Drawing in Public!

EDM #36  Draw in public.  I have to say, this challenge scared me a lot.  I am accustomed to drawing--and making mistakes--in the privacy of my own home, not under the scrutiny of strangers.  It's been years since I've taken an art class, and it's been ages since I've been able to go and just sit in a cafe or a park with nothing else to do but draw.  This was the challenge, though, so I went to a neighborhood cafe, ordered an iced coffee and sat outside at a table.  I found myself kind of rushing through this -- trying to get it done before anyone noticed.  There were people sitting nearby and walking by, but no one seemed too interested.  But very near the end, terror of terrors, someone came over to see what I was doing.  He turned out to be a very kind man.  He told me that I should do the drawing in color and sell it to Roost (the shop in the drawing) for fifty bucks.  "And two extra dollars for a nice gold frame." Good entrepreneurial spirit.  On the whole, it was a very pleasant experience, and I should do it again.

I chose charcoal pencil, my fastest medium, not knowing when Simon would wake up from his nap.  I got more and more detailed the longer I was allowed to sit there, but it's still very sketchy.

Keys

EDM #37  Draw some keys.  I skipped #36 (draw in public) because I couldn't go outside during Simon's nap.  Hopefully I'll be able to tomorrow.  These are my work keys.  I'm not sure what one of them does.  I do love my pretty little Edelweiss Swiss Army knife -- I need to always remember to take it off my key ring whenever I fly.  I don't want to lose it!

I used my charcoal pencil today.  I thought keys would work well with it.  Honestly, my favorite part of this drawing is the key ring.

A Bicycle Built for Two (or three)

EDM Challenge #35  Draw a bicycle or a part of one.  My boss and his wife ride a tandem bicycle together.  It's totally adorable.  They are going to have a baby in September, and I really, really hope they get to recreate this scene.  I hope it brings to mind a nearby picnic on the lake, and not a lonely, sad, empty bicycle.

I had fun with this one -- trying to fill most of the page with paint.  I used a lot more paint than I usually do!  I don't know what to do with backgrounds.  Do you start with the background and hope that it doesn't bleed through to your foreground stuff?  I started with the bike and then painted things around it, but you can totally tell.  Is that just something I have to live with if I'm using watercolors?  I'm terrified of oil painting, but it would be nice to just paint over an already-dried background -- or something I didn't like!

Look, it's fall!

EDM Challenge #34  Draw a fall leaf.  When I first started these challenges, it was mid-July and the end of summer seemed ages away.  I scanned the list to see what I had to look forward to and I saw 34, draw a fall leaf.  34 days from mid-July?  There's no way there will be any fall leaves yet.  But here we are, the end of August, and fall is definitely in the air, even if the temperature isn't cooperating.  This is one of the millions of black locust twigs that will fall on our street over the next month.

Gouache on cold-press paper today.  I don't feel a huge difference between cold- and hot-press paper.  I can feel that there is a difference, I just don't see it affecting the way I'm working with it.  I'm trying to choose hot-press for the more detailed subjects and cold-press for the simpler ones, but I'm not sure whether it's helping.  I wish I'd been able to get a finer line on the top of the twig, but overall, I'm pretty happy with the way this turned out!

Cat's Eye

EDM Challenge #33  Draw an eye.  I've worked a lot on drawing human eyes, but I realized that I've never tried to draw a cat's eye.  So when I thought about which eye to draw for this challenge, I figured it might be fun to try to draw our cat Nigel's eye.  I had to do it from a photo or else I would have had to keep waking him from his nap (I wish he had the same compassion for us in the middle of the night).  Cat's eyes are interesting!  I wasn't able to show the layers and textures that you can see when you really study them, but I think I got some of the cool stuff across.

I used gouache today and kept wishing that I had a good way to draw the fur.  I tried a fairly dry brush with barely watered down paint, but it kept looking more like feathers than fur.  Hopefully the drawing looks more like a cat than a rooster!

Metal

EDM Challenge #32  Draw something metallic.  This is a pot that I got on serious sale at Now You're Cooking in Ithaca, New York, where I worked for a little while after college.  I learned so much working at that store -- when and how to use certain cookware, how to hone and sharpen knives, what to call some of the very specialized tools, as well as how to deal with customers and use a cash register.

I went back to gouache today.  I've been very happy with some metallic textures I've gotten with charcoal, but I decided to challenge myself and try it with paint.  I didn't do any pencil sketching before I dove in with paint, which is why the handles are a bit smaller than they ought to be.  I'm not sure what I like better -- I like the freedom and devil-may-care feeling of just starting paint on a blank sheet, but I also strive for accuracy.  I'll have to do more and see what feels better.  I am, however, very happy with the copper color.  I went a little overboard with the white on top of it, but there were a lot of reflections!

Collection

EDM Challenge #31  Draw something you collect.  I'm not really a collector.  I'm a hoarder, certainly; I don't throw things away easily.  But I don't tend to try to collect a bunch of one kind of thing.  At least, that's what I thought when I first saw this challenge.  Then I thought, no, wait.  I definitely collect musical instruments.  Shawn and I both do.  It's kind of a habit of ours.  And it's so much fun to go into a music store and look around and try a bunch of stuff--and then you think, hey, I could learn to play this!  Most of our instruments are totally useful.  We gig with them and they've paid for themselves many times over.  That blue piano, though.  What are we going to do with it?

Colored pencils today.  No reason, I just didn't know what I was going to draw beyond the first two pianos, and I didn't want to use paint for those two.  Instruments are very monochromatic, really, and I thought I didn't want to just use black paint for a black piano and blue paint for a blue piano.  Then I started adding the other stuff, and I guess paint would have been nice.  I like this, though.  It feels sketchy (in a good way).

Poang

EDM Challenge #30  Draw a chair.  This is the oldest, rattiest chair in my house, but also the only one I can actually say anything about.  My mom and step-dad got this chair sometime in the 80s, I believe.  It had already been worked over pretty well by several cats by the time I took it with me after college, and since then our two cats have had quite a time with it.  It's got rips and stains and there are bits of fluff and string hanging from the back where the cats really work at it, but I still really like it.  When we finally get rid of it (and I know that eventually we'll have to), I'll be rather sad to see it go.

I had such a good time with the charcoal pencil a couple of days ago that I decided to do this one in charcoal, too.  It's a beige chair with light wood, so color wouldn't really add all that much.  This is a "hard" charcoal pencil, whereas the appliance challenge was drawn with a "soft" pencil.  I'm not really sure which I prefer.  This kind of felt like a messy #2 pencil, and I think I prefer my charcoal a bit...fluffier.  But I do like the result.  My charcoal pencils also need sharpening and I have no idea how to go about that.  Any suggestions?

Andersonville Water Tower

EDM Challenge #29  Draw something architectural.  I live in a city with amazing architecture and I work in a historic building, but I'm not going downtown today, so I chose something iconic from the neighborhood.  This is the Water Tower in Andersonville, on which they paint a Swedish flag, to celebrate the neighborhood's Swedish-American heritage.

Watercolor pencils today.  I was originally using them as a way to do a quick sketch, and then I was going to go over them with gouache, but I wound up liking the lighter, simpler look of this.  I wish I hadn't done the brick part of the building, though.  It's too dark and you can't really tell what it is.  I did enjoy doing the clouds, though.

Nana's Mixer

EDM Challenge #28  Draw an appliance.  Shawn's grandmother, Nana, was a baker.  She worked at a bakery for about forty years, and on her own time made tons of cookies and pies.  She got this mixer at some point in the 80s and with it made tens of thousands of cookies and innumerable pies.  And they were all delicious!  Now we have the mixer, and, though we do use it a lot, I think it needs to be making more cookies.

Naptime today happened in the car.  We drove down to Hyde Park and I stayed in the car so Simon could have a bit of a nap.  Not wanting to deal with paint in the car, I grabbed my charcoal pencil, smudger, and kneaded eraser.  The only drawing class I took in college had us working mostly with charcoal, and I had forgotten how much I enjoy this medium!

Momo

EDM Challenge #27  Draw a book.  Every time I look at this book, Momo, I think of my friend Naomi, who (with her husband) gave these out as wedding favors at their wedding.  She is a children's librarian and in an early conversation, he brought up a children's book she'd never heard of.  She was impressed, time passed, and now they're married!  It's a great book, by the author of The Neverending Story (it's very different from that book, though).

I started this with watercolor pencils, but the colors were so soft and the book cover is so vibrant, that I got out the trusty gouache set and went over it all with those colors.  I'm glad I did; the result is much better than it was.

Ocarina

EDM Challenge #26  Draw anything you'd like.  I didn't get to draw yesterday, so when I woke up this morning, I just grabbed my book, went into the living room, and drew the first thing I saw that struck my fancy.  This is an ocarina we picked up at a street market in Monterrey, Mexico, when we were there for my brother-in-law's wedding a few years ago.  I like the sound a lot, and I like how you change the notes, just by moving your hand.  As I wrote on the drawing, it really makes you want to do the Ennio Morricone "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" theme.  As a social experiment, I should hand this ocarina to people and see how long it takes for them to try it.

When I picked up the sketchpad, I also picked up the nearest drawing supplies, which happened to be an old set of Crayola colored pencils that desperately need sharpening.  I got very frustrated with not being able to do a sharp line, but the shading came pretty easily.  It was difficult to get anything to be dark, though.  I've never used high-quality colored pencils, so I have no idea how different they would feel from Crayola.

Hopleaf Glass

EDM Challenge #25  Draw a glass (the kind you drink from).  This is one of the Hopleaf pint glasses that we've gotten over the last couple of years (it has water and lemon in it, instead of beer).  We live just a few blocks from the Hopleaf, and it is truly great -- a large beer selection and tasty, tasty Belgian food.  However, they take their "21 years and above" rule very seriously, so we can't go with our 22-month-old, even for lunch.  It's been a good thing for our wallets and waistlines, I suppose, but man, do I miss those frites.  Time to get a babysitter.

I mixed my gray too dark and spent the rest of the drawing time trying to lighten it!  I got it closer to what I wanted, but it would have been so much easier if I'd just done it right from the start.  I do like some of the highlights I was able to put in, though, particularly around the bottom of the glass, and I had fun drawing the leaf.

Orange Slices

EDM Challenge #24  Draw a piece of fruit.  My son Simon had an orange with his lunch today, but neglected to eat the last two pieces.  They looked so pretty on the plate there, so I drew them!

Gouache again today, but no pencils or pens this time.  Just paint.  Really, I don't know why I haven't been doing this for years.  I'm having such a good time.  I might just go out and buy an easel!  Actually, what I should buy is a scanner, because I'm just not taking good photos of these drawings.  The colors are off and the whole thing is fuzzy.  Any suggestions?

Foot

EDM Challenge #23  Draw your foot.  Second drawing of the day!  Hooray, I'm caught up!  My foot is apparently quite bumpy.  I'd never noticed.  My little toe hides under the fourth toe, which my husband tells me is cute.  It's interesting spending so much time looking at your foot.  I was also watching "A View to a Kill" while drawing this.

This was my second experiment with gouache, and I still love it!  I had a little trouble with the color, but I was able to mix things and layer colors on to get it fairly close to what I wanted.

Indispensable Sweatshirt

EDM Challenge #22  Draw a piece of clothing.  I couldn't post yesterday.  I had to work through naptime and then bedtime went badly because Simon has a cold, so by the time he was actually asleep, I was pooped and couldn't do anything.  I had wanted to draw something everyday, and I did 21 days in a row, but yesterday was just hard.  Maybe I'll try to do two drawings today to make up for it!  Anyway, this is my indispensable red sweatshirt.  It's the perfect weight for slightly cool weather and it feels totally comfy.

This was my first experience with pens and gouache!  I've had these supplies sitting in my art supply box but had never tried them out.  I've seen so many beautiful paintings from the other people in the Everyday Matters group, that I was inspired to try them.  I see what all the fuss is about!  Painting is fun!  I didn't use the best paper (a kid's watercolor pad that doesn't seem any different from computer paper) because I didn't think my first attempt would turn out, but then I wound up liking it, so here it is, wrinkles and all.  I started with the pens (these waterproof pens I've had for ages -- I'm missing the black one, though, which I would have liked), and then filled in with the gouache in varying degrees of watery-ness.  I don't know if that's right, but I sure had a good time.  That black space is a shadow because, though I was able to take a brighter photo than usual because there was direct sunlight, it was only a little square of sunlight!

Vintage Sheet Music

EDM Challenge #21  Draw something old, antique, or vintage.  My grandmother was a wonderful pianist and had a large library of sheet music, both classical and popular.  Between that library and my mom's and stepdad's mental libraries, I grew up learning songs that often baffle my husband (why does a thirty-two year old know songs like "Betty Co-Ed"?).  I love them, though.  And the covers are amazing!  Such style!

I am very happy with my "Second Hand Rose" drawing, and pretty happy with my "How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree?)" drawing.  I had expected to have more fun with that one, but it was too small to put the detail in that I wanted to, so I had to limit the background images to a barrel of cider and a dancing girl.  So wicked!  I set it up so you could just see a bit of "Betty Co-Ed", mostly so it would have the colors (which I love) and the title.  But now that I've finished, it's a shame I didn't show the face that goes with that salmon-colored hair (which, according to the lyrics, is supposed to be golden for Princeton, to go with her red lips for Harvard and blue eyes for Yale).

Swimming Lesson

EDM Challenge #20  Draw something "Dad".  Recently, Shawn was teaching Simon to swim in the lake at his parents' house.  He did so well!  We know how important it is for kids to learn to swim, so we're going to build on this success and get him swimming this winter in an indoor pool.  By next summer, he'll be swimming across the lake!

I went with a no-details approach to this drawing, and I'm pretty happy with it!  I was reading a beautiful blog (http://scratchyas.com/) and she mentioned starting an architectural study with just the shadows, then filling in the lines later.  She showed the step-by-step process and pointed out that you could tell the structure of the building even before the lines were added because the shadows tell you so much.  I wondered if I could do it with faces.  It didn't work as well with Simon (the baby), because there wasn't as much of his face to see, but I really like the way it shows Shawn's face.  I might like it even more if I added lines and details, but I was afraid to ruin it!  I'm also happier with this water than most water I've ever drawn.

Something I Made

EDM Challenge #19  Draw something you've made.  I've knitted so many things, but I've never tried to draw any of them!  It's not easy, I've discovered.  These are the kilt hose that I am in the process of making for my husband for our seventh anniversary.  The traditional seventh anniversary gift is wool (or copper, but I prefer wool), and he wore a kilt at our wedding and I knitted my wedding dress, so I thought that the perfect seventh anniversary gift would be hand-knitted kilt hose.  Of course, it would have been more perfect if they had been finished on time....  Anyway, it's summer.  Who's thinking about wool knee socks now?

I thought charcoal might make the fuzziness of the wool come through, but I was wrong.  I also went overboard on the shading and made the lovely cream-colored yarn look like a mottled gray.  Next time I draw something knitted, I think I'll try paint.  Or colored pencils, maybe.  Oh, and the sock really was kind of twisted to the left like that towards the toe.  I could have fixed it, but instead I just drew it that way and made it look like I'd made a mistake.  Oh well!

The View from my Office

EDM Challenge #18  Draw the vew from a window of your house, apartment, office, etc.  Where I sit at work, I can look across the street and see this house.  It's a very nice house, and I enjoy the view.  I actually prefer the view of the garden that's right there, but I'm not at the office today and I don't have a photo of the garden from my desk, and I did have a simple drawing I did ages ago of this house.  I made a new drawing from the previous drawing, but it's missing a lot of details--the previous drawing was rather sketchy.

This was another sketch with the watercolor pencils.  I'm quite enjoying them.  I realized that my sketchpad had both cold and hot press sheets (I really don't know anything about watercolor!), so I did this one on the hot press, to see how it felt.  It was easier to do small things, so I wish I could have added more detail, but I can't trust my mind to remember things well enough to paint.  I love it when people can just draw something from memory and it looks perfect, or at least plausible.  I'd love to be able to do that.

Making Music

EDM Challenge #17  Draw a musical instrument.  I drew two.  One is the "Backpacker's Banjo" that my step-dad was planning on getting rid of and asked if I wanted (yes!), and the other is an African percussion instrument that I think is called a calabash rattle, or something like that.  I didn't feel like drawing a piano, a bass, or a saxophone, and I don't have my accordion with me at the moment.  And anyway, these two instruments are perfectly fun to look at and draw!

This was my first experience with watercolor pencils.  I figured them out more as I went along, I think, which is the reason I continued drawing after finishing the banjo.  I'm glad I did, because I think the rattle turned out much more painterly and more like what I enjoy about watercolor.  I look forward to learning to use these better.

I still don't know how to take a photo that's not dark.  I tried natural light, flash, camera phone, and a good regular camera, and they all turned out dark.  Do I need to invest in a flatbed scanner?

Thank you, piano technicians!

EDM Challenge #16  Draw a favorite tool.  I drew several, but they are used in conjunction with each other.  I did a year-long course at the Chicago School for Piano Technology and absolutely loved it.  Wonderful school, wonderful people.  Piano technicians use tons of amazing and incredibly specialized tools, but I think my favorites are the tools used for tuning.  Watching and listening to a good tuner make a piano sing is a very calming experience.  It's like they're restoring order to the universe.

I think I enjoy drawing tools.  I like the angles and the metal, even if I don't always get it the way I want.  I didn't even know how to begin the felt (and for a while it just looked like a weird rose...kinda still does, I guess), but I think it mostly turned out looking soft and floppy and felty, which is what I wanted.

Fallen Birch

EDM Challenge #15  Draw a tree or trees, leaves, or branches.  Here is a part of a fallen birch tree in my husband's parents' backyard.  I really liked the look of the birch bark with the broken wood.

I'm really fairly happy with this.  I've drawn a lot of trees that have knobby, gnarly, bumpy bark, but I've never drawn a birch, even though I really love them.  I found it very satisfying to draw!  The background kind of annoys me, but it was stranger before I added it.  I also think I went overboard with the black in the broken wood part of it.  It kept not seeming dark enough, and then suddenly it had too many outlines.  I'll see if I can fix it someday.

Grumpy Morning Simon

EDM Challenge #14  Draw what you see in the morning when you get up.  Simon can now wake up, open his door, toddle into our room, and say, "up!"  (Sometimes he says, "up, please!")  As I wrote on the drawing, the earlier the hour, the grumpier the boy.  This morning was 5:00 a.m.

This doesn't really look like Simon.  There are bits that I got right, but as a whole, it's another kid.  Likenesses have always been a problem for me, particularly when I try to use color, because it's a whole other element I need to pay attention to.  I have only done one other drawing of Simon in his 21 months, and it was a sleep-deprived sketching session in a dark room after he'd finally gone to sleep.  I'd like to start doing some more and try to get better at capturing him.

Smart Phone

EDM Challenge #13  Draw your telephone (land line, cell, old-fashioned?)  I wish I had a nice, fancy, old-fashioned phone to draw, but we switched over to strictly cell phones years ago.  I do enjoy my smart phone, but sometimes I wonder if I really need to be able to do everything it does at any moment.  I get my work emails on my cell phone, so technically, I'm always at work.  That's not so good, is it?

I really think I would have had more fun drawing an actual telephone.  This was just a black and gray box.  I turned on the screen so there would be more interest, but then it got much more difficult!  The hand was a total throw-away afterthought, and therefore has some problems.  Oh well!

Dinner on the grill

EDM Challenge #12  Draw what you ate for dinner.  Too hot to cook indoors, so we had kebabs and corn on the grill.  Yum!

I had a lot of fun making the textures of the food, particularly the fruit (including the tomatoes).  The corn, however, was really tricky for me.  I didn't know how to make it look like a pile of stuff, and I didn't want to painstakingly draw every individual kernel.  Again, the shadows were a problem for me, as well as the circular plate.  Finally, I didn't know what to do with the onions (you probably didn't even see that there were onions).  I couldn't figure out a color and I couldn't get the texture right, so they wound up just being yellowish bits in between other pieces of more recognizable food.  I think I need to make a list of things to practice drawing.

Brown Sunglasses

EDM Challenge #11  Draw your glasses or sunglasses.  I feel very strongly about brown lenses in sunglasses.  They make the world look even more amazing, especially clouds.  When I drive with brown lens sunglasses, I am constantly gazing at the clouds.  They make everything look like a Maxfield Parrish painting, and I love it.

I do not know how to draw shadows.  I wanted to add them because otherwise it just looked like the glasses were floating in space, but I don't know how to make it look like they're on a surface, especially when it's a plain white surface, like this one.  Something to practice, I think!

Holding Hands

EDM Challenge #10  Draw your hand or hands (or someone else's).  Simon reaches up for my hand when he's going down stairs or is on uneven terrain; he pulls me by the hand when he wants me to go somewhere with him; and sometimes he just reaches over and takes my hand when we're sitting next to each other.  I love all of it.

As for the drawing, what is it about hands that makes them so hard to draw?  Why is it so difficult to measure distances and just make it look right?  I think I got fairly lucky with this one and it went mostly the way I wanted it to.  My blue jeans background, however, could use work.

The Diaper Bag - Organized Chaos

EDM Challenge #9  Draw a bit of "organized chaos".  I chose the diaper bag.  On first glance, it's completely chaotic.  It's a bag full of random bits of fluff, plastic, and cardboard.  I do have it carefully organized, though, and I can find anything I want in about five seconds.  As I wrote on the bottom of the drawing, I once drew a map of the bag for a babysitter, because I didn't want it to be too daunting to go through.

Drawing-wise, I did something a bit different this time.  I went with bold lines and bright colors, and I didn't care as much about how accurate it was.  I think the subject matter worked with it, but I know I won't be able to do it with everything.  At any rate, it was fun!

 The green giraffe's name is Rafa.

Watch

EDM Challenge #8  Draw your watch or other piece of jewelry.  I haven't worn a watch in years (I just use my cell phone, which has its limitations), but I keep meaning to get batteries in one or two watches so I at least have the option.  This is, for some reason, a thing that I can't manage to do.  It goes on my to-do list for months! Years!  I will get a battery in this watch, though, and I will do it very soon.  Maybe tomorrow.

I found the circular watch face to be very difficult to draw, and had to do lots and lots of little lines, rather than one good bold one.  This is something a drawing teacher once told me I do way too much of.  I'll do little feathery lines that make one long line, rather than just go for it.  I've gotten better, but not when I'm drawing circles!  The arm/hand in this drawing is very much an afterthought.  I didn't want to deal with all of the details.  And anyway, the hand-drawing challenge is in a couple of days.

Tootsie's Dog Treats Jar

EDM Challenge #7 Draw a bottle, jar, or tin from the kitchen. I decided to draw Tootsie Roll's jar of dog treats.  She was definitely wondering why I was paying so much attention to it!  It was fun to work on both the metal and glass in this.