Our gang was back at the museum cuz, “baby, it’s cold outside.” I decided to draw a stone guy who was making an offering at a funeral, or so sayeth the plaque associated with him. Hope you like him.
Fabriano Artistico CP (7.5×11), Platinum 3776, DeAtramentis Document Black
Not long ago I posted this decorative square and talked about how we’d started drawing these squares in a chapel. I also mentioned that I was going to work on methods for painting/shading them.
These wood-carved squares are probably not even noticed by most visitors to the chapel because they’re dark mahogany and blend into the mahogany wainscotting that runs around the chapel. Yvan ‘discovered’ them and we’ve both been thrilled with the idea of drawing them. I find them challenging. Yvan just makes them look beautiful (grin).
We’ve continued drawing them and I have been experimenting a bit with approaches to shading them. The process is teaching me quite a bit about watercolors and their use, at least the way I want to use them. Which one looks best to you?
There is an exhibition of carriages and sleighs at our Musee de la Civilisation and it’s about to end. We’ve drawn of it in the past but the room is so poorly lit that it’s hard to see what you’re drawing.
But Yvan and I decided to brave the dark a bit more and to draw some of the carriage lanterns before they were pulled from their dark places and sent back to the well-lit storage barn where they are stored.
These are fun to draw because of their complex shapes but I can’t guarantee that my sketches are correct. Often I couldn’t tell whether something is square or round because the room was so dark, so these are more a guess than anything.
Part of the reason for this blog’s existence is to give me a place to document my sketching journey. Today is a day of recording, not one of presenting good sketches.
I was out for a walk yesterday, in Quebec City, where January high temperatures average around 20F (-7C). Of course, the low temps are, well lower. So typically, street sketching doesn’t happen in January.
But as I walked, on the 8th of January, I realized just how warm it was as I took my hat and gloves off because I was overheating. Some minutes later I came upon one of the impressive old mansions here and I decided to see if I could do a quick-sketch while standing on the sidewalk, in January.
I grabbed my 4×6 toned paper sketchbook and went at it, very quickly, and very loosely trying to capture the house’s complex structure. I failed miserably but it didn’t matter. I had sketched on location, outdoors, in January. I’ve joked with a few climate change denialists that I was planning on selling citrus and palm trees to the residents of Quebec City in the not so distant future. Maybe I was right.
Since that sketch is so poor, I’ll try to improve the esthetics of the post by showing you my latest “mustache book,” As much as I love these little books, the felt glasses and mustaches glued to the cover leave much to be desired so I glued one of my sketches to the cover and then covered it with laminating material. What’cha think?
I suspect I’m not the only one who feels that the holiday season is more a disruption than something to celebrate. I’m an old guy, set in my ways and those ways are for me to go sketching. But with all the hoopla my routine has gone bonkers and my sketching has become scattered. I thought I would just post a smattering of the many small, generally incomplete sketches I’ve done over the past week or so leading into New Years.
Here’s a sketch I did one day at our museum. Another Egyptian guy, standing stiff against a wall, or so it seems. I don’t really know who he is but he was fun to draw and that’s good enough for me.
He was done in a Stillman & Birn Gamma book with my Namiki Falcon and DeAtramentis Document ink. Color was mostly burnt sienna with a bit of ultramarine to produce the grays. I played with the notion of making him look like stone, which he was. I’m not sure how successful I was in this.
Otherwise sketching has been a bunch of doodles here and there, mostly on photocopy paper. On New Years Eve, however, I was watching TV with Chantal and I drew these three ornaments that were laying on a table. Color was done with watercolor pencils but the sketch was done on cheap paper and so I couldn’t use a lot of water or move the color very much.
I was still bored by the TV so I picked up my Sailor fude pen and decided to give it a whirl. I’ve never adapted to the fude pens because I typically want thin lines and there are better tools for that. But I’m determined to improve my ability to draw heavy-line, quick sketches for some reason. I started out by drawing the same three ornaments.
As I scanned this for the post I couldn’t help but think of a conversation I’ve been having with Tina Koyama about what or whether the degree of expressiveness in a sketch says about what the artist was feeling, either about the sketch or the subject. The two sketches above were done within minutes of one another and yet one was done with an “expressive” stroke while the other was done in a more controlled fashion. I’m pretty sure I was wishing the holidays would be over during both sketches (grin).
I turned my fude pen to my imagination and one thing I drew was a bunch of imaginary carriage lanterns. I’d talked to Yvan about meeting to draw some at the museum where there’s a carriage exhibition going on so they were probably on my mind. Anyways, prior to drawing these I looked at a couple sketches I’d done of some a few months ago but these were all done in a very few minutes. While I think they reflect bits and pieces of ‘the real thing’, they’re purely imaginary.
Now that the holidays are over, I should return to a more normal schedule. I’m still a couple sketches/days behind on the blog but I’ll get caught up “real soon.”