Paintings and Drawings

"Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice reduces the imperfection."
                                                                                      ~ Toba Beta

Chambered nautilus study in colored pencil

My father-in-law's shell collection continues to inspire me. My enthusiasm has caught on and now he is searching the house for long-forgotten boxes of shells to give me. He found one box the other day that included a magnificent chambered nautilus shell.

The nautilus is a cephalopod like an octopus or a squid, however its tentacles do not have suckers. It is also the only cephalopod with a protective outer shell. It has changed very little over the millions of years that it has existed, so it is considered a "living fossil".

My nautilus shell model, I fear, was store-bought. To stem the decline in nautilus populations, some countries have banned the commercial trade of nautilus shells, but others have not. I will try my best to make lots of beautiful art with this shell, as I would never buy one myself.

Plate of Shells - 6 x 6 acrylic on canvas panel

Here's a little painting I did of an assortment of shells. The plate wasn't perfectly flat in the middle, so the shells sometimes rattled and shifted positions when I would walk around near the little table I had them perched on. The painting was really finished 2 hours before I put down the paintbrush, but I kept fussing with it and of course ended up overworking it. Oh well.

After 5 weeks of class, my first figure painting in oil is done.

I finished my figure painting in class at PAFA. We'll start another painting with a new model this week. I'm excited to try a new painting, but this week also marks the half-way point of our summer adventures. Nooooooooo! How can it be halfway over already!? I haven't even gotten my fill of East Coast pizza yet - and believe me, I've been trying!

Sketching at the Local Watering Hole

If I were a portrait artist, this post might be about a completely different place but...

Colored pencil sketch of a medley of mallards.

Pen and ink drawing of two Canada geese. Notice that's Canada geese, not Canadian geese. Not all Canada geese are actually Canadian. Where is the furthest from Canada that you've seen a Canada goose?

Portrait of a Rhode Island Red

Never thought I'd be learning the names of different breeds of chickens! This one from "our" flock is a Rhode Island Red. She's very curious (nosey?), being the most likely of the hens to peer in our windows, turning her head to look in with one eye and then the other. I think she intimidates our cat a little.

A quick pencil sketch led to this pen and colored pencil study.

Hibernation - Can I join in?

I think in another life I was a bear. Or a groundhog. Or one of these box elder bugs. Whatever I was, the desire to go into hibernation this time of year has followed me into this realm of existence, as has the desire to eat everything in sight. And I am confident that the daylight savings time change this weekend will not help the situation one bit.

On top of the sleepiness, I have been so restless and listless lately. Maybe it is just because Paul and I are headed into the two most pivotal weeks of his PhD program to date, but as his supportive spouse there's nothing I can actually do about it except just wait. And bake cookies (with a rather Leave It To Beaver mentality that home-baked goodies made with plenty of butter and love will make everything all right). While the cookies may clog his arteries, hopefully they won't clog his brain cells as he needs them to pass his comprehensive exams. This is kind of like passing the Sphinx, or Fluffy the giant three-headed dog; making a mistake would be very, very bad. I have every confidence that Paul will pass with no problem, but it is still a long, nerve-wracking process for both of us. My preference would be that I go to sleep now and he can wake me up when he's got the good news.

So, to my little half-hearted sketch. I'm obsessed with these box elder bugs and I wanted to try something different tonight. I thought maybe using colored pencils for a change would shake me out of my stupor. However, I think they had about as much chance at really perking me up as trying to wake up a hibernating bear.

Experimenting

My art training is mostly grounded in realism and scientific illustration, but every so often I get the urge to do something abstract or stylized. Unfortunately I tend to do this spur of the moment and not plan it out. It is play really (at least this is my rationale when it becomes clear that it isn't going to work out the way I'd envisioned).

So today I'm working on this butterfly and suddenly I'm swept up with the idea that there should be an abstract background; kind of implying a bunch of lush tropical leaves and the dappled light in the rainforest. "Oh yes, great idea!" says my mind, and off we go. My inner child is delighted - madly coloring with bright colors and sheer exuberance. My focus is on one single square inch at a time, watching the pencil blend and mix the colors together right on the paper. And then when I finally come up for air, well...all together isn't as brilliant as I had hoped. The butterfly came out - carefully rendered in colored pencil before my inner child took over - but the background? Not so much. It is as if this tropical butterfly somehow ended up in the Arctic and is observing a northern lights display through a window (which I suppose is a good thing because if it was actually outside it would be a frozen butterfly and not capable of enjoying the northern lights).

So was this whole thing a waste of time? No - I really did enjoy the process. My inner child got lots of play time and now might settle down for a nap so that I can do some more detailed work. And who knows, maybe I am destined to write a children's book about a tropical butterfly that visits the North Pole.

Restlessness

It has been miserable weather today - snow showers with a chill in the air that gets into your bones. The kind of weather that makes me want to hibernate again, or at least eat lots of comfort food. I've been feeling artistically restless lately too; not happy with what I'm doing, feeling like what's the point, going from idea to idea and not settling down to work on any of them. I've been thumbing through some old sketchbooks and feeling like I was on a good trajectory at the time and somehow I've lost it now.

Today I found this unfinished colored pencil piece from 3 or 4 years ago. Why did I abandon it? It had potential. And I remember enjoying the challenge of trying something different, breaking out of my usual pen & ink or watercolor. I probably started it during one of these same types of restless periods and then maybe I shelved it in frustration. But it is a good reminder to me that I have lived through many artistic periods like this before. I assume that this is a pattern for me. Maybe it is artistic growing pains before a break-through, although it seems like in February and March I was feeling a resurgence of artistic energy and now it has kind of fizzled out, but time will tell.

Many, many years ago, not long after my husband and I were married, our apartment building burned down. We, along with 9 other families, lost everything but the clothes on our backs. My half-sister sent me a gift of a sketchpad and some pencils - a seemingly odd thing to give someone who has just lost everything - but somehow she must've known that it was exactly what I needed. For those first horrible months after the fire, I clung to that sketchpad for dear life, drawing in it whenever I had a minute; rebuilding my life pencil stroke by pencil stroke. At the time it didn't matter to me if what I did was any good or not, just that I was doing something that was creating a sense of moving forward. And so although right now I feel like my hand is cursed and I will never draw anything good again, I look back on that time when drawing was everything to me - was all I had - and I promise myself I will keep drawing. And I will try to never forget the reminder that my half-sister gave me - life will go on if you just pick up the pencil and draw.