Life, once again, gets in the way. I have had little time to draw of late and what time I had was short. So, if you don’t have time to draw the whole figure, then draw an interesting part of it. I was doodling around and was experimenting with various body parts. Mostly in graphite but I also experimented with my Pitt Artist Pens – I bought a set of the Gray shades a while back and hadn't really done much with them.
The other day I was waiting for my lovely bride, enjoying the sunny afternoon when a tiny ladybug landed on the knee of my blue jeans. I decided to experiment with the macro mode of my little digital camera. It was touch and go, there, because the sun was quite bright and it was difficult to see the image on the view screen. The macro mode also requires a very steady hand or a tripod – since I didn’t have a tripod handy and if I did it would have been awkward to try and set it up to take a picture of my knee. So, it was to be a hand held operation. Several tries later and coaxing the poor ladybug to stay put I managed to get one sharp image.
For those interested the camera is a Canon PowerShot SD400 5mega pixel model. It has a macro mode and a 3x optical zoom and 12x digital zoom. It is a very small and compact camera – probably the main reason I bought it. I am happy with it for what I use it for.
The Pigma comes in lots of colors as does the Pitt. I had a hard time finding individual pens - instead of sets - of the Pitt pens in art stores. I finally found the black ones at Office Depot! After you get used to them they really provide a lot of expression in pen and ink line. They remind me of comic book illustrations.
Last week was a very intense week. I attended a seminar on Simulation Modeling and Analysis – read heavy on statistics. To avoid the traffic and parking I rode the Metro (subway) to and from the sessions. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to do a little sketching. The ride is not very long so I decided to try sketching heads to start with. I did a couple on each trip in. On the trip out it was to crowded to try and draw – there are lots of stops so trying to draw standing up is near impossible – need an extra hand to hold on to a support. The seminar was really good – but even a good seminar will have some slow moments. So, as the math began to get deeper than I needed I doodled i
n the margins of my notes. Well, there was five days of this and I tend to doodle a lot. I used my fountain pen for almost all of these doodles.
My first couple of days I tried heads, as I mentioned, a couple were good and others dismal. I still find myself noodling with the image and trying to put more detail than I need, in my opinion. I am trying to improve my sketching speed! But, as Dave Rankin would say I tend to draw rather than sketch.
I thought I would try my hand at hands one morning and that was not so good. I really got wrapped around the details and lost the image I was after. The fact that some people move their hand
s around a lot made it difficult as well. So, I need to really concentrate on speed – to capture the shape that caught my eye and worry about the detail later.
After my questionable effort to capture hands I thought I would try one of the EDM challenges – to draw a mouth. This was particularly interesting and I really had fun with this. It is extremely enlightening when you begin studying the mouths of those around you. The amazing range of subtle and dramatic diff
erences could fuel drawings for a very long time.
In spite of all the marginal art I really did get a great deal out of the seminar. I expect that I will be applying many of the concepts presented in the very near future.
