April Friday Update

Daisy's playing Badminton

Actually I don't have anything really new to post today, but I have been working on something I started last summer and put aside. Below is what I am working on. I call it Daisy's Band. When it is finished it will be the 5th drawing I have done using the Daisy's as characters. Above is the 3rd one, Daisy's playing badminton. For some reason I never posted any of the Daisy drawings to the blog. I created them to be images for cards and I guess I felt at the time that I should keep them a bit under wraps. Sort of pointless since I doubt I will ever get them published as cards. So I thought I would share a couple of them today. The rest I will post to my Facebook fan page, which you can find by clicking on the "like" button at the bottom of the blog page.

The other three completed drawings, are Daisy's celebrating a Birthday (the first one), Daisy's having a picnic, and Daisy's on a camping trip. They might look a bit silly but actually the last three took a fair amount of research to draw. For the badminton players I had to find reference images for the badminton net, racket, birdie and the squirrel. For my campers I had to find a tent, canoe, a lakeside and an image of distant mountains. For the band below I had to find microphones, guitars, the drum set, and the various audience animals.

As you can see the petals around their faces are different colors. All of the drawings have different colored petals around the faces, no particular reason, just me playing with color. The drawings are done on smooth bristol board using ink outlines and then colored pencil fills. For each design detailed drawings were done in a sketchbook and then transferred to the bristol board using tracing paper.

Below is the outline drawing for another of my pen and ink works. I have another outline finished but decided you didn't need to be exposed to that much unfinished art.

I managed to get the beets drawn and inked before I got sidetracked with the Daisy's. Actually what really had me sidetracked yesterday was updates to my Portfolio web site. I added a page with some of the recent drawings I have been doing on the hot press watercolor paper, removed old images and added images of newer works to some of the other pages. The biggie was to revamp the flash slide show. I also revised the About Me page to reflect the fact that I haven't been attending school this year, and to hopefully push me to really think about and write an artist statement.

The flash slide show isn't that hard to do, but it takes time, esp. as I had to refresh my memory on how to actually add images to the existing show. Thankfully the last time I had worked on the show I had written notes to myself. They certainly helped  me to get back up to speed fairly quickly. Still it is time consuming to add images to a time line so it took a while to create something that lasts only a few minutes. I removed several older images and added some of my newer works to the show. I am not going to suggest that anyone go visit, all images have been shown here on the blog, and I don't put everything on the web site anyway. I just wanted to explain what has kept me away from actually drawing.

That is it for today. Comments and/or questions are always welcome.