FFFC Challenge # 32

Alphabet of Ferns

I am happy to say this challenge piece is done, late, but hey it is still May right? This is another of my FFFC Yahoo Group challenges, number 32 to be precise, issued the last Friday in April. Of course number 33 has already been issued and so far that one is only in the thinking stages, and I have missed doing 2 others, though one of those has fabrics pulled and some templates made so hopefully I will get to that one eventually.

Our challenge for Thirty two was to use analogous colors, I used blue, blue green and green with a complementary color. I used Orange. Seems like I have been doing a lot with orange lately. Obviously I like this color combination. The composition element was to use grids or frames. We were supposed to continue our series, mine is structures, but not sure this fits that theme. Maybe if you consider letter forms structures.

Earlier this year in my Typography course we created strokes and designed some letter forms, at the time I thought they would be fun to use on a quilt and even went so far as to create some stamps and purchase some Lumiere Paint. I even played with it a bit but had no time to actually do anything with the results. So when this challenge came out I thought, perfect way to use my letterforms and stamps. The stamping isn't very good, not as clean as I would prefer, partly my lack of skill in carving the stamp, and partly the material I used. I think I would have done better using a stencil as I did with the ferns. The fern design was done using home made stencils and Shiva paint sticks. I like how they came out. The lighter ferns are actually two colors a light cream overbrushed with a green.

I had designed 9 letter forms and used all 9 to create this small quilt. Size is approximately 17 X 19 inches. As always comments are welcome.

Nature Sketching #2

I am trying to draw something everyday, if not a finished drawing then at least sketches. I read the 3rd chapter in my drawing from nature book and I think that is the major piece of information that I took away. Course I already knew that, if you want to draw something well you need to draw it over and over, and you need to do a lot of drawings.

I decided this past week that I want to improve my animal drawing skills so I downloaded some pictures of squirrels and printed them out as smallish images on one sheet of paper. I used those for my rough sketches. The image below is just one page of dwgs I did more then one.

Then I moved on to do a more detailed study from a photo I had taken of a squirrel in a Chicago park. Cheeky fellow, he had no fear of us two legged folk, I have a feeling people fed him, this is certainly a begging pose.

I have also started a pen and ink study of some sea gulls, a composite drawing from some photo's I took earlier this year.

I am also working on a small quilt. Hopefully my next blog update will be pictures of that. Until then happy drawing, and per usual comments are welcome. Oh, one additional comment, the pencil drawings were small enough that I could scan them, I think they are easier to see if scanned, the sea gulls is a bit larger so I had to take a photo, also the pencil I used to sketch them is a harder lead, easier for me to erase later, but harder for you to see in the photo.

Drawing Exercise #1

In an effort to keep drawing I have joined a Drawing Blog with others interested in either learning to draw or improving their skills. I have a book that I have had since forever it seems called Nature Drawing a Tool for Learning written by Clare Walker Leslie in 1980 about the same time that Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain came out. This book focuses more on drawing from Nature which I was very interested in doing about then. I did a lot of flower drawings

Not wonderful but not too bad, you would be able to recognize the flower if you saw it for real. Anyway I have never actually used the book for study so I have decided that now would be a good time to do that.

So I have been reading the beginning two chapters and did the first study exercises, well, most of them I did pass on the memory drawing where I was supposed to look at an object for about 3 to 5 minutes then draw it from memory. But I did the other studies, a "blind" drawing where I was allowed to look at the object and draw its outlines but couldn't look at the paper to see how I was doing, the book allows 5 minutes for this, but I know I took much less time, guess I was in too much of a hurry.

Next exercise was to do gesture drawings, these are quick outline drawings to just give you the feel of the object, I did three of these, they are supposed to take less then a minute to do. When we were doing gesture drawings in Drawing II we could get a couple of minutes for the pose, but believe me, 2 minutes to draw a human figure is a very short time frame

The last drawing is a detailed drawing of your object, it is supposed to take 20 minutes to draw but I think I took a bit longer. I am semi pleased with this, I have been so busy drawing the human figure that I seem a bit out of practice with objects so this study will be good for me.

One thing I like about this book is she goes over supplies and what the basic supplies are if you want to do drawing. She also reviews the tools mentioning their characteristics, like a 2H pencil is hard while a 2B pencil is soft. Most of this I already know but for the true beginner this is a lot of help.

So now I need to read Chapter 3 and see what suggestions she has for me to try next. As always comments are welcome.

Comments welcome.