100 Heads: Head #53

This is a portrait I did for my on-line portrait group.

100 Heads: Head #52

This is a copy of the angel's head from the painting Madonna on the Rocks (1483-1485 ) by Leonardo Da Vinci. This painting is in the National Gallery in London. The original is in oil; my copy is in graphite. I changed the angel's hair a little to make the woman look more contemporary. I have been using the egg shape as a basis for drawing heads. I draw guidelines on the eggs to help me position the features of the face. This method is not particularly accurate though; it is easy to get the guidelines wrong. I plan to try out other methods, such as the cube in perspective, to see if they lead to quicker accuracy.

Doodling on a Jet Plane

I flew to the Washington DC area this week; this is what I did on the flight home to Dallas. The plane was nearly empty, so I had a whole row of seats to myself. Very relaxing. Good for me, bad for American Airlines. I got the idea for this type of drawing from the book Keys to Drawing with Imagination by Bert Dodson. Dodson calls this escher tiling:

The object of this technique is to make a drawing that has no background spaces; every shape is an object that fits into every other shape.

I made up a game where I had to copy images from the Sky Mall catalog in the seat pocket in front of me. You know, the catalog with things no one really needs? Like the King Tut Life-Sized Sarcophagus Cabinet for $850?

I flipped through the catalog until I came to an image that appealed to me, then I fitted it into the drawing. Very relaxing and childlike. Doing art for no reason at all.

100 Heads: Head #51

30 minute sketch of my dad. Here I am experimenting with using line as a unifying element in the drawing.

Fist Blind Contour Drawing

Blind contour drawing of an always available model: My hand.

Giraffe Blind Contour Drawing

This is a blind contour drawing of a giraffe statuette.

100 Heads: Head #50

30 minute sketch of my mom, from life.

Going Bananas

I am revisiting fundamentals this month and practicing contour drawing. I am also developing design skills by thinking about how I arrange multiple contour drawings on a single page.

The Couple (Rock of Ages Variation #1)

Here is the first variation on the drawing I posted here. I used charcoal on Ingres paper. At first, I had difficulty getting started on a variation of another drawing. I am so used to copying, either from life or from master drawings, that I struggled with imaginative work. Once I got started, though, the drawing took on a life of its own, and I no longer referred to the original drawing, but rather let my instinct guide me.

Rock of Ages

Wow, I have been gone from blogging for over a month! My mother is still in a rehabilitation center recovering from hip surgery, but she is now stable and is slowly gaining mobility. Rehabilitation is a long, slow process and I am getting back to my normal life and activities.

This drawing was inspired by an exercise in the book Experimental Drawing by Robert Kaupelis. I started with a crop of a magazine photo. I cropped the photo a long time ago, so I do not recall the magazine. I think the actual photo was of a man and a woman lying next to one another. I like the ambiguity and the forms in the cropped photo. The faces remind me of mountains. This drawing replicates the cropped photo closely, but it is just the first step in a series of drawings. In subsequent drawings, I will depart from the cropped photo more and more. Eventually, the art work will be totally different from the original photo.