Holiday Doodles

There’s a lot of unplanned time during the holidays at our house.  Some cooking and baking is involved.  Too many Christmas movies are watched.  And then there is the puzzle making.  We avoid shopping due to the crowds and so we don’t get out very much.

This leaves me with an itch in my pen and I have to scratch it.  So I doodle a lot.  I may draw something in front of me or I may draw from photos or even sketches done by others.  Normally I wouldn’t show these to anyone, mostly because they’re not worth showing.  But I always feel that we do a disservice by presenting only those sketches we deem as “acceptable” and so I offer this pile of doodles, done on a whim during the holidays.  All are small.  All were done quickly.  All represent very little at all.  But they helped me scratch my itch.

Jodie and I sat down in the kitchen to draw one morning.  She was drawing flowers from one of my botanical art books and I grabbed an orange and lemon, dropped them on a plate and did this rather poor rendition that I title “Orange and Lemon.”

 

I did go down to our Grande Marché  one afternoon, sat for a few minutes and scrawled this sketch of one of the kiosks.  Like most of my quick sketches, it illustrates the frantic pace at which is was done.  But, like all sketches, it was fun.

One afternoon, Jodie and Chantal decided to make a fancy cake.  I think they felt challenged by the two batches of cookies and bread I’d baked (grin).  As I sat watching  I started sketching the kitchen.  This is as far as I got.

I met my buddy Yvan at the market for a bit of sketching people.  The people movement was hectic but I did a couple pages like this.  I’ve said before that I’m not a fan of people sketching but this is the only reliable sketching target for us in the winter.

One morning I just started sketching an old-time imaginary church on a hill.  It was fun to just doodle some sparse scenery around it.

A quick sketch from a photo.  Not much to say about it.

I’ll leave you with this.  It’s a page of doodles I did one morning, mostly while looking at sketches done by my friend Yvan.  I’d say I copied them but that wouldn’t do justice to Yvan’s sketches, which are in every way superior to these doodles.

4 thoughts on “Holiday Doodles

  1. I agree 100% that if we show only the sketches we think are “good” or “worth showing,” viewers get the false impression that we only make “good” sketches. When I first started sketching and spent a lot of time looking at other people’s work online, I was constantly astounded that they only did spectacular work. I couldn’t imagine how many decades I would have to practice to get to that level of skill. It took me quite a while to figure out that they just don’t show the ones that aren’t spectacular. And that we all have to make a lot of bad sketches to get some good ones.

    • I remember feeling that way as well. In point of fact, we live in a universe where everyone’s life looks better than our own mostly because people write about the good stuff in their lives, leaving the “we had to sell our kids to pay the rent” parts of our lives unsaid withing this social media river 🙂 For me it’s not ever about “good” or “bad.” It’s more about whether I feel the sketch is important to my sketching path and/or whether I have something to say about it.

      Only then do I think it’s worth scanning and posting. I do soooo many quick sketches, partial sketches, or just plain doodles that I can’t possibly post them all. Most of them I chalk up to practice. Heck, I should be better than I am given all the ink I spew onto paper 🙂 Happy New Year, Tina.

  2. Hello Larry,
    I love this post. It’s always nice to see ‘behind the scene’ as I might call the sketches that our inner critic just don’t want us to publish.
    At one point in my journey, I decided to post all my work (mouah… not all but over… 90%)… that’s it : good or bad, mostly not so good. But hey! that’s at the point where I am. We have to make some ‘not so good’ stuff to finally get a good one. ha! ha! I just reread the post of Tina… same words… lol. There most be some truth there…
    I wish you a very Happy New Year and lots of happy sketches even in the dark of the Aquarium
    Diane

    • I don’t really have an inner critic beyond that little voice that says that everything I do is less than perfect. I mostly ignore that beyond its insights into improvement. What I do have, however, is the lazy gene, which keeps me from wanting to scan every quick-sketch and doodle I do during a day. As for getting a good one, if I wait for that to post something I’d never post anything (grin).

      Always good to hear from you Diane. It seems like forever since I’ve been in Montreal. My health has mostly returned, however, so I’ll probably see you in 2020. Hope so.

      Larry

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