Embracing creativity as an Artist, Coach and Teacher
You can find my ink and watercolor drawings and textiles for sale, blog postings on the creative process, information on creativity coaching with me, current workshops I am teaching, and examples of my work over the years.
New notecards have arrived and are now available for purchase in my shop. I now have 8 images and two sizes of cards, (4.25" x 5.5") and (5" x 7"). I also have a limited number of postcards of the Small but Important Things in Cuba to Know drawing.
Not all art is fabulous. Not everything that an "artist" puts her hands on turns out to be wonderful. Like everything else in life, there is a lot to learn. And when at the beginning of something, it's easy to get frustrated because it's hard to do or doesn't look like you imagine it should. It is easy to get stalled and procrastinate when those feelings come up.
I would like to be better at drawing people. I would like them to be accurate and to have the right kind of proportions a real person would and I'd like them to look natural. Unfortunately and fortunately the only way to get better is to practice, and practice and practice. I joined a February challenge offered by the site Sktchy called #30Faces30Days. They send a new portrait every day and ideally I do that drawing that day. That's not happening, but I do try to at least work on the next face I'm on every day. There's a lot of grumbling, some whining, but there's also a lot of satisfaction as I work through the faces.
The above portrait is my drawing of the below person. I started with pencil, then did all the hard edges with my Platinum Carbon pen and ink and did some shading. Finally I added various washes of indigo watercolor. Onto the next portrait.
I now have two sizes of notecards available with some of my drawings from Cuba! There is a smaller size of 4 1/4" x 5 1/2" or regular size of 5" x 7" (pictured above). Just click on the link to the Shop to order.
I really do like architectural drawing even though I don't do as much of it as I would like. There are only so many hours in the day... I've been going through Rice's Church Primer as a way of getting some architectural sketching in and its terminology. I had finished up a section on the basics of gothic traceries and I came across a diagram that showed how a gothic window could be constructed. It's from one of those wordless diagrams from thee late 1800's that shows the geometry and background lines on one side and the completed detailed drawing on the other. This is my drawing of that.
I like to do travel journaling in my sketchbooks. This is a page from one of my Cuba sketchbooks that I completed recently with some of the bits and pieces brought home from my trips. I have fun with trying to make the items are realistic as I can within the ink and watercolor format. The coins, bills and card in this sketchbook spread (11"x8.5"/28cm x 21.6cm) are real size. I like to record the memorabilia of receipts, tickets, pamphlets, maps and odds and ends in my sketchbooks. I will usually mix them in with sketches related to the event. What do you like to record?
I now have a pyramid watercolor chart which is a quick visual summary of my favorite yellow mixes with Daniel Smith Transparent Pyrrol Orange. I had done 18 mixes and chose these ten. I did not include DS Hansa Yellow Light and WInsor & Newton Yellow Ochre in the chart since they are already part of my permanent palette.
No matter where you are in your learning path, it's always good to take classes to learn something new, refresh skills and be challenged to do things you wouldn't normally do. I am taking a class from Liz Steel called SketchingNow Watercolours that begins 10 Jan 2018. She does mostly sketchbook work and is a trained architect. She has a much looser and wetter style of painting than I do and I'd like to learn more of how she approaches watercolors.
Many artists like to take stock of their current materials and Liz is no different. She suggested that the students draw and paint out their current watercolor palettes and make notes of what paints are included. Here is my current set of mostly Daniel Smith, a few Winsor & Newton and solo Holbein, Schmincke and Sennelier watercolors. Palettes are so much more interesting painted out because the color can be seen. It's surprising how different a dry pan of paint can be from a painted swatch on paper.