Back to drawing

I got in a drawing mood after playing around with abstract painting and collaging lately. These two are graphite and gouache - the top one is 11x14" and the bottom is 9x12". I thought reducing the size of the paper would make it easier for me to fill in the composition when there's just one hand that I'm drawing and it seems like it worked out ok.

One of my challenges with these pieces is figuring out what exactly I want to show and what is unnecessary and can be left out. So I try to think of that when I'm putting together my reference photos or I end up wanting to put too much in. Even cropping down the image so it's showing only the bit I want to draw helps me simplify. Most of these drawings are a sort of composite of multiple images and the hands are usually pictures I've taken for reference. Not that it probably makes that much difference but I thought maybe other artists who work from images would find it interesting :)

collaging

Three little collages this week - the first two are 5x7" and the last one is 8x10". I had an idea to put some kind of texture in the background of a collage, so I did some watercolor washes with a big flat brush. It's one of my grandma's watercolor brushes so I feel like it fits with my themes even though all you can see on the paper is an abstract wash :)

It's good to use the things I inherited from her - makes me remember her but not in a sad way.

I'm not ready for fall

Ok, I know that everybody seems to be delighted that fall is almost at hand...I keep seeing blog posts about scarves and leaves and hot chocolate. To fall I say "meh." I am not ready to let go of summer yet.

I'm still getting used to the idea that I live in a place where it rains a lot. Like really a lot. This year we had an unusually warm January - 50 degrees and rainy. And that is warm, for January. Here's the problem: it was also 50 degrees and rainy for the entire month of June. And it's been hot in spells but not for long. And now we appear to be skipping straight to October.

That horse you see up there? She does not go out in the rain. At all. She will throw an absolute fit if she gets wet while we're out. And I'm not ready to stop riding for the winter yet.

Enough grumbling. I haven't been in the studio much lately - more working on knitting and sewing projects that I can pick away at a little at a time. I keep forgetting to get pictures but I'll get around to it soon, I hope.

brushy brush brush

Two square oil paintings - small one is 6x6" and the larger one is 10x10".

I can't remember what I used to mix the greeny blue on the other pair of these that I did. I don't think this was it but I already mailed them off to their new owner so I can't confirm :) I need to get in the habit of noting some of the color mixes I use when I'm doing oils because I have just enough random tubes of color to be confusing. I used to make little swatches on canvas paper and stick them into a sketch book with a note about the colors I used. I should get back in the habit of doing that when I get something I'm especially happy with.

Cut and paste

A couple collages today. I printed out the pink scanned images a while back and hadn't got around to actually putting anything together. The weather has been sunny and hot until yesterday so I thought I would go in the studio for a change :)

I like mixing it up a bit and incorporating that certain vintage magazine pink. I like the blues and greens and all, but I need variety, too.

Garden update

Apparently the people are demanding a look at my garden this year...well, one person, anyway :) Here's a peep at the flowers for you.

Summer evenings

We've had some gorgeous summer weather around here lately. There's been a few fires around - nothing close enough that we could even smell smoke but enough to give the sun an orange tint and make some crazy sunsets. So here's a summer evening treasury that was just the thing for me to do last night when I was feeling too lazy to knit :)