Cats and Other Life Drawings

 Cats in Pen 3 1/2" x 5"

 Hens and small objects in fountain pen

These two pages are today's art. I've come down with a brutal cold that has me exhausted, aching, snuffling, miserable and nauseated. Yet today I got outside ad sketched with a fountain pen my friend Stan gave me - it's awesome. I love the expressive line. Fountain pens are unique for sketching and give a livelier line than Pigma Microns.

Pencil sketch of trees on printer paper

Yesterday I started Johannes Vloothuis's class "Essentials of Drawing Landscapes." He insisted on our using printer paper, so I turned over a Blick package inventory list and used that. It had to do with the texture of the paper being smoother than vellum drawing paper. His sketch methods are quirky and unique to him but fascinating.

Unfortunately due to the bug I fell asleep after two hours of class, so I will have to catch up on it by downloading. Managed to attend half of it though!

I hate being sick and will still struggle to do daily art.

Day 15: Winter Dreams

Winter Dreams ATC

Monochrome Winsor & Newton Watercolour Marker, Raw Umber. I like the feel of an old time photo that monochrome brown gives a painting. This one was an exercise in values and shapes, an icy creek and snowy landscape with scattered pines and some other grasses or bushes. Even the sky is just pale clouds and slightly darker color.

Monochromes are fun. Not always black, any dark color will do. 

Light colors obtained brushing a wet Niji waterbrush over the tip of the watercolor marker.

Crayon Sketches from Memory

Crayon Sketches from Memory: Foxglove, Tomato, Daisy, Copper Ring

Crayola crayons on paper, 8 1/2" x about 6"

Just for a lark, I went ahead and bought the largest set of Crayola crayons available for goofing around in my sketchbook. They're fun. I charted them on the upper part of this page and discovered the range has few neutrals and many near-matches in gradations of magenta to cerise and bright blue-greens. Few tints and darks, but a few darks proved useful and there are many variations on dark blues and violets, one dark green and a maroon. 

The glitter and metallic ones have fairly subtle effects. All are quite transparent, much more so than colored pencils. They were a bit softer than the cheap crayons in that kid set and I was pleasantly surprised at the blending. Good enough for color sketching, a saturated color can always be muted by layering transparent complements!

The white is translucent enough to burnish without altering color, but putting it under another color lightens it substantially. It's always fun to do something in a kid's medium and have it come out the way I wanted things to when I was a kid struggling with them. They still cause a lot of little specks and crumbs though.

Why I Like Painting Pears cartoon

Once in a while I get a silly idea. This is one of those times. I'm still down with a cold, still not up to serious art, but a comment by my daughter about her cat's plumpness just gave me the idea. So naturally I had to draw it up!

The best cartoons come from a moment's silly thought. The best cartoonist I've ever known said "You don't have to be able to draw well to do cartoons. You just have to be able to draw consistently and get really funny ideas."

So here's one for a laugh. 30 Cats in 30 Days turned into a retrospective. I posted seven older cat pieces on Facebook yesterday and later today I'll do six more - subtracting any serious cat art or real Ari sketches I do. Tomorrow I'll finish with seven more cats and at least share 30 cat s in 30 days.

But this teaches me something - doing the same subject as daily art doesn't work as well for me as just "Daily Art" in general. Also finishing one intens daily art challenge followed immediately by another can be too much. Your mileage may vary, probably will since I'm still wrestling the Fourth Bad Cold Of The Worst Winter In A Decade. Yuck. I didn't think I could get this sick for this long in a good climate ,but maybe it can happen anywhere. There seem to be some obnoxious ones going around this year, other people seem to be down with colds a lot more often too and all are in very different parts of the country.