10/30/11

Little excavator

Today was a beautiful, cool, crisp fall day, and I took a walk over to the neighborhood street-widening, still underway. Sunday's a great day to visit. I found this little excavator, with its shovel resting on the ground. Drawn in my Sketchbook Project book.

10/23/11

Intersection of Braddock & Poplar Tree

 

Done in my Sketchbook Project book. I love poles and power lines, and the traffic lights. This is just down the street from all those big machines I've been drawing since the summer.

10/18/11

Oak leaf

Picked up on a walk around the neighborhood. Done in my Sketchbook Project book.

10/16/11

Off road dump truck

 

I walked over to the road-widening that has been underway near my house since the beginning of the summer. There are still plenty of interesting machines over there. I drew this in my Sketchbook Project book.

10/13/11

Underpainting for "Floodit" painting

OK, this is not a drawing. And I haven't been doing a drawing a day for awhile. But I have been looking at a lot of art online, most of it abstract. I have never worked abstractly, but am very attracted to it, and admire those who do. I've also been playing an online game called "Floodit", where you have to choose colors and try to turn the whole game board one color within 25 moves. I usually lose this game, and am left with a large field of one color with a few scattered squares of other colors here and there. I've been fascinated with the random aspect of this game, and sometimes the end result looks like a geometric abstract painting. So, both to break my non-working streak, and to dip my toe into abstract water, I have started to reproduce the game with paint. This is the first stage - a random pattern of six colors into a grid of 10 by 10 squares. (My husband actually made a random number generator in Excel to come up with the random pattern.) I mixed up a palette of six colors and dutifully painted them in to the squares. (I may redo the dark red, because I don't like it much, and it's too transparent.)

The next step, on another day, will be to play Floodit with this board - starting with one square, I'll choose an adjacent color and paint the beginning square that color. And so on, moving from color to adjacent color. Look up the game on line to get a feel for it, if you want. I have no idea if this will be successful, and I'm painfully aware that it's not a very creative thing to do. Maybe it will break the ice for me to do a little abstract work - please don't laugh at me, I'm taking baby steps.

10/4/11

Stuff on the shelf

Some of the objects that live on one of the shelves in my studio.

10/3/11

"A" painting set-up

This is the still life I've set up for my "A" painting (where everything in the painting starts with an A.) This is not the angle I'm planning on painting it from - I'm going to stand and look down on it - but I was sitting in my studio wondering what to draw, and I looked over and saw the still life from an unaccustomed angle. I've been living with the set-up for awhile, to see if it's right. It's actually not bad from this angle, but I still think I'll paint it from above. (Can you tell what's going to be in it? Let's see... African violet, anvil, arrowhead, antler, ace of hearts, ampersand, amber bowl, avocado seed... I still need something in the bowl...)

10/1/11

October self-portrait

 

The first of the month, self-portrait day. I'm getting pretty tired of looking at myself, which is why I look grumpy. I used colored pencil on Canson pastel paper - not a great choice, but I wanted to start from a middle tone.