Catching Up for Now

My husband had an appointment at the VA dental office. It is in Prescott AZ, about 80 miles away so I packed candy and journal stuff to go along with me while I waited for him. The first picture is what I did while I waited. It's in the style of Alisa Burke who offers an ongoing class here.

I made a little travel palette to go in my journal in my purse. It takes up no room. In fact it sits inside my journal. It's made by cutting a piece of Sheer Heaven, a special plastic which can be used multiple ways as you can see here. I made it per the instructions found here. It worked really well as you can see.

And these are my latest pictures from Jane Davenport's class SuppliesMe. I plan on signing up for her next class!

A Few of My Recent Pages

 These are some recent pages in my journals.  They each stretched me a little.  To start with, my cat was drawn in colored pencil on red paper.  That meant getting my whitish cat to show up and I did that.  I didn't get the blue comforter to look as much like a comforter as I should have but after working so hard on the cat I was getting tired of it not coming out as I would have liked.  What is wrong?  To start with, she looks like she is colored in with a white pencil.  She doesn't look like she has fur.  I did okay I think on her face and it does look like my cat so I am happy about all that.  Also, I did this live with my cat turning her head this way and that and finally shifting even her body position so I feel good that I got her down as well as I did.  When I look back in years to come I am hoping to see that I have improved on her over time!

The next page was done with a pre-done background of a red dry brushed corner added to the page.  It took me a long time to figure out what to fill the page with.  I ended up doing my canary as he sat on his perch.  This was another live drawing but I probably will try for a photo next time.  He doesn't like me to stay so close and I can't see him if I'm not!  Reading glasses only make it worse.  I am happy with him but not his beak.  I didn't really get his whole face right but I have plenty of time to try again.  He was done with watercolor and a waterbrush.  I added a bit of penwork to finish him off as he seemed to need a little something after I added the background.

Next up comes my plastic, thermal, iced tea glass.  I decided to try out my new Pentel Pocket Brush Pen which I have heard such good things about.  Many of the people whose sketching I enjoy use these pens.  It actually is a fountain pen with a brush instead of a nib.  It was harder to draw with this pen over a pencil or regular pen than I was expecting.  The ink wasn't running strongly yet and I thought that was the way it worked but later found it started flowing very well.  Then I learned that I was going to need some practice to learn to control the thick and thin lines this brush can make.  Lastly I learned that on my multi-media paper at least, the ink does not dry very quickly and smeared when I went back in with watercolor.  So...

...I took another page to do some practicing!  I tried to see how it would do with comma and S strokes like I'd use in Folk Art painting.  I doodles little pictures quickly and just some lines, a couple of letters in calligraphic style and just tried to get used to the way this brush works.  I'm thinking if I can learn to control it, I will like how it can make the various lines and marks. 

At any rate, this is some of what I have been working on.  I have been taking a few classes, some better than others.  My favorite again, is the Imaginary Trip to Ireland with tour guide Laure Ferlita.  I'll be posting a few of the pictures later on. 

So what have you been working on?

Fake Journal Page Six

I have found out that a line drawn to show the shape is not really there on the object in reality. I actually knew this but hadn't seen it put into words really until I saw a blog post on Drawn2Life where Jennifer talks about why she draws as she does. Very interesting and I suggest you go take a look at the post if you haven't already. So anyhow, it led me to my current take on "fake".

I drew a continuous line drawing of my lamp I painted several years ago (it was a $5 lamp from a dollar store and I hated it till I painted it to match the furniture I'd painted). It was harder than I thought as I find I have to hold the Pitt pens so vertical to get them to draw that my hand started to hurt. I need to find a pen that will write at a slant which may better suit my left-handed curled grip. I colored it in this time with markers. Hope you enjoy it.

Red and Black

Maybe it was in the air on the eleventh but I just came over from Margaret Ann's blog where she did a great sketch on the eleventh on a Trader Joe's grocery sack. She made it in red and black.

On the eleventh, I finished a trio of pages in my journal about fairies. It started as a challenge from my granddaughter to "draw a fairy". It ended with this last page when my daughter sent me a photo of the two youngest being fairies for the day (this is breakfast and they wore their wings till bedtime even having to pick the right jammies to fit their fairy "personality"). I used red and black which is a very unusual color combo for me so when I saw Margaret Ann's drawing I thought I'd show my same color - same day drawing.