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

The Fox Confessor

With school and work I haven't taken much time for being creative lately, but this week I miraculously finished my coursework before today! What with a dear friend's birthday this week and Neko Case's "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood" on repeat I decided to finally work on another template from the amazing Facebook group Ornation Creation (created and run by Ben Kwok).

Fox "tangle" based on Ben Kwok's template

Unlike my first attempt at one of the templates I consulted several ZenTangle patterns to give some structure to my animal.  (ZenTangle Patterns is a neat place to expand your doodling horizions! My fox certainly doesn't fit ZenTangle guidelines, but there is something soothing in giving structure and direction to ones doodles) For this fox I used three different ballpoint pens. My pen hoarding habit paid off with two different shades of orange, and a brown ballpoint pen. I was also pretty pumped to use my shiny new gold gel pen! The colors survived the scan well but they haven't printed well. The printing is a bummer since I want to send a print as a card to the aforementioned fox-loving friend, but then again a less vibrant fox isn't so bad.

Last month I made desktop calendar with hummingbird sketches I'd done, but I hadn't come up with anything for this month yet. I had photoshop open for another project and came up with a fox desktop calendar for October that I'm pretty excited about. Finished, it's 1280X800 (perfect for a 13" laptop). If you'd like to use it for your own, you can download a full-sized version here. Use it on your desktop, you blog background, etc but please give me credit and don't sell or otherwise use it for profit.

This is a smaller version of the desktop. Download the original here.