I was going to write a post today with a wonderful photograph my friend Lynda Schumacher sent me. However, once again my blog image upload is acting up, and I can’t upload any photographs. So it will have to wait until it’s fixed.
I did start a new piece two days ago, something for the 75th Anniversary Exhibition of the Wellesley Society of Artists, which is the town I live and work in! I don’t usually do this type of thing, but they wanted a piece based on Wellesley, and I thought: “why not?”. I started the piece, a drawing of Rockridge Pond which is very near my house, in all of it’s autumn splendor; foliage at it’s peak and reflected stunningly in the water. I got out some Colourfix paper that I have wanted to try and started in on the drawing. I did not like working on that paper. Maybe someone who has worked with it has some advice for me? You cannot work up lighter colors on top of darks, as I have with Rtistx and pastel board. So it ended up looking muddy. And I was finding it very difficult to achieve any level of detail. Has anyone else found this to be the case? I gave the drawing two days, but it’s definitely not being worked on anymore.
I don’t know what I’m going to do for this show now. I walked around my neighborhood with my camera, but everything is so buried in snow and that’s not really the look I want to portray. I’ve been thinking about a subject all day, but haven’t come up with anything yet. We’ll see where this takes me! Stay warm and dry.
I’m wondering if this drawing is complete. I keep going back and tweaking little areas, and fine tuning edges, or shading that looks like it didn’t develop enough. My question is this: “Is it done?” Please feel free to give me your opinion.
Another week of work (sort of) on the sharp-shinned hawk drawing. I was in New York City from Friday evening until late Monday night, so it was really only a three day work week, with the presidential inauguration happening on Tuesday. Anyways, I’m happy with the work I did get done. There’s a new leaf over the hawk, not floating down as I had originally envisioned, but I like what it adds all the same. Tomorrow I’ll start on the leaf that’s going in below the hawk. This drawing should be done soon! I cropped out the glue smear in the photo, which is an accurate depiction of how the top of the drawing will look when it’s framed. The bottom will have a little more space when the fourth leaf is added.
I’m back to working on the sharp-shinned hawk drawing. I’ve made a lot of progress since the last photo I posted here. The bird is developed all over now, but the wing in the foreground is still not complete. I have also been going back and playing around with the rest of the bird – tweaking it here and there. The shadows have deepened, and the leaves are almost fully developed. I will be adding one more leaf and maybe two. I still haven’t worked out the new leaves in relation to the glue smear on the upper left corner, but I will most likely just barely crop it out when it’s matted for framing.
While it has been a quiet time on my blog, my studio life has been anything but slow! I was contacted by someone in product management at Derwent House in the United Kingdom about doing a commission with their graphite sketching pencils. This was an exciting opportunity for me, as for many years I worked exclusively in graphite. It was fun to switch back and try out their pencils, which are very nice to draw with.
They wanted something stark along the lines of the little egg still-life or beach stones piece I’d done; something to show off the tonal range of their graphite collection. I tried combining an egg with several stones, but none of the photos and set-ups had the feel I was looking for, so I switched the composition to only stones. It was strange to work with graphite again at first, but after the first couple of stones, I switched back into a more “black and white” mode and found it refreshing.
Derwent also makes a line of graphite tinted pencils that would lend themselves to drawing these beach stones I’ve collected, and I may well try that out at some point in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, the sharp-shinned hawk drawing is back on the front burner and I’m making wonderful progress with it. I’ll post a photograph of it later this week. (And thanks to everyone who’s given me advice at the Pencil Pushers blog on how to handle the paper smear!) Here’s a photo of the completed commission.
