Another Classroom Sketch

Mostly the same people as before, though. Foreign Policy is the only class I have where I have time to draw and where I know the teacher won't mind. But it's a really small class, so there's not that much variety in subject matter...

A New Painting

Or not new, actually. I've been working on it since the 9th. It's slow going because of how much homework I have and how little time I have to paint. Only 25 more days until the semester ends and I'll have all day, every day to paint! I can't wait.
So anyway, this is a new mommy and a new little baby (plus a cat in the background).


I'll post it again when it's finished.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

(Or drawing with the left hand, at least.)
I got to hang out with my friend Erika today and we spent hours It was so fun... I only wish I'd had better pencils with me. I borrowed Erika's charcoal pencils to do these three:


I drew this with my left hand... (I'm right-handed.)


... and this with my right hand.


These were Erika's hands while she was drawing me. (Used my right hand again.)

Oh, and here's a sketch from my last trip to the library that I never posted:



And that's all for now.

More Doodles...

... Literally, doodles. I brought my sketchbook with me to my foreign policy class yesterday night and decided to start doodling in that rather than in my notebook. That class involves a lot of note-taking, so I ended up shuffling both books around in my lap, drawing with my regular pencil, and switching back and forth from sketching to writing. I think I should start doing that more often. I forgot how much fun it is to actually sketch (in a sketchbook) people in school... I just haven't done it because I take so many notes in all my classes.

It was actually a little bit harder drawing in class than in a cafe, because when people are eating, they tend to look in the direction of the person they're with. In class, everybody's looking up, down, up, down, back, forth, etc. It's especially hard to draw the professor - he paces a lot.
Anyway, here's a page full of doodles of classmates.

Some Doodles...

Got out of botany early yesterday so I went to the library to draw for a bit. I only had thirty minutes, though, not enough time to do anything very detailed, so I just doodled.

German Landscape

I actually finished this sometime last week, but I never got around to photographing it until now. I meant it to be just a little doodle to keep me busy between portraits, but it turned out a lot nicer than I expected. It's 6"x8" on vellum Bristol board.
I did a drawing in ink...


... and then went over it in watercolor.



It didn't take too long to do. I was going through old photos last week and found a picture of this German town and was actually interested by it... Which is strange, because usually I'm not attracted to painting landscapes at all. I don't have the patience to do large areas of green. (Which is why I did this one tiny.) I wouldn't have had the patience to do it if I'd been trying to paint the same thing any bigger.
It's a pretty big departure from my normal style, but it's fun. I like doing that now and then... But I still prefer my normal style of painting, at least for portraits.

The Jurying

I made it! I'm now juried into the Torpedo Factory Art Center.

The Newly Juried Artists Exhibition will be in Target Gallery from April 7th to April 15th. One piece from each juried artist will be on display.

Also, I have one painting hanging in the Art League Gallery (located in the Torpedo Factory Art Center) for the April all media show.
The Torpedo Factory Art Center is located at
105 N Union Street
Alexandria VA 22314


This one is on display in Target Gallery...


... and this one is in the Art League.

K.J.

Here's the final pic of my Portrait of K.J.



Still no new paintings... I have a little one done, but I still need to flatten it. Meanwhile, I've got an avalanche of homework to get done.

Update

Narrowed my lineup for the Torpedo Factory Jurying down to Tess I and Tess II, the first Katie, Katie Looking Down, Megan, and Megan II.

Receiving is tomorrow.

Something Different

Something way different. Photographs! I'm taking black & white photography this semester and I'm especially proud of these three prints. All three are of machinery; respectively, two bulldozers and a dumptruck. The bottom one is my favorite.

Finally, Some New Sketches

It's been ages since I went out and sketched people. Today I didn't feel much like using graphite. (That and I wasn't close enough to anybody to do a detailed drawing.) So I did a bunch of sketches with my brush pen. These are my two favorites. Pregnant mommy and her little baby were running around the cafe. (Well, the mom wasn't running around, but the kid was.) Cute kid, too. Kept smiling and waving at me.




On this one... the top left sketch was the little girl trying to stand on her head - or trying to do a somersault, something like that. She didn't manage to do either one, she just stood there for a few seconds in that position, absolutely thrilled by doing it.

Lineup

Sorry it's been a while since my last post... I've been fighting a couple of nasty colds in a row this last week, so I haven't been doing much work. That and I've been busy getting things together for the Torpedo Factory Jurying. I've got eight things framed for that: Megan II, Tess I and Tess II, Margaret, Megan I, Hands With Bangles, Katie Looking Down, and the first Katie.
I can only enter six of those as my originals for the Jurying... Now that they're all framed, I'll stick them together and see how they look as a group. I doubt I'll enter the hands as an original - to small. My lineup will almost definitely include both Tesses.
Here's a picture of Tess, Megan II, and Margaret together. It's not a very good picture, but hey.


And here's the first Katie, Katie Looking Down, and the Hands with Bangles.

Done

Finished the portrait of my grandfather today.

Old Stuff...

My old oil painting teacher tracked me down in the hallway today at school and gave me this old painting I left behind last spring. This is a 16" x 20" of a bottle and a... cow skull? (I have no idea what type of skull this is. It wasn't a horse. I think it was a cow...) Anyway, I entered in the student show last spring, it got in, but I forgot to pick it up. (Bad, I know.)
It's pale and not as good as my watercolors, but I figured I might as well post it.

And here's a little update of my Granddad... Didn't get much done today because of class, but it's getting there. I need to go ahead and finish his hair and the background and then it will be pretty much done, except for touch-ups.

KJ

Started this one on Friday. The model happens to be a scientist as well as a watercolorist.


And did I mention he's my grandfather? :-)

It runs in the family.

Finished

I lucked out today - my photography class was canceled, so I got to come home and finish this painting! That makes me so incredibly happy... All I want to do is sit back and stare at it.

Day by Day

I'm so proud of this one and having so much fun with it that I am going to have to post step-by-steps... or day-by-days, I guess. Got an amazing amount of work done on it today. I wish I could skip class tomorrow to stay home and paint. In fact, if I had tomorrow and Tuesday off, this would be done by Tuesday night at the latest.
But thanks to college... might not get done until next Sunday.


There's really not all that much left to it. I need to do the necklace, and then some touch-ups...

New Painting

I finished my last painting faster than I expected - mostly because once I saw the photographs of my new model, I was in a hurry to start painting her. So I'm back to painting adults, for now.


This one's untitled at the moment. (14" x 16")

A Little Boy

I went to the cafe yesterday for dinner and got some good sketches of a little boy. He couldn't hold still for more than a minute, but he was really fun to draw.








For some reason I haven't really been in the mood to draw with graphite lately. Actually, I haven't really been in the mood to draw at all - I need a new sketchbook. I bought one, but I took the old one with me to dinner yesterday by accident. Anyway, now the old one has joined the towering pile of filled sketchbooks in my closet, and I should (hopefully) be drawing more.

A Little Update

I probably won't be posting any new paintings for a while. I'm working on some children's portraits right now, and I'm not going to post those on the internet. So I'll be putting up a better picture of the fourth Tess (eventually) and sketches whenever I have them.

In the meantime, here's a somewhat better picture of that Tess. I'll replace it with a better one as soon as I have to time to go out in the sun and photograph it properly.

Tess IV

This one's done for now; all I have to do is touch it up and flatten it. I'll post a better photo as soon as all that's done.

Just Some Doodles

There really wasn't much to draw in the library Thursday. Just one girl reading a book, and the same guy that had Georgia On His Mind. So I just doodled a bit with my pens...


These are from life, as always.


Georgia wasn't on his mind this time. It's a different guy inside his head there.


I was just having fun playing with hatching and cross-hatching.



All these were with #001 Micron pens.
I tried playing with my pen nibs and ink Thursday too, but that didn't go very well. I learned my lesson about leaving a bottle of ink in a car overnight in the middle of winter... Apparently, Higgins ink doesn't defrost too good. That bottle of ink is now a bottle of black sludge.

In Progress

The newest one, in progress. Started it last Friday.

Megan II

(22" x 20")

And I'm starting a new one of Tess. I'll post pictures of that once I get some work done on it.

Math, Math, Math

Much better subjects today. More of them, too, and all the best ones were within 10 feet of me.


Sounded like he and his buddies were trying to figure out their calculus homework. Poor guy.


Another one doing math homework. I'm so glad I got my math over with.


And here's that girl with all those earrings again. She sat down right across from me, so I had all the time in the world to draw her today. She was doing math homework too. Come to think of it, everybody there was doing math homework. Hmm...

I promise I'll post a picture of a painting soon.

Just One

I had a very pathetic half hour at the library yesterday (much less time between classes on Tuesdays). It was practically empty, and I didn't have a very good view of the few people that were there.


This girl would have been fun to draw if she would have stayed longer than five minutes. She was covered in piercings, not that you can tell from the sketch. I drew her eyebrow ring, but it kind of came out as a lump. Oh well.
That's really the only decent sketch I got.
I'll be taking another two hour trip to the library tomorrow, so we'll see how it goes then.

Something On His Mind

I took a trip to my college's library today to sketch. I'm really surprised that I got as many good drawings as I did; it was really pretty dead in there for a while. At least three or four different people sat down at my table, right in my line of vision, when there were three other tables empty. I was starting to wonder if they *wanted* me to draw them.

So the library is my new drawing location. With as much spare time as I'm going to have this spring, I should end up with a lot of drawings. I should probably buy a new sketchbook tomorrow. The one I'm using now is almost full.
Anyway, here are some of the sketches I did today:


"Georgia On My Mind"...(literally.)
I did these two drawings separately, and they ended up connecting. I didn't realize until later that it looks like the man has a woman growing out of his head.
But I like it this way.


Most of the people in the library were on computers.


This guy was further away than the others, so I couldn't get a very detailed sketch of him. I like this, though; it reminds me of the quicker sketches I did of people back in high school.


Some quick sketches of the staff that were milling around. The woman on the bottom left was answering the phone.

New Stuff

A couple new sketches:





I should be getting more sketches done now that winter break's over. I'm going to have a lot of time to kill between classes this semester, so I'll probably spend it drawing in the campus center or cafe.

I'm working on a new painting right now, too, but I don't have any pictures to post yet. I'm working all weekend, so I might be able to finish it then.

Update

No new pictures to post today, but I took digitals of all my paintings this morning in the sunshine and updated old posts with the better photographs. So Megan, Margaret, and Tess are all better quality pictures now.

There It Is Again...

... finished this time. Took me exactly 7 days.