More Toys, eggs, and some Donkeys

Working in series here, above are more toys done with colored pencil. This time I added a train set to the mix, along with a stuffed horse and dog.

In a way these are more personal toys than the ones I have been drawing. While I don't recall a stuffed dog I did have plenty of toy horses. I was one of those young girls who are horse mad, there was nothing I wanted more than to have a horse of my own. Never happened, in fact I never really learned how to ride, though I did have some lessons one summer. The dream died a long time ago, maybe in another life I can make it happen. In the meantime I can relive it a bit in my drawings.

Now the model train I did have. As I recall it was a largish train (probably O scale) and I had enough track to make a small oval such as you see above. Course at this point I can't remember if mine was a steam engine or an electric engine probably steam. My drawing is of a steam engine with the coal tender behind followed by a caboose. The other object is a "tunnel" for the train to go through.

I have no memory of what happened to that train set, I never had a lot of cars or a lot of track. I did have a friend whose brother had a very large set up that he would occasionally put out on the top of their ping pong table. Now that was one fancy model train set up. The other memory I have of model trains is the set up at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, talk about large and complex. Though the current set up isn't the one I saw as a child. I can remember wishing for more of my own, but as a girl it wasn't encouraged, and we/I didn't have the money.

Do these look familiar? They should, this is the pen and ink version of the graphite drawing of the eggs I had in my last update. I used tracing paper to outline the eggs and major fabric folds and transferred the image to another sheet of drawing paper.

I used my 3X0 technical pen to draw the shadows. Probably just as well I did the finished pencil piece first as it gave me a feel for where the shadows should fall and how dark they should be.

I had started another sketch and thought that to finish it I should add a donkey. While I have over the years (mostly when I was young) drawn hundreds of horses I don't recall ever drawing a donkey. To get the look I did some on-line research and downloaded several images. Using some of those images I sketched the above.

I can tell you some of the differences I noticed between donkey's and horses. Donkeys have larger heads and ears, a more sloped profile to the nose, but very slender legs in relation to the barrel shape of the mid body, oh and not much mane or tail.

Still haven't gotten around to finishing the other drawing, I feel that I need to do a bit more sketching and research first. But it was kind of fun to do, it has been a while since I picked an animal to practice drawing, donkeys are both familiar but different from horses so are a challenge.

More signs of Spring as my final photograph today, daffodils in bloom. Hopefully they are still looking good this morning as we had a very chilly night last night. Winter just doesn't want to let go here in the Northeast. After our lovely warm weekend we actually had a bit of snow yesterday morning. The flowers survived that well enough as I made the above photograph later in the afternoon, but it was cold last night so I can only hope they made it through OK.

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