Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Spiral Drawing

Miguel Herranz demonstrated "spiral drawing" in week 5 of "Stretching" in Sketchbook Skool.  He instructed us to find a scene and focus on one thing we found interesting and draw it near the center of the page.  Then instead of working out the entire composition we were to draw in a spiral or circle out from the center to the edges.  I think I must draw complicated scenes like this because this didn't seem strange or different.  I started with the "one way" sign and worked out from there.  This is really not the scene I wanted to draw but was the only thing I could find from a shady spot in the old Cordova neighborhood near my house.  I want to draw some of the older more interesting buildings from the early part to the last century.  But there were so many cars parked everywhere that I couldn't find a place to park myself without sitting in the very hot sun.  The vantage point that I chose was the back of a restaurant (now out of business) that had an interesting pattern of railings, walkways, and great shadows.  I didn't finish the entire scene.  I was satisfied with the incompleteness of the drawing.



Friday, September 2, 2016

Sketchbook Skool Week 5

This week's lesson was fun "child's play" presented by Fabio Consoli from Sicily.

The theme this week was to free yourself to be childlike in your approach to drawing. Children love to draw what is in their head and don't get hung up on whether their work is accurate or composed properly.  They just enjoy the process of making art and love the finished product.  They don't consider anything they put on the paper a mistake.

Our first homework was to allow a small child to draw something in our sketchbook.  I found a 6 year old girl in the after school care at my school and asked her to draw a forest in my sketchbook.  Keeping the childlike tone I had to draw on top of her drawing to make it my own.  The little girl drew trees that seemed to be floating between the ground and the sky.  She had added herself in the middle in a rainbow dress, of course.  I turned the trees into rockets and put a parachute on the little girl.

The next part of the assignment was to draw an object or scene from life in detail.  I drew my grandson's toys. 



Then we had to close the sketchbook and were instructed not to refer to our drawing for the second part of the assignment. From memory we were to incorporate those drawings into another  drawing from our imagination, approaching it as though we were a child, no worrying, not acknowledging mistakes.  We also had to use our non-dominant hand for part of it and paint with something that wasn't paint.  


My inner child wanted to use that road construction equipment to scoop ice cream.  I painted the chocolate ice-cream with coffee and wrote the words with my left hand.  I rarely draw from my imagination, but it was so much fun that I can't wait to do some more of this type of work.    I may go back and work on the background some more.  My inner child said I was finished, but my adult self wants some more refinement.