “not my hobby,” I’ve been spending more time with garden tools than with my fountain pens.  So I apologize for the lack of blog posts, but all this stuff is just how we’re coping with the stress of life in 2020.  COVID isolation has disrupted my “daily sketch” regime in a major way.  Oops.

Here’s a sketch of our garden staging area.  By that I mean that we went to a garden center, filled our vehicle with a jungle of plants and many of them are shoved into this area as they wait for garden beds to be created for them.  I drew this the day we finished a couple raised bed vegetable gardens and moved a whole bunch of plants from this area to their new home.  Hope you like it.

Plants, Plants, Plants

Posted on by

I sometimes enjoy trying to draw a plant by carefully drawing each leaf while capturing the relationships between them.  It’s a real challenge in relationships and proportions but it’s good training for my visual cortex.  This was my attempt to do just that with a basil plant.

Stillman & Birn Beta (8×10), DeAtramentis Document Black, Wing Sung 3008