Category Archives: Art

100 People In Five Days

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It’s BACK!!  Marc Taro Holmes and Liz Steel are, once again, leading the challenge to draw 100 people in five days.  I’m not a people sketcher but I did this last year and it was a lot of fun.  My advice is to set aside Monday and, draw, draw draw 30-40 people.  This makes the rest of the week easier as you’re less likely to fall behind and get stressed (grin).  Then, post your results with the tag #oneweek100people2019.

To demonstrate some ways of achieving the goal, here are some examples of how I drew 100 people.  None of these people captures took more than a minute or so (adding color not included) because these were real people, doing real things and they didn’t wait around for me to draw them (grin).

These were captured one at a time as they ordered coffee.

These floating heads were gleaned from TV.

 

These were people standing around in the mall.

Sketching Rabbit/Hare Structure

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On Tuesday, Yvan, Claudette and myself headed to the hunting and fishing museum.  We’d just had a huge snowstorm that was a real struggle to clean up because the 11-12 feet of the stuff that has preceded it made it nearly impossible to find a place to put the new snow.  Anyways, it felt really good to head out for a day of sketching.

Unfortunately (for me), that same storm was beating up my joints.  I was limping a bit, but the real problem was my left hand and wrist which made it very hard (impossible?) to draw.  We had fun and I did three sketches, all of which were so full of errors and attempts to fix lines that went off willy-nilly that I’d be too embarrassed to share them.

We were drawing rabbits, however, and that got us discussing the structural underpinnings of a rabbit.  When they sit back on their hind legs, they start looking like a ball of fur and it’s hard to make out what’s really going on inside.  When we got home Yvan and I asked Mr. Google if he could provide us with a rabbit skeleton to study.  He obliged and this morning I drew a rabbit skeleton, well sort of.  My hand was a bit better this morning but it’s still hard to get my lines to flow.  But I do understand lagomorph anatomy just a bit better.

Stillman & Birn Beta (10×7), Pilot Falcon, Sketch Ink Thea (grey)

Sketching Bobinette

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Long before Sesame Street, baby boomers cheered on puppets of one form or another as they came to our houses via television.  Television was new back then and we didn’t seem to mind that the shows were goofy, didn’t have any super-heros and not a single explosion upset the simplistic dialog of these shows.

Remember Howdy Doody and Buffalo Bob?  The people of Quebec didn’t see them, but they had Bobino and Bobinette and I never saw the Bobino show, so never got to see the marionette Bobinette perform.

Bobinette now stands in our civilization museum, next to Bobino’s suit coat and bowler hat, and while a blizzard was dumping yet another foot of snow on us, I drew her.   I probably should have used color to show off her pink dress and big blue eyes but I settled for a Pilot Kakuno and a brown/black mix of DeAtramentis Document ink.  I hope she’ll make you smile.  We need more smiling these days.

 

Getting My Brain Back Into Sketching

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My brain is rusty.  While I’m still having trouble with my drawing hand, it’s my brain that has fallen out of practice and needs some line miles to return my sketching to the miserable quality it once was.  So when Yvan and I made another trip to the hunting an fishing museum I was determined to make a lot of lines.

Instead of trying to create a detailed, well-proportioned drawing, I decided to sketch quickly (for me) so I could cover more ground – make more marks.  No pencil block in, no holding my pencil out to get proportions.  The goal was to make lines – lines that, hopefully, would look something like a duck.  Here’s what I managed to put to paper.

Stillman & Birn Nova (5.5×8.5), not sure what pens I used

Errors abound, of course, but they do look like ducks and generally they look like the ones I was looking at.  I label this a success with the caveat that I need to do a lot more of it to get my lines to flow better.  After a short break I decided to do the same thing with a bunch of fishing lures.  The drawing here was pretty “sketchy” (pun intended) so I added some color to add some life to the spread.

We say all the time that it’s the process, not the product.  Getting back into sketching is reward enough for me.

Spud Sketching In The Afternoon

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Winter is tough on people who like to sketch on location.  We can go to museums, sketch people in coffee shops, and maybe even visit a mall, but there are days when the weather is so bad that we can’t even do that.  What to do, what to do.

Those of you who follow Tina Koyama might have an answer.  You draw fruits and vegetables and since Seattle agreed to take some of the snow headed to Quebec, that’s what she’s been doing.  Recently she ventured beyond bananas, apples and garlic and drew a potato.

I’ve drawn apples, bananas, garlic, pumpkins, peppers, etc. (we get lots of snow), but I’ve never drawn a potato.  Following in Tina’s footsteps, today I drew a potato, or rather two potatoes since that was the road less traveled.

Stillman & Birn Beta (10×7), Pilot Kakuna, DeAtramentis Document Black, Daniel Smith watercolors