Drawing Lab: Color

Though my silence belies it, I'm still working my way through Carla Sonheim's great book.

20 drawings of the same dog with a chisel tip marker

I've already confessed to my awe of the blind contour, but some of the other techniques seemed deceptively simple. (Not the one of drawing the same dog in the same pose 20 different ways!)

Drawing and coloring a monkey with three to four "mystery tools" seemed simple enough. Draw, then color.  What I didn't expect was that forcing myself to use the given colors would help me break from the constraints of reality.

It sounds a bit dramatic, but it was surprisingly effective in helping me work through my paralyzing standards for realism in color. Of course, I still hope to return to realistic colors and master them. But, by breaking from reality I've given myself the freedom to see and capture other elements first.

Monkey with "Mystery tools"

Following artists on social media and even meeting up with professional artist often leaves me disappointed at how far away I still am from the realism I love. Taking the freedom to change colors and the looseness required to draw on index cards with a chisel-tip marker, I've been able to explore slightly more refined water color renderings. I hadn't expected it to help, but stepping away from my attempts at realism I am slowly coming to understand the pieces that go into making up a realistic piece.

"Twinky"

Huitzi

One great thing about living in the midwest is that there are craft breweries everywhere. Because these are small companies and can't afford huge ad campaigns, they have to work to stand out. I think it's such a treat to walk through the store and see product design for each company.

Many companies have a theme in which all their beers are named. One of my favorites is called Five Rabbit. Their beers are animal themed with a Central American twist.  I found this beauty at the store during the end of Polar Vortex and let's be frank, I'm a sucker hummingbirds. I stopped to examine the label and realized (of course!) that it is a Five Rabbit product.  The side of the bottle says:

Art journal page (where I should have used a thinner Pen)

"Huitzi is a winter beer that doesn´t wallow in the dark cold days of this season. Like it’s namesake, the Aztec hummingbird god Huitzilopoctli who smashed the winter to allow the sun to return, Huitzi looks forward to the brighter promise of spring. We think of it as a winter cooler."

WHAT--Did I just read that correctly: "hummingbird god?" Yes, yes there was an Aztec hummingbird god. Sort of...

Huitzilopochtli was a warrior and sun god.  In art he is depicted as a hummingbird (sometimes an eagle) or a warrior wearing hummingbird feathers. As the son of the earth goddess and a sun god, the legend says that he created the moon and stars from his siblings who tried to kill him and their mother. According to the legend the spirits of fallen warriors would join him in the sun and then be reincarnated as hummingbirds.

The product design for this beer and the stories its name honors caught my imagination. Over Christmas break I found an Art Blanc Modo Arte journal on clearance at Hobby Lobby and bought it as I always do art and office supplies: on impulse.  But like so many journals, the beautiful cover and blank pages keep me from using them. Not this time, Huitzi bounced around in my imagination as the snow fell and became the first entry in my new art journal.

Blind Giraffes or lab 2

Blind contours have always seemed to me a mark of arriving as an artist. Certainly not the only mark, but high on the list. Knowing one's hand and tools so well as to be able to render what the eye sees without concern for the hand is basically magic as far as I can tell.

Lab 2 in Sonheim's book is all about making blind contours of a single creature again, and again and then on top of the renderings made! As I rendered a giraffe multiple times I examined exactly which parts of the creature were clearest each time. It was a little discouraging to realize that my contours looked less and less like a giraffe as I worked. I mean I should be getting better with practice, right?

But the thing is I was improving! No, not improving in the goal of rendering the outline perfectly without checking on my hand, but improving. It wasn't until this exercise and examining my results that I realized I've been assuming the goal was a feat of hand-eye coordination worthy of the greatest athletes. In fact this exercise was strengthening my observation skills and helping me realize the details that make a giraffe a giraffe.

Layered contours with color added

A New Year & A Drawing Lab

While New Year's Resolutions are beginning to lag or maybe even fizzling out mine is taking its joyous shape.

It's not secret that I've struggled a great deal since moving to Chicago fifteen months ago. It was sometime last February when I realized to my horror that I couldn't write anymore. Poetry: gone. Fiction: gone. Letters: gone. Personal journal: gone. I'd always thought of the fabled writer's block as having the desire to write but for some reason not being able to do so. This time writer's block was feeling the weight of stories in my heart and mind yet not being able to let them bleed out. Voices, echoes, moments from stories true and imagined crowded in. Once that would have meant writing them out and becoming empowered by them but  this time I was crippled by them and felt unable to even face them.
I did several thing to try to drown out the stories or forget them, but at last in November I forced myself to write. That's the thing of it, there were so many stories floating through me that I'd pushed deeper and deeper until when at last I sat down to write I even said aloud, "I don't have a story to tell." I wrote anyway, just to prove to myself that I could. A strange thing happened then, I began to feel myself waking up. Suddenly the things I had brought into my life to help me ignore the nagging of the stories I couldn't release were obvious for the shackles they had always been.  I left Chicago to visit family for the holidays in a way I didn't expect: excited. Excited to visit family, but also excited to return to Chicago in a new year and another chance to write.

This photo from the Amazon listing

 While there are more quiet resolutions for myself about writing, I  was given another new year's resolution as a Christmas gift. When my parents gave me Carla Sonheim's Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists I doubt they meant it to be a goal for my new year, but 52 drawing exercises is just perfect to have one for each week of the year! As the cover might suggest, this is not a book for realistic renderings instead Sonheim says that her goal is to make drawing fun again. The book has seven units and the first is about finding inspiration from animals. Within each unit there are several "drawing labs" with instructions for a drawing exercise and tips for taking the drawing further.
In the first week of 2014 I eagerly started the first lab "Cats on a Bed." The exercise involves using your bed (or in my case a pillow) to make loose drawings of cats from memory and imagination. This was a lot of fun! It was even more fun because when I'd run out of poses that I could imagine a cat in I would turn to my husband and say,"What else do cats do?" and that darling man would describe or ever act out another cat pose. The "taking it further" for this lab was to select one or two favorite poses and render them in another media. Because I'm giving myself a week for each lab, and because I liked several poses I ended up doing several of the poses in watercolors. I included one page of my sketches and my watercolor cats below.
So far the hardest thing about this New Year's resolution has been to not do all the exercises in 52 days!

One page of cats on a pillow

Colored cat

Red kitty eating

Blue kitty turns her back to you

Green kitty just wants to be petted

Orange kitty is scared

Purple kitty stretches

Mysterious purple kitty