Happy Friday! Happy Weekend! School meeting cancelled yesterday while my youngest child was still at preschool and my oldest child was at a playdate. Instead of eating one of their yummy fattening desserts I sat outside and drew the Ula Cafe during my free hour. So glad that I had my little portable art studio with me and was ready to draw.
See you on Monday!
A family stops for a snack before a ukelele class inside the complex.
Want to improve your drawing? Don't know when to draw or what to draw? How about taking on the 75 Day Drawing Challenge? Started by watercolor artist and sketchbook keeper Brenda Swenson it has grown and developed into a popular artistic challenge for many people to customize. The only rules that stay constant are the 75 day length and using ink or another permanent line. I made the challenge my own with ink and doing blind contour drawings. A blind contour drawing is a drawing where you focus mostly on the outline, don't lift your pen as you draw and don't look away from your subject (so you don't look at your paper) while you are drawing. Do this for 75 days in a row (more or less) at a fairly consistent time for maximum effectiveness. I find the morning while I drink my coffee to be a good time for this activity. It can take as little as 5 minutes, but some people go all out and spend twenty minutes or longer on their drawings. I am content treating this as a warmup activity and spending rarely more than ten minutes on my drawing. I have also started journaling in the pages and including the date and weather forecast in the margins. Sometimes I fill in the drawings with details and sometimes I add bits of color. But they all start with a blind contour line that I mark the start with dot and an S and the finish with a dot and an F to keep me honest.
It was a hard challenge for me to start but once I got going I noticed a change in my drawing and easily continued. Until around day 35 when I realized I had been doing this challenge for over a month and wasn't even halfway done. I am not used to drawing challenges that last longer than a month. But I made it through that bumpy period and now here I am almost at day sixty and with well over 100 blind contour drawings under my belt and I am looking at ways to keep this habit going after 75 days and after my sketchbook is full. I'll probably just start a new sketchbook with simple graph paper and save the next Moleskine from my clearance stockpile for something else.
Finishing up an art filled week with a sunny and mild Friday and looking forward to the weekend. Loving these early fall weather days here in Boston. On Tuesday and Wednesday I wandered and on Monday and Thursday I stayed close to home. Today I will have two little ones with me so any adventures will need to include them.
from my Wednesday wanderings
The car is in the shop for the next couple of days so I am either on foot, on bike or taking the T around Boston while the kids are at school. There are still jackhammers outside my window so I don't really want to go home to work. Plus the weather is beautiful and mild. What kind of adventures should I go on? Yesterday I stayed in my general area and had a lovely time drawing JP, but today I think I will go a little father. Maybe the South End?
My home filled with the sound of jackhammers in the morning, dreaming of more peaceful locations.
So glad that it's Friday. It has been a long week of a long summer here and this morning I am super grateful for the upcoming weekend. Hoping to get some beach time and drawing time.
For a few months now I have been keeping a sketchbook in ink and it has changed my drawing for the better. My lines are more confident and my drawings improved rather quickly and steadily after making the switch. About two weeks ago I hit a rut where I wasn't growing as quickly anymore that I found horribly frustrating. And worse I was growing bored with my drawings. So I took on a new challenge for myself. Blind contour drawings in ink. A blind contour is a one line drawing where you don't look at the paper while you are drawing. Focusing on what you are drawing on instead of looking back and forth can train your eye to see details that you may have glossed over in the past. But often the drawings end up pretty wacky. Early on they look like scribbles, but they get better and now I am totally addicted to the process and feel that it is improved all of my drawing. The challenge is to do this for seventy-five days or seventy five drawings. I am already at more than seventy drawings two weeks in so I am going to ignore the number of drawings and focus on the days.
Blind contour of South End brownstone done with water soluble brown ink then colored at home.
Vacation travel was wonderful, but as usual I am finding it difficult to adjust to being back to regular life. Especially the not so regular routine that is summer vacation with my kids 3 and 6 home with me and asking for enrichment all. day. long. Camp is expensive and the 3 year old is still too young for most of them and I feel guilty leaving them to watch TV all day and feeding them frozen pizza. So art we do art projects with together and we go outside to the zoo, playgrounds. playgrounds inside of the zoo, sprinkler parks and more playgrounds. The days are hot, humid and very long. I love them but by 4pm I am so totally done and out of things to do and out of energy for myself.
Meditative watercolor paint circles to the rescue. They look cool. They help me relax. They are fun and simple and require more patience than technique and concentration and they help me get to know my paint better. In the end I always feel better and learn something during the process. In my book that is a total win. This one is available on Etsy.
Focus on the process.
Yesterday I met with fellow buried creative that wants to start a sketchbook habit. I want to start a running habit so we are hoping to trade some positive habits that will benefit both of us. We started out sketching together at the pond and then stashed our stuff in her car and jogged around the pond together. I didn't burst into flames while running and have plans to do it again. She has plans to keep sketching. I'm still very much a beginner when it comes with drawing and painting on a regular basis. I did a little oil and acrylic painting in high school and college but never watercolor. As soon as I discovered printmaking painting was over for me. I was not a painter. Now years later I am finding that watercolor and drawing works well with printing. Once a week (or month in the summer months) I get to print and the rest of the time I draw and use watercolors. Six months ago I didn't draw much. Certainly not daily! Draw more. Paint more. Two surefire tricks to improve your skills. Start with a few pens and a cheap sketchbook. Maybe add some watercolors to that to see if you like them for splashes of color. Make an Altoid watercolor tin like mine.
My basic supplies.
