Flowers, a Figure and Snow

Where does the time go, this week it has totally gotten away from me. No excuse for not updating the blog, I actually have been busy working on various projects so have images to post but somehow didn't manage to make the time to actually scan images or post an update. Oh well, means I have works for my next post which should happen in a more timely manner.

Before I forget Happy Valentines Day to all, though I have to admit it is one of those Holidays that I usually ignore.

Anyway the above colored pencil drawing (with some ink) was finished earlier this week. The images started out as a doodle that I rather liked so I scanned it into the computer, enlarged it in Photoshop and reprinted it at the larger size. Then using tracing paper I transferred it to Stonehenge paper, inked in outlines and colored. Sometimes I feel like I am still working in coloring books though colored pencils allow for much more finesse than crayons do. Still I rather like the look of the finished work so probably will continue to work this way.

Needless to say these aren't real plants/flowers, though the fern leaves are fairly realistic. The leaf variegation was inspired by seeing some spotted wintergreen on one of my fairly recent walks in some woods.

Above is last weeks figure drawing. I actually made it to a Monday night long pose session. Not totally happy with this, but not sure what I would want to change. I think the model found the pose more of a challenge than she initially though it would be and had a certain amount of difficultly maintaining it, which made it a bit hard to draw. When a model shifts a pose it shifts the shadows which can make it very tricky to get the drawing finished the way I would prefer.

Shifting shadows are one of the major challenges of painting or drawing plein air landscapes, when doing those the idea is to lay in the major outlines including shadows in the first 15 to 20 minutes, and then work on details. Not quite so easy to do with a figure drawing. But then the challenge is why we keep doing it, or at least I tell myself that.

One week ago here in the Northeast everyone was preparing for a blizzard. The storm started Friday morning and stopped Saturday afternoon. I tried to document some of the storm in photographs, though I have more start of storm images than I have after storm images. Still I thought I would share some of the ones that I liked.

Above is a road near where I live, the photograph was made Friday afternoon when it had been snowing for a couple of hours but still wasn't much in the way of accumulations. The road is fairly empty because our Governor had declared a driving ban starting just prior to when I made this photograph. People grumbled, but at least we didn't have hundreds of cars stuck on major highways here in MA like they did in CT and NY, and like we did back during the blizzard of '78. BTW thought the photograph looks like it is just black and white it isn't, the snow just seemed to wash all the color out of the environment.

The above photograph was made out one of my windows Saturday afternoon after it had stopped snowing. It shows the snow piled up on the porch railings. I would guess it was about 14 inches of snow. Course it didn't actually stay there long. By Sunday afternoon it had fallen or melted off the railings.

The above photograph was made Sunday afternoon after the snow, and shows a bench in the park area around our city hall. I am not sure how much snow we actually received in my area, but from this image I would guess at least 18 inches, not as much as many areas, but still quite a bit. Some walkways had been cleaned out, but obviously not around this bench. The little lumps of snow are bits that had fallen off of tree branches in this park area. The initial snow fall was very sticky and stuck to trees, sides of buildings and phone/power lines, the bright sun on Sunday caused it to fall away.

That is it for today, per usual comments are welcome.