Saturday Morning

While having my coffee this morning I spent some time playing around with some new drawing materials that I just bought this week.

I picked up a Pentel brush tipped ink pen; it has india ink in a cartridge that is refillable and a real paint brush tip. I enjoy drawing with it and look forward to continued experiments. I also picked up my first Niji water brush, mostly to use while out and about sketching, but it was handy to use while curled up in a chair as well. The only tricky thing seems to be filling it with water. In order to use the water brush I broke out the Derwent watercolor pencils - always fun. All in all it was a good morning sketching!

City Sketch

Here is my finished submission in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts Foot in the Door 4 show. Had a few moments when I wasn't sure exactly how I was finishing this, but finish I did. It is submitted and will be on display with all of the other Minnesota artists' work until June.
Now I just need to stay in my studio and finish a couple of the other projects I started along with this one!

Book Project

I am really stuck and wish I wasn't pushing a deadline to get this project done, as now that I have it at this point I am not sure how to finish. My original plan was to draw images of people doing things in the city in each little window and now I am not sold on that idea. I am going over the watercolor with an ink drawing. It is what to do with the windows. I may end p cutting them out, or reusing close-ups of the buildings. Oh well back to cover my boards and ink at least I will be moving forward.

Virtual Paintout - finally

So, for months I have been following the blog of Bill Guffey, The Virtual Paintout.

Every month I find an image and save it to my desktop and never end up doing the challenge. Well, I finally did it and finished a painting. This month the location is Corsica, France. I did a pencil drawing, used watercolor and then decided to do an ink drawing over the top with a Sharpie pen. Of course now that it is done I am not entirely happy with it, but oh well. It is finished and it felt good to paint again just for me.

Lazy Blogger . . .

So, I guess I am not the worlds best blogger. I like the idea of blogging much the same way I liked the idea of having a journal as a kid. I would find the perfect book and start with the best intentions and after a week or two never go back again to write. Of course, I would find the journal ages later, cross out everything I had written, and most often get a new book and try again. With the same result.

That being said I have a couple of blogs I like to look at, like the Virtual Paintout and Karin Jurick's Different Strokes for Different folks and still hope to try this blog thing. If for no other reason than to try and display work that I create, for me, rather than as an example for a class.

So, I have found the notebook and I am trying again with the best of intentions.

Finished botanicals

Here are the finished drawings. Now I have to try to frame them, despite using the same paper for all three, they are all a little different size.

Attempt at Botanicals

Well I need a wedding gift for a cousin and his bride to be, they are registered at a local store for some really lame botanical type sketches. After looking at them, I decided I was not going to pay $25 for something that I felt I could do better myself. Two afternoons later, the wedding looms on Friday and all I have are pencil sketch beginnings, but I do think they will be better than the ones in the store. And besides, it will make a very personal gift to have originals I painted, rather than the ones from the store that anyone could buy, right? I am probably just making myself crazy, but honestly I am bored this summer, and need to keep finding ideas to keep me busy. SO anyway here are the sketches so far.

I am off to paint.