Spring Photos, ferns and a figure

It has been a strange week here in MA. Beautiful weather, perfect for running a marathon, and then for searching a bomb site for evidence, a running gun fight, a city wide shutdown, and finally a manhunt in one of the smaller Boston suburbs. The manhunt fortunately ended with the capture of the suspect and no additional loss of life, so the citizens of Boston were able to have a late night celebration on Boston Common. Today it is raining, much needed rain since the leaves are still not out on the trees so the woods ground cover was getting very dry. We don't need to add major brush fires to the events of this past week.

While I was listening to news coverage about the Marathon Bombings I was working on the above drawing of a fern sitting among the leaf litter. The image is an expanded version of the drawing I made for a book mark. I rather like how it came out, but haven't yet decided if I should try to add some color to the background. I think I will just leave it white, I feel anything else would just be distracting. This drawing is done on white Stonehenge paper with various colored pencils and is 6.5 inches square.

Monday night, despite the tragedy at the marathon I decided to attend the long pose figure drawing session. Above is my drawing from that evening. I am generally pleased with it, though per usual there are parts that I would have like to have done differently. This model is one of our twitchy ones who never seem to take exactly the same pose after our breaks. That makes it tricky to get the shadows correct. Also Scott shifted to an overhead light for this pose, which is not my favorite. The overhead light tends to make the pose flatter making it harder to define shapes. Ah well that is what the process is about, learning how to treat those difficult poses/lighting so they still work. 

Since we were having such lovely weather I went over to Borderland State Park in Easton one afternoon. Mainly I wanted to make photographs but I also took the time to do a sketch of one of the pond areas. Above is that sketch.

The rest of this post will be some of the photographs I have made at Borderland in the past week.

Motor boats are not allowed on the ponds, but people can bring canoes and fish. Which is what the gentleman was doing in the above photograph. I actually made several photographs of the fisherman and his canoe, this is to my mind the best one. The reddish trees on the right are maples starting to come into bloom, red buds.

The above photograph I made at the rear of the house of one of windows showing some blooming geraniums inside while the reflection gives a hint of the blooming beds of daffodils outside.

One area of the back lawn at Borderland has a mass of forsythia bushes which were in almost full bloom for my visit this week. You can see some other visitors to the park in background.

One last image of some early pink azalea flowers that were blooming on a bush by the old swimming pool.

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