My list is now in reverse order so the newest drawings get posted at the top. Bummer is that now to post a new image I have to scroll to the bottom of the entry. A good trade off though.

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08252021: DAY 32: Playing with Garlic Scapes

I haven’t posted anything to this project in almost a year! Well, I am hell bent on getting into doing art on a regular basis again. One of my realizations in my process of starting again was that I have a strong voice in my head that takes over and pressures me not to “fail” at doing art. It is something I am challenging but I can tell you it is well engrained. I really admire Chris’ just do it and see what happens. Experimenting and letting go of things I create as being good would be such freedom! How else can I learn?

Last night I just sat down to keep going and not drop off after posting something about a week ago. I kept it in mind that I could just let it happen and not get too caught up in it being perfect (whatever that is!). So here it is. Some garlic scapes…which have been sitting around calling to me.

Oh, and one last thing: I LOVE COLOR! I love all that I have learned in Chris’ classes about mixing and applying it. It makes me feel so good when I sit down to work. Thank you, Chris!!!!

Paper is Arches, palette is Quin Rose, Quin Yellow and Indanthrone Blue.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 1 - student project

10282020 - DAY 31: Painted Mandala

I am going to post this above the black and white mandala so it will be easier and more fun to see how color altered the design. This was done on Stonehenge paper and painting on it was a good experience. Definitely different than watercolor paper...more like the printmaking paper that Chris uses. Drawing with ink and stippling was really nice. SEE BELOW DAY 30, the green bell.

10102020 - DAY 30: Bell contour drawing painted

I used the color game to pick the palette for this one. It was pretty uncomfortable to use these colors - or challenging could be another way to put it! Colors were 4 colors opposite on the color wheel. I forget which scheme it is. Yellow green, orange, red violet, blue.

I didn’t like it much so I embellished it with some stippling and dotted lines.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 2 - student project

10042020: DAY 29 - an ink mandala

This mandala is going to get painted at some point soon. I wanted to take it to get scanned before I went ahead with color...but I may cave and just paint it! The size is around 4.75” across on Legion Stonehenge white 100% cotton paper, 250gsm. It says on the pad that it was originally made for printmakers but it is now a popular drawing paper. The art store person I got it from said it was a good multimedia paper. I want to experiment with a good paper to do the very detailed mandalas on...so smooth is key.

Inking the lines on this paper was really nice. Can’t say yet about the painting part!

One part that is different on this mandala is the center ring. Instead of having enclosed circles, the circles are just described by the shapes, yet connect to one another. It was a happy accident although there is a temptation to change the white space between the circle line and the design of leaf shapes and dotted lines. Thinking that I want to keep it like this until I paint it and there is something about how it makes my eye move in and out of the center also makes it “spin”.

ADDED COLOR VERSION!!!

What Moves Me to Draw - image 3 - student project

What Moves Me to Draw - image 4 - student project

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10012020: DAY 28 Bell Contour Drawing

It was interesting to revisit the bell (I did my first drawings for this course of the bell). I have been stymied a bit by the contour drawing idea and somehow when I sat down to do this, I took a leap forward without “trying” so hard to do it. So I am quite chuffed as my Scottish friends would say.

I did go over the pencil lines to be able to see them. Next time I will just use ink or draw with a softer pencil. Painting - maybe.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 5 - student project

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09272020: DAY 27 - a mandala

Still looking to jump start my art practice so doing whatever moves me to do art! I decided to try Legion Stonehenge Aqua Coldpress paper and I found out a lot about it on this project. It is 100% cotton, not a very deep texture, 140 weight. Drawback: the paint has the pinpoints due to how it is sized so the color can look rather weak, this is my biggest issue with it. I am glad I only got a small pad because it makes me crazy to put a lot of time in on something and when it dries it looks like it needs another layer of paint.

Size? Ready for this? It is 2.25” in diameter...

What Moves Me to Draw - image 6 - student project

Playing with the tiny mandala by adding it to the center of another one that was painted with the same palette. I couldn’t resist trying this to see how it worked visually. Not too bad seeing as it was completely unplanned. Oops, I just saw with this posted that I didn’t pay attention to alignment of inner shapes to the outer ones. Close enough...you get the idea!

For the larger mandala original, scroll down a few entries...

What Moves Me to Draw - image 7 - student project

09142020: DAY 26 First two exercises re: shorter time

Here we go - I sort of wished that I was doing them all at once, however it if seems as challenging to the system 1 or 2, not sure which is at work right now, I may just repeat the exercise all at one time. Chris, you said to work on any paper and darned if I am not wresting with this paper not absorbing the water. It did not help that I was pretty much out of paint and I didn’t want to mix up more given the time. So I will do that before I start the other ones. I figured it took me about an hour and a half to do the Day 25 Tomatillo. So a starting point was 45 minutes.

First up: 45 minute Tomatillo

What Moves Me to Draw - image 8 - student project

Second tomatillo - 22 minutes

This one got some ink on it as the paint was so wet it the form was just a blob. Watching my timer running, I reverted to getting out my pen/ink to make it more than a blob. It was hard to resist doing ink on the first one!

What Moves Me to Draw - image 9 - student project

09132020: DAY 25 Tomatillo again...

After reading the comment Chris made about “System 1 vs System 2” re: the voice in my head that tells me I will never get anywhere with watercolors and painting anything close to real - I got the book to find out more and started listening to it. When I sat down today to draw/paint the tomatillo again, I didn’t get the loud voice...it was still whispering on occasion but I found it easier to dismiss.

The image looks like it is leaning impossibly to one side but in fact, it WAS leaning impossibly to one side. Not sure how it managed to stay in that position. Some of the sense of leaning is coming from the angle of the background line that ironically is pretty identical.

I am using the same palette as the previous one. I did a frame around the image from the start so I had that part of it settled before I went too far. This time I started with light washes and worked up the value as I went along. The funniest part was the purple part of the tomatillo which for the longest time wasn’t connecting with the whole. It is better than it was after I added a light wash of gray over the top of the purple.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 10 - student project

09092020: DAY 24 (2 entries today!)

I have been dealing with a very persistent voice in my head about painting “real things”. My thoughts are mostly seem to center around “giving up” when I can’t paint what I want or even have a happy accident. It is so interesting because my artist response is “if you don’t practice and learn and in the process make things you deem failures, you will never progress = have fun!”. It’s like I need to be the painter I will be before I get there.

So here is what brought on the above revelation: Three cherry tomatos and a tomatillo. What I like about it: The colors, I enjoyed drawing the tomatillo and think I captured the shape and the volume of it. What is hard is that I just don’t know how to approach doing an exercise like this. At one point I thought the painting of the tomatillo was really nice, but it wasn’t what I was seeing so I kept at it. I am recalling my pottery professor saying that if you spend an hour on one pot, you would have learned more by making a bunch of them in the same timeframe.

I would like it better if the ratio of the space above and below the images was cut to be more dynamic. I may fool with cropping the photo.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 11 - student project

09092020: DAY 24 Mandala on Day 23 Painted

This mandala is 5” in diameter. It was pretty challenging to paint but luckily I had recently ordered a few smaller brushes (ProArt 2 and 3 sables) which are fantastic and made it easier to do the tiny spaces.

What was different about this from doing the larger mandalas was how one color would alter the design radically. I know this happens with others but I didn’t think the small bits of color would be so dramatic.

Colors used: Quin Gold (MG), Indanthrone Blue (DS), Quin Rose (DS)

I managed to make a beautiful gray without spending an entire day and a tray of brown watercolors. YAY!

I may go back and make minor changes, but this is pretty much done! If this doesn’t make your eyes go bonkers, nothing will!

What Moves Me to Draw - image 12 - student project

Grayscale:

What Moves Me to Draw - image 13 - student project

09072020: DAY 23 Black and white mandala to paint

I have been working on this black and white mandala and decided that since it didn’t have a place of it’s own, I would include it here in this project as it definitely fits into “what moves me to draw”. I am in the process of doing the very tedious but rewarding job of painting this mandala.

The size is only 5” across and I have found that I have to practically put my nose on the design for the tiny size of some of the spaces. I will post the painted one when I am done...hopefully in the next couple of days. I did leave out some of the detail that I might have put in if it was staying black and white. Also, the inner dark shapes were painted before I realized that I hadn’t taken a “before” picture.

I decided to wait to do the values when I paint it and not include the darks until then. To me the design doesn’t work very well, especially in the center at this point.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 14 - student project

07312020: DAY 22

What Moves Me to Draw - image 15 - student project

07212020: Day 21

Well, it isn’t a hammer but a pair of scissors was in the cards for today. I decided to stick with a pencil drawing to start as I am really working on teaching my eye/brain to stop making assumptions about what is actually happening. For instance, the little oval at the joint of the scissors: I looked at it and brain said “round” - I drew it round. Then as I kept at it, all of a sudden a light went on about it being an oval shape. So in this drawing I spent quite a bit of time looking at negative shapes for clues as to the relationships between things. Using pencil allowed me to keep making corrections to get the complexities of the scissors. BTW: I discovered quite by accident that once I am editing a project, if I hit “tab” it automatically goes to the bottom of the page where the ADD IMAGE button is! For this project, it is a great thing to know. When the image is added, the cursor returns to the top of the page where the picture got loaded.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 16 - student project

07202020: Day 20

More pea pods... harder than I thought they would be but hey, keep on drawing! The top one in particular just doesn’t read well and truth be known I gave up on it and then the pea pod dried up. (I was going to go back to it).

What Moves Me to Draw - image 17 - student project

07192020: DAY 19

Pea pods! And a cat hair...

The middle one has some nice qualities to it - I was using wet on wet techniques and it turned into an amorphous green blob. To remedy that after attempts to get it to work (without the patience to wait for it to dry I might add...I used my Stabilo. That created a whole raft of other issues. I like the fact that the inside top of the pod looks a but luminous like it ought to! Learning about my patience factor. I still have a few peas to use as models so expect more of those!

What Moves Me to Draw - image 18 - student project

07182020: DAY 18

Two sketches today, one mostly done last night and one this morning. I keep encouraging myself to experience the moment of painting and not “think” about exactly matching what I am using for an object. It is coming along, I think. Here they are...(I am working on another pentagram - ought to have that done tomorrow!)

I am really beginning to enjoy the pen/ink. I finally am not feeling pressured to make exactly the “right” line and so it feels much more relaxed. I really love this Arches paper.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 19 - student project

The apple half with the cut side up just isn’t quite right. I decided that the best way to deal with it was to draw more cut apples and move on. No matter what I did, it continued to look like a wooden boat on the bottom. : ) The proportions of the top surface to the volume below it is part of the issue along with not tucking under to where it sits on the table.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 20 - student project

07172020: DAY 17

Another apple! I picked the color palette by chance. Interesting exercise especially after painting with the Quin Gold palette for several weeks. Colors: Light yellow ochre, Cobalt turquoise, Quin Red. I painted this mostly the night before and finished it up today. Shadows are all of a sudden giving me a royal pain. : )

It is really cool how the blue separated out in the wash in the background color.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 21 - student project

An apple...I enjoyed this painting but ended up overworking the shadow. One thing I am currently observing is the way the shadow shifts from the ground to the shape. It tripped me up here and I kept trying to fix it only it was just too funky so I gave up and on to the next one! Colors were my same Quin palette - really using it up so what I had left was pretty limited. Paper was Arches cold press 90lb weight. I love this paper, although a bit thin for working both sides with water in some cases. It is dreamy in terms of washes.

SECOND POST - Shadow improved?

What Moves Me to Draw - image 22 - student project

FIRST POST - shadow issue

What Moves Me to Draw - image 23 - student project

07152020: DAY 16

More cherries from yesterday and my tiny porcelain palette. The top palette is the second try.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 24 - student project

This set of cherries was done without looking at the real thing. Sort of a late night play session. Caran d’ache on top of watercolors on the top left. Don’t mind the unfinished turtles that showed up at the bottom of the page!

What Moves Me to Draw - image 25 - student project

07142020: Day 15

Exploring cherries for a subject. Enjoyed this exercise. The group on the right that is almost off the page - got out my Caran d’ache and had a bunch of spontaneous fun. I thought about taking a picture of the cherries and making it a grayscale so I can hone my eye toward shadows and highlights. The order they were painted in: Top left, middle left bottom left, middle right.

Colors from the Quin gold palette that was already mixed. The crayons were on top of what I had already painted.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 26 - student project

07032020: Day 14

A playful wet on wet pear using a Stabilo aquarelle pencil that I “melted” with water. I got out a box of pencils from years ago when I was drawing a lot more. I found these pencils that are water soluble and very black.

A place in this exercise that feel particularly effective to me: the stem and how it fits into the pear.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 27 - student project

A pudgy lumpy pear...well, it wasn’t THAT lumpy in reality.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 28 - student project

07022020: Day 13 (not Day 12 as indicated on the sketch)

Another pear...am I sensing a theme here? Not sure yet.

This was an up and down experience. When I started putting color on the image I got that warm, OMG feeling which I have been noticing when I paint and my reaction is one of wonder and awe at how beautiful color is.

Then after working on it for a bit, a voice said to stop but I didn’t listen because I wanted to learn more - which is the point, right? So to be kind to myself, I am reminding my “judge” that this is an exercise, not ART. I can easily see how this judge could me from progressing, but I have got this! AND the pear ain’t half bad. (This is on Arches and essentially the same palette with Quin Gold, Manganese hue, Alizarin Crimson - all DS colors)

What Moves Me to Draw - image 29 - student project

07012020: Day 12

Well, I realized today that I really have very little idea about how to go about painting something with watercolor. (Confession: I got frustrated with the shadow and just mushed the maroon around.)

This is a seed pod but I haven’t taken the time to figure out from what plant. It is really awesome and a great way to explore how shadows happen on the seeds. (Assuming one has the patience to do so). Rather than continuing to poke at it, I decided to stop and either do it again or move onto something else.

Perhaps I am getting to the point of needing some instruction on how to go about painting something that isn’t a flexagon or a mandala!

What Moves Me to Draw - image 30 - student project

06302020 Day 11:

The colors in this image are off but for now, I am going to post as is. I have a particular frustration with this as the brush was lying on top of my glass art table top which I spontaneously use for mixing colors at times. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to make the yellow under the brush - behind it, look like it was receding and on the same plane as the color on the close side of it. I tried a couple of things and it was getting further away so I stopped.

HELP! Please give me a hint...make the color a lighter hue? No shadow? Make the puddle shape so it is smaller on the far side? Is this a perspective thing?

Curious minds want to know...

What Moves Me to Draw - image 31 - student project

06222020 DAY 10:

Lost of few days of drawing when I got taken away by the magical Flexagon fairies. Today after seeing Vesta’s pears, I sat down and drew one that I bought the other day. Bonus was that it had a leaf still attached, which was fun to draw. I thought I was going to paint it but now I have decided to just let it be and in honor of that, I ate the pear! YUM!

What Moves Me to Draw - image 32 - student project

06142020 DAY 9:

Today’s drawing is the second in my handmade journal. I have to say it is very satisfying to be working on paper that I chose and made into a sweet book.

This is a raku rabbit that I traded an artist for at a craft fair many years ago. It caught my eye this morning as I pondered what I was going to draw today. I also took the opportunity to fool around with my newly mixed gray that loves to separate into the colors with granulation. I did apply a light wash of reddish gray over some places and had to stop as I started feeling like in a few places, it had looked better before, not after whatever I did. Always an interesting question about “is it done?”

What Moves Me to Draw - image 33 - student project

06142020: Belongs with question on gray scale I brought up in DAY 7 and Chris commented on.

I got darn close to matching Jane’s Gray but with a few caveats. My mix separated much more than JG as just the gray but didn’t when it was mixed with Cerulean blue. The “indigo” was almost exactly the same.

So when do you use something already mixed for convenience? I do understand that my mix would be totally aligned with the other colors I was using. Answer: when you learn color mixing so it is done out of knowledge —- or when you are in an incredible hurry : ).

What Moves Me to Draw - image 34 - student project

06132020 DAY 8:

I found an old business card from when I was doing porcelain sculpture and was moved to do a painting of it...it was interesting to do this as while I was painting the image, I could feel what it was like to make it. Ah the good old days! I may take the time to reverse order this list so I get to add the new to the top instead of the bottom. 100 days will be scrolling forever to get to the new paintings!

What Moves Me to Draw - image 35 - student project

06122020: DAY 7

I am on a roll now...enjoyed doing this project and feel like I am starting to “see” better. I also found a delicious indigo simply mixing Jane’s Gray with Ultramarine. So then the question is in terms of color, we haven’t been dealing with adding gray to mandala colors and I am slowly entering a curiosity stage about what gray does. I have done a couple of value scales (is this the right word? Is it tint? Or ?). So many words with color and so little time! This was already a drawing so it isn’t in my new journal which I am just itching to use.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 36 - student project

06102020: DAY 6

The clover on the left is the one that I drew and then got out my paints to color it. Then when I finished it, I just forgot about drawing it first and experimented with dropping paint into a shape I painted with water first. It was great fun to try it without a drawing to see what would happen. The one in the top right, I subtracted color to get the texture.

Why are they cut out? I didn’t like how they were arranged on the page and I have done collages with things I have painted and cut out like this (including a cool pop up card that is a garden).

I want to have more experience with color flowing and mixing on the paper.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 37 - student project

06082020 DAY 5:

This one I did several times before I could break it down to be more like what I was really seeing. I put it in a place where the perspective was more pronounced to help me deal with the oval.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 38 - student project

06092020: DAY 4 (Drawing done on 0607)

Wow, I last posted something to this project in late March. I guess I got caught up in the Mandala classes!

Why am I back here? Well, I realized that I need to get my drawing skills going. I have, in the past been pretty hard on myself when it comes to drawing...then I read something that was simply what I needed to hear in the moment in an email from an art blog - it isn’t rocket science or something that I hadn’t known, it was just at the right juncture of my art journey in the present: Leave the judge and the ennui that results from that and just start. Have a daily practice if even for 15 minutes. So I have started (again).

This project was supposed to have a theme and I picked one. Now I think the best approach is for me to just have a theme of - “What moves me to draw that day” so I don’t agonize over it and get something going. I have been doing small drawings for the past couple of weeks. These two are on Rives and I used the color palette that was active at the time.

This brought up questions about how to deal with perspective, which is something I have never entirely understood how to do it. Of course I had to start with some interesting circular items that challenged me big time.

I think the first one is really fun. Question is: Does it look like it is tilted and sitting on one edge?

What Moves Me to Draw - image 39 - student project

More drawings from 0607 and 0608:

Will be dating work now that I am in the swing of things.

These two images of the maple tree seeds, one with pencil (done after the next one in ink), I painted the following day. I was only imagining some of the shading as my young cat, Izzy, thought the seeds made a delightful thing to chew on.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 40 - student project

What Moves Me to Draw - image 41 - student project

My tube of paint...

What Moves Me to Draw - image 42 - student project

03242020 DAY 3:

What Moves Me to Draw - image 43 - student project

Had a lot of fun with these two. Well, the first one was a happy accident. I decided to use a calligraphy pen someone gave me to draw. It was really hard to get anywhere with it so after struggling and being wildly unhappy with it, I grabbed a brush and water and wow was it super fun to see the ink bleed and run. That got me going and I felt overall that I am making progress.

Bell 9 was more playing with melting the ink with water after an unsuccessful drawing attempt. Also used the crayons by dipping them in water and laying down the color.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 44 - student project

03232020 DAY 2:

I thought that I had chosen this cool clock that I have for this project BUT it was just too complicated for me to start with given I haven’t done any drawing for quite a few years. I was discouraged and giving up after my first attempt. Hmmmm. I think overwhelmed. It seemed like it was going to be too hard. SO after some thought, I decided to settle on a theme of my sacred objects that are meaningful to me. I have a bit of latitude with this theme and it feels doable.

My third attempt: For this one I drew with the same pen but then got inspired to pick up my watercolor wash that I had left over from today. When that wasn’t satisfying enough, I decided to resurrect my old dear friends - caran d’ache crayons. Somehow the physicality of crayons gets me out of my head and into the moment really fast. So here is what happened with them.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 45 - student project

Worked on another version of the bell - started with pencil got impatient grabbed my crayons - time and Coronavirus thoughts disappeared. Color is a bit washed out, I may take another pic tomorrow. Oh! I wanted to share that I remembered a key to my creativity tonight: creating something inevitably means it reaches an awkward “teenage” stage...it is the time to keep going because beauty awaits (most of the time!). This was so true of my porcelain sculptures and I reached that point tonight...it was a gift to remember.

03222020 DAY 1

My first attempt with the bell that I use in my meditations is pretty rough and I didn’t cut myself a break by picking up a marker to draw with. I don’t really want to post it but what the heck! It was the best I could do in that moment and as you said Chris, looking back after 100 days on these first three is going to be a kick.

What Moves Me to Draw - image 46 - student project

My second attempt: (after throwing out 3 other ones) Using the pen again- a glutton for punishment!

What Moves Me to Draw - image 47 - student project

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