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).