I finished this graphite drawing, titled “Front Side/Back Side” over a week ago, and have been tending to art business details in the interim. I guess it should be pretty evident that this stone is reflected in a mirror, so one can see two sides (or more, since more than one side is showing on the rock in the foreground). In this series I always aspire to do a companion piece to each drawing, an opposite of sorts. For this one, I envision drawing a whiter rock on a darker background with a mirror image. But I’ve moved on to a yet larger colored pencil still life of stones in a vase with water, seen from straight on, rather than a bird’s eye view. It has a lot of green in it – I’m so happy it’s spring!
Several posts ago I mentioned that I had started a large stone drawing, only to find that it was going to take forever to complete if I continued on the Canson Mi-tientes I had started on. I bought some Rtistx board and started over, ran out of needed colors of Derwent Inktense pencils for the color wash background, and started a small graphite piece while waiting for the shipment of pencils. Here’s a photo of this piece that I finished last week. It’s done with graphite pencils and light layers of Derwent Graphitints in some of the stones. I wanted it to have a bit of the feel of a hand-colored photograph. I’m well underway with the larger piece and an really having fun pulling it together. More on that one later!
As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been working on a little graphite drawing, and here it is. It’s a very simple and zen-like composition. A black stone used in hot stone therapy that was given to me by a masseuse, a small peacock feather, placed upside down atop the stone and some shadows are all that composes the drawing. It’s small – maybe about 7″ x 7″.
I’m eager to move onto the next drawing in my rock series, and plan to try and incorporate water in the drawing. Coincidentally, I’m just back from the 17th Annual Exhibition and Convention of the Colored Pencil Society of America, where I took a workshop with CPSA Artist Pat Averill on the power of water. . . entitled “Unleash the power of water in your drawings”. Below are two photographs from the workshop: one of friends Dee Overly (left) and Mari Kaye Moehl (right) working on one of the four projects we tackled that day, and the other of workshop instructor Pat Averill. I’m not sure that the workshop concepts will transfer to my drawing, but you never know! We worked on the distortion of images in reflected water, drawing moving water (ie – surf), drawing water moving over rocks, and looking at wet sand to dry sand within the context of a seascape.
