7" x 5" | Pencil on Paper

I only had two goals yesterday. First was to take some photos of butterflies and second was to do some pencil drawing; both were completed.

The female house sparrow you see was inspired by a photo I took in Washington DC April 2009. Somehow she seems to be an expression of how I have been feeling lately, but I won’t elaborate on that.

Butterflies are surprisingly difficult to get good photos of. Here are a few of then decent ones I caught. I wasn’t particularly happy with any of them, but that might be a sign that one of them should become a painting. Generally, my paintings are inspired by photos that are not particularly good. I almost never want to paint a great photo, because it is already in its ideal form.

I also discovered a vine down at the end of my driveway with some really neat flowers.

As always, I had to snap a few of the dog. Phoenix is really photogenic. Chewing on sticks in the backyard is still one of her favorite things to do.

And finally, I think this next one is my favorite photo of Phoenix ever. I particularly like it in sepia as seen:

I actually had a lot of trouble that evening because I initially picked a difficult angle, and then I moved probably 15mns in and had to move a lot of the lines…so it really cut down my time. You can tell that my focus area was on the legs, and in particular the lower bent leg. The upper body looks strange because I didn’t place the fabric she was laying on which covered some of her skin. Without seeing what is covering some of the skin, the shape looks kind of odd and too narrow. Anyway…some days things click, and some days they don’t.

Week seven I was mainly experimenting with different kinds of lines. I don’t think either experiments were particularly successful, but they were interesting all the same.

I am in the middle of a painting I will try to finish and post in the not too distant future. It’s of some more pink blossoms and a glass. These days, all I am interested in painting is flowers and glass. But I think it’s just that time of year.

There are some really great buds on a bush at the back of my house right now. I am trying to decide which one of these I will paint. I’m leaning towards the second one. I really love the drama of the lighting…not that I couldn’t add some to the first…we’ll see.

Session Five

This was a surprisingly difficult pose, and also was a lot of fun. This was 30mns, but I could have spend at least an hour.


I was daring and used a pen for the first time here. I messed up the legs, but the upper body turned out okay and it was interesting. This was a 20mn pose.

Session Six

This was a hard pose. I had such a tough time getting the proportions, that I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked. And I still didn’t nail the the position as well as I wanted to. It was a 30mn pose.

I thought this was an incredibly inspiring pose. Wish I had more than a little under 30mns with it! This was an awesome model. He wasn’t the only one though, we’ve had lots of great models at DAC.

Before I move on to the sketches, here are some daffodils from my back yard the other day. They seem to come up around my birthday every year, which is a nice treat. However they always seem to get a cold shock and  whither quickly. I like the focus in this photo on just one flower thanks to my amazing 50mm prime lens I got for xmas.

Now on to the figure drawing sketches. Sorry about the really heavy shadows. That’s what you get for taking photos in the evening while standing on a chair. I couldn’t be bothered to re-do them though.

Session three

15mn with a focus on the knee

30mn with a focus on the midsection

Session four

15mn cropped to focus

30mn focus on shadows

I’m not completely done with it. This was my first painting on my new linen boards. I am really liking them. I am considering buying some 3m sticky spray and sticking them to cardboard while I’m working on them. I would get the adjustable stuff.

Also, this figure drawing class is encouraging me to do some more sketching in my spare time. I couldn’t sleep a few days ago, so I did the following little sketch at about 3am.

I have my figure drawing class again tonight. I am looking forward to it despite feeling like I might have a cold coming on.

The other week I felt inspired to paint some pistachios. Not sure if I’m done with the painting yet, but it’s been a while, so I thought I would post my progress. If I work on them some more, I will probably post the revision. But I didn’t really intend this 5×7 to be a drawn out process. Pistachios have an amazing range of color and at the time, the sun was hitting them in an interesting way.

Also, I’ve been struggling lately about what the optimal surface to oil paint on is. So far my favorite is gessoed watercolor paper. But the prep time involved is somewhat undesired and I don’t like the flimsiness. I experimented with canvas paper for the pistachios and just hated the surface. I have ordered some oil primed linen panels to try out, and I have high hopes for them. So far the texture seems right on and I like the firmness of board and being able to use a regular frame. I don’t like stretched canvas for almost any reason these days…although I realize that at large sizes it might be the best choice.

Secondly, I registered for another class at the Durham Art Center. So far this is my second class there and I love them both. Last time I took Intermediate Painting and it was great. I plan to take it again but I can really only do one at a time. This session I decided I wanted to focus on drawing. Not regular drawing though, that’s too tame. This time I decided I needed to take figure drawing for a number of reasons:

1. I have no experience drawing the human figure whatsoever.
2. I feel that the skills used in learning to draw the human figure will translate into all my artwork.
3. I tend to get very involved in detail and spent a lot of time erasing and redrawing lines. Live models don’t really allow for that. The poses are very limited and the challenge of the allotted space will be good for me.
4. I don’t get charcoal. Paint makes sense to me with blending a shading. It just clicks. I can even get by fine with pencil. When I use charcoal however, the implementation of whatever I’m doing seems to have no grace whatsoever. So I just feel like I need to get a feeling for the medium because I like looking at charcoal drawings, I just have not developed any finesse with them myself.

Next are two of my very first figure drawings! They are all about 15 minute poses, possibly 20. Obviously the shading is pretty terrible, but the proportions are okay, especially on the second one. I would love to take both figure drawing and painting during the same session if I can manage to swing it.

After two sessions, my feeling about all figure drawing is: love the instructor, love the class, love the challenge. There are a lot of talented people taking the course with me, and I really enjoy seeing their interpretation of the work. Everybody has a different style. My work has no style yet, I’m just trying to sort out how to deal with getting out of my head for 15mns and sorting out this whole charcoal thing. The only success I have had with charcoal is eraser drawings, I can make those look good (where you wash the page with charcoal and erase out the picture) but I certainly will not lean on that crutch to get me through anything.

The human body and face has some of the most interesting shadows and curves to draw (and paint I’m sure). It’s way outside of my comfort zone to confine a drawing to a time limit and that’s great. Part of the purpose is to get you to stop thinking about what you’re drawing and just draw…that is very hard for me.

From class one:

From class two:

Each received a light watercolor wash for color and the ink was applied on top. I have also included the photos that served as inspiration.

The Art

The Inspiration

I was also lucky to have the opportunity to see my aunt who traveled all the way from England over the holidays. She has asked me for an ink drawing inspired by her stories about her chickens. That should be interesting.

Below is a photo of my aunt and I, albeit a bit of a fuzzy one. The rough part of being the only one who can operate the digital SLR camera is that when other people touch it, they don’t understand quite how to get it in focus.