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.

Equine Studies

 Left side page, pencil on paper

Right side page, pencil on paper

Large watercolor Moleskine journal.

I did these pages a couple of days ago while out at one of my daughter's horse shoeing stops. Stu is a show horse, very beautiful and graceful. He was well behaved while his owner held his head and my daughter trimmed his hooves and nailed his new shoes on. She actually did a bunch of horses that day but my fibro caught up with me so I didn't do any more sketches.

I meant to pen and watercolor these, but once I was finished I decided I liked the look of the pencil drawings as themselves. Sometimes that happens even in a watercolor journal.

It's part of art to know when to stop. These pages are good in themselves and while I may work from them or from any sketch on them, graphite lasts as well as anything else I could put on them. Might spray fixative since I'm keeping the graphite but I'll take it outdoors in the daytime for that.

Having finally gotten all moved in, I shouuld be posting more often now and will try to get back to daily art! It was hard for about a month, even though I did quite a few drawings getting photos wasn't always easy and sometimes I forgot to date them. So let's go forward from here!

Gesture and Pencil Portrait of Ari Cat

Pencil Portrait and Pen Gesture of Ari Cat

9" x 12"

Still working and ruminating on a pastel landscape with good preliminaries that I plan to turn into a good demo on my Art Lessons blog. Ready to do that on the sanded paper, but haven't started that yet. Paper is chosen though and so are pastels.

Tomorrow's another clinic visit day - and that means doing water media! Maybe some charcoal and pastel sketching too, we'll wait and see. Till then, enjoy the first serious pencil drawing I've done in a long time.

Ari posed today with the sun shining in early afternoon brightness, all the lights on and for once, his beautiful eyes weren't heavily dilated. My room gets pretty dark and I was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with his eyes. Nope. They dilate and retract just like any cat's, but he's fond of the low light and has no problem seeing anything even when it's too dark for me to see at all.

I meant to do pen and watercolor or just watercolor, but got going with an HB pencil and light shading turned into better shading. It was nice working that large for a change, the original is close to life size. My handsome model is now draped on the bed in a relaxed pose and I'll soon be joining him for the night. Sleep well, Ari Cat... your midnight crazies will probably wake me to laugh a little before I get back to sleep.

He already treated me to the Rowdy Cat Yell earlier and a thrilling pinball cat game all around the room ending in a triumphant trampoline tail chase on the bed. One of these times I need to start video on the first yell!