Halloween In Sketches – Day Four

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This is day four of my warmed-over Halloween/Thanksgiving sketches.  It’s also Halloween and I hope you all have a Happy Halloween even if you aren’t out trick-or-treating and/or scaring other people or yourself.  Here’s another couple sketches I did last year at this time.  Hopefully by October 2021 things will be a bit better for all of us.

I got lucky with this sketch.  Anyone who has tried knows that sketching moving people is hard.  In this case there was a very long row of kiosks and this mother was enjoying (??) some time with her son.  He wanted to touch everything, of course, and so it was fun to watch the interaction as they looked at pumpkins.  I was lucky because I started grabbing the people shapes as they stood in front of one kiosk and they took up a position that was almost identical, in front of another kiosk and stood there for a while.  I drew them and then the the first kiosk full of pumpkins.  One thing about pumpkins, they don’t move.

This is my best Halloween sketch ever, though the credit must go to the people who mounted a huge spider on their house.  I was riding the bus home from a doctor’s appointment when I first saw it.  The next day I went back, sat across from the house on a very busy street and drew it.  Isn’t it amazing?

Halloween In Sketches – Day Three

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This is day three of my Halloween celebration.  I have to confess that I’ve been a bit sheepish about presenting the sketches that I did many years ago.  I’m not very good artist but I used to be much worse (grin).

I did this one in 2019 and I guess it’s really more of a Thanksgiving display.  It was just outside the large farmers market near my house.  I sat at the edge of the parking lot as I drew it and there was a steady stream of people stopping to take a look.  I really enjoy those interactions, though I struggle with my French.  People in Quebec are nice, though.  Nobody laughed.  This was a “take my time” sketch and I took a lot of time.  I was also quite frozen when I finished.

This is another 2019 sketch. Given the synchrony of Canada Thanksgiving and Halloween, lots of pumpkins are sold at this time of year.  I’ll post a couple more tomorrow.

 

Halloween In Sketches – Day Two

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Yesterday I started celebrating Halloween by posting sketches I’ve done during past Halloween seasons, you remember….before COVID.  Here are a couple more.  This one I remember well because I “knew” that someone was going to get upset with me standing, almost in the street, sketching their front door.  This was done in 2013.

This one was done in 2015.  It’s of a display they put up in front of city hall.  And yes, the manikin looks that stiff (grin).  More tomorrow.

 

Halloween In Sketches

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Every year, during this last week in October, the sketching community posts a flood of great sketches of pumpkins, witches and ghouls of all sorts.  It’s not happening this year because we’re all sitting inside, looking out on a world that has cancelled Halloween.

But you know, we all say that our sketching provides memories, that we’re documenting our world, and we HAVE done exactly that for many Halloweens in the past.  Soo…what I’m going to do is post a couple of my old Halloween/Thanksgiving sketches each day until Halloween.  Thanksgiving in Canada is in the same month as Halloween so pumpkin displays sort of merge together.  That’s why I’m going to include some of those sketches.

To start things off I’ve gone way back.  These are the first pumpkin sketches I ever did.  The first one was done on a very rainy, cold day and I remember sitting under the eave of our farmer’s market as I sketched it.  Mostly I remember the cold.

We always claim that each sketch we do conjours up personal memories of the day we did it.  I’m afraid this one does not.  I have no idea and I suspect that’s because I set up the still life in our kitchen or some such.  Note the dates here…October 2012

More tomorrow.  I encourage others to do the same.  Let’s not let these holidays pass uncelebrated just because of a pesky little virus.

Pointy Devices Do Weird Things Sometimes

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As a street sketcher I feel more than a little lost in our modern COVID world.  Our plein air group had to cancel its season of outings and the portrait group has moved to Zoom (my French isn’t good enough for that), and cancelled their outdoor sessions as well.  I try, very hard, to get excited about drawing at home but I guess I’m just not built for it.  Mostly I’m dabbling with watercolor, gouache and even oils, trying to learn something about paint while largely not producing anything of significance.

The portrait group decided to do monthly prompts just to get us doing something and this week the prompt was “chair.”  Most of the time, when one of my pointy devices gets near paper, I draw something that is in front of me.  Somehow, this time, this dripped from my pen.  Maybe it was because I was using my Kaweco Lilliput that has a high cute factor.  This was a lot more fun than I thought it would be so maybe I should do more of it.

Hahnemuehle Cappuccino sketchbook, Platinum 3776, DeAtramentis Document Black