Saturday, November 21, 2009

Sketchcrawl 25





This morning, I poured my last cup of coffee into a travel mug, tossed my small sketchbook and a pencil in a bag, and marched out the door. After a short walk, I arrived at Library Park and sat down at a picnic table. I didn't move for an hour while I drew this lovely home.

I had an opportunity to go in this house a couple of years ago during a Christmas crafts sale that the couple hosted for a local organization. At the time, the home was lovely but worn. The couple who own it have been working on it steadily (and carefully) restoring it. I hope they host another craft sale soon, so I can see what progress they've made inside. The outside received a completely new paint job this year. My sketch doesn't do the gingerbread any real justice, but there was a LOT of detail work there, and they did a great job with it—butter yellow on the brick with white trim, and maroon highlights—gorgeous!

As I understand it, they were hoping to open a B&B, but they were having a hard time getting permission from the city. I don't know if anything has changed with the city, but it would be a wonderful B&B!

Back to the topic of the Sketchcrawl: The concept is to go to several locations and sketch along the way—twist on the classic pubcrawl. I did go to several locations—the park, a restaurant for lunch, a walk along the lake, and back home to my sunny back porch. However, I ended up working on this one sketch at almost all of those locations.

I did accidentally discover a technique for doing the brick so it doesn't look so heavy. I did the brick in my usual manner, and then I erased a lot of it. The eraser leaves enough along the edges and even in the erased areas, that the texture is still there without all of the lines. This may be old news to you, but it was a happy new discovery to me :-D

If you'd like to see other results from the worldwide Sketchcrawl go to: Sketchcrawl Forum and click the link for the 25th Sketchcrawl.

Thanks for stopping by!

Saturday, November 07, 2009

The Small and The Large



The bee is drawn from a Charles Krebs' photo appearing in National Wildlife magazine.



The gorilla was drawn from the cover photo of National Wildlife magazine. I couldn't find the photographer's name anywhere :-( It's a great photo, though :-D

Thanks for stopping by.

Wednesday, November 04, 2009