The Garden At Midday

I had tried to make time for days to paint this particular angle of our garden, as one would see it coming up the driveway from the road.  My kurrent klass teacher, Cathy Johnson, has us doing landscape homework this week, so I had a valid excuse to grab my paints, my three-legged REI stool, and my kit, and set up in a shady patch to catch the wide range of hues and textures.  It might've been better had I subdued the forest that is maybe 150 feet beyond, but I thought it'd be a nice dark contrast to make the garden pop.  According to many other students, it was a good idea.  This is done with Derwent Inktense Pencils, a waterbrush, white gel pen, and some gouache on a Stillman Birn Alpha watercolor book.  

A Feline Selfie

This is the final selfie from my assignment in Sketchbook Skool of A Selfie A Day.  Two from mirror, two from photos, two of continuous contour sketches, and one from memory or imagination.  Guess which one this is?  Staedtler Pigment Liner 0.3 and graphite on my sketchbook paper. Some fist smudges. 

Selfie In Grey Tones

Nearly finished with klass assignments, this is the second of two sketches from photos of me.  This one was from a favorite photo of myself taken by Jim last year.  It was a dark and cold night, we were cozy in our reclining chairs, the lamps were low (this is not an introduction to a romance novel).  The prevailing color of the photo was DARK.  So I used a dark grey toned paper, and sketched with my varying grey and white Conte pastel pencils.  By the time I was done, I had more grey dust on my body than on the paper, but I was happy.  

Blind Contour Selfies

Koosje has also prompted us to do a selfie version that is a contour drawing.  Which usually requires that we just look in the mirror, put the pen to the paper, and draw our portrait without lifting the pen until we are done.  A great exercise, but I misunderstood, and thought we were doing this without looking at the paper!  She wanted us to maybe fill it in afterwards with color, but by the time I finished with my "blind contour drawing", the result was like a Ripley's Believe It Or Not museum display.  Oh, well, it's a lot of fun, might do some more!

Down Under Selfie

At the day's end, I finished my second mirror selfie homework assignment for Sketchbook Skool, Koosje's klass.  I was working against time, as the light from the sun was perfect, hazy bright, lending some drama to the subject, but the sun was inching toward the horizon!  I grabbed my Indiana Jones hat to create a little more visual interest, and again used my Derwent Inktense Watersoluble Pencils for the color wash, and Staedtler Pigment Liner, with a touch of white gel pen for highlights.  I so love hats.

Selfie In Graphite

Another semester has begun in my online Sketchbook Skool Klass Kourses (truly not a misspelling), and again, I'm so enjoying the postings of my fellow students from around the world, as well as working the assignments given by our delightful and incredibly talented fakulty.  Kurrently, this week our teacher is Koosje Koone (again, not a misspelling, she is Dutch), and she has us doing a series of selfies, at least one a day.  Some from looking into the mirror, some from photos of ourselves, some from memory, some from a continuous pencil like while not looking at the paper.  This was mine from last night, end of day light, in front of my flexible jewelry mirror.  Thank goodness it was a good hair day.  But truly, I am showing my age!  This was done in graphite on my Moleskine sketchbook page.