Rainy Day Drawing Blues

Maybe this whole community thing really -is- starting to take hold and push the cobwebs out of my brain. After symbolically beginning the artistic year anew by hunting down and purchasing a really nice blank journal, I tossed it into my bag before I went to work and threw in five of my Micron ink pens as well.

The urge to sketch something, anything, is starting to devour my brain. I wound up drawing the chocolate ball I had for lunch, and stood like a nutcase in a light drizzle for about ten minutes sketching out a very pretty plant in front of the hospital. For once I didn't pre-outline with pencil, just dived straight in with the inks. I do that more with the botanical drawings I infrequently do, and it's a good lesson in line, I find.

I came back after dinner, worked like a maniac on colouring the plant, and this is what resulted:



I think I'm going to start having to carry my camera -and- my sketch journal wherever I go. I'm looking at the trees down the side of the road as I walk and seeing beautiful, arched shapes in their twisted trunks and towering boughs. It makes me just itch to materialize them onto paper, watch the curves and angles form one black line at a time.

Out of the Cold and into the Fishbowl

My. It's been a while. A year or so more since my last post - how time flies. A lot has happened since then. All things are in flux, so sayeth a great philosopher, and much has changed. Perhaps this year I'll be able to do more things creative, find the spark, motivate, get to where I want to.

I've done two things to kickstart myself into 2006:

1) I've joined the Everyday Matters Yahoo group in a desperate attempt for artistic community and motivation. I don't have much of it where I live, and since leaving the US two and a half years ago, my creativity has taken an absolute downswing for the worse. Motivation. That's the ticket, yeah. Acceptance of what I do without the negative spaces in my head. It might just do the trick.

2) I'm starting singing lessons this week. I damaged my voice some twenty years ago, and lost an octave off my range; with warmups I can still hit the extreme high range but I want to learn the techniques to make it permanent, not just a flash in the pan.

With that in mind, here's my 'Draw A Mouth' challenge for the Everyday Matters group - might as well jump in, newbie or no. The point was to -draw-, right?



The weird little black marks to the left on top of the piece are the bits of ring binding I wasn't quite able to crop out of the picture. And like a dingbat, I forgot that highlighter colours don't show up under scanner, so if you can imagine all the colours in bright neon highlighter, and the 'Adjectives' box in lumiglow yellow, that'll have to do, unfortunately. And I suppose I cheated for the mouth - I kissed the page with lipstick, then drew the outlines so I could learn more about how a mouth creases and folds, all the little intricacies that make it so intriguing to draw one.

Il'l work on the Valentine's Day challenge when I get home tonight. I -will- be creative this week, dammit.