It pays to tidy up

Decided it was well past time to reorganize my desk/studio area and found a couple of quick sketches I had forgotten about. Given that I woke up to snow falling fast and furious, I appreciated the cheery nature of my find.



Thankfully the sun came out, the snow has completely melted and it's like the whole thing never happened LOL.

Kickin Up My Heels

Kicking Up my Heels(c)2015 Susan Langdon
 8x10 in on 140 lb CP Strathmore paper
 

Considering I'm a diehard Crocs girl, I'm not sure where the inspiration for these came from but I sure had a ball painting them.

I like the right shoe better than the left but I think that is only because of the foreshortened perspective, something I struggle with but admittedly am getting better at the more I draw it.

I'm really pleased with this, my first attempt at leopard print. it doesn't really show here but in the original there's a fair bit of texture so that the material looks more touchable. All that's left to do is get them matted up and packaged to go to Nan's shop for her April Fools Sale. Who knows, they just might follow somebody home LOL.

It's beginning to feel like Spring

Poured Daisies (c)2015 Susan Langdon
7x5 in on 140 lb CP Strathmore paper

Temps are rising, snow is melting and it truly feels like winter is letting go. My personal challenge to do something art wise every day for a month is definitely working.

Some days it's new work and other times it's searching through my orphan drawer and taking out a half finished piece and working on it. That's what happened here.

This was a poured piece that I did last year, oddly enough during this same period of ennui. It was okay but didn't feel finished, yet I didn't know what it needed. This year, apparently, it needed a little ink work.

It's different for me but that's okay - I'm in a mood to break out of my norm and try new things.

Finally

It's been many, many weeks but finally I've put something down on paper that makes me happy. This is just the colour test done on scrap paper for a sketch I've already drawn but it pleased me enough to put it here.

I've also challenged myself to do art every day for a month in order to push through my own creative block. Sometimes I just need to get out of my own way, as a dear friend reiterated for me last night, and stop making things more complicated than they need to be LOL!

So Day #1 complete.

Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays to all.

Thank you for stopping by my little corner of the world.

 

                                                                            

Virtual Paint Out - Rome

This month's Virtual Paint Out location is Rome. So much to see and choose from here.

If you want to see what I was working from click here.

I pushed my Bienfang sketchbook paper well beyond its water media capabilities and ended up overworking it.

But while my perspective is not perfect, I was quite pleased over all with the drawing, which took about 15 minutes to complete. I do wish I had scanned it before adding in colour though.

I really need to do a value study of the original and compare it to mine so I can see where I would need to fix it if the paper were to tolerate it. I know in my heart and mind that value studies are a key tool to being happy with the finished product but my lack of patience always gets in my way. 

ETA- In the meantime, I put this into drafts while I searched out how to do a screencapture - easy, peasy in the end. So here are the images in grayscale. This really does help me to see the value and perspective lines better and not get caught up in the details, which is what usually happens.

 

Okay, definitely need to add routinely doing value studies to my New Year's art resolutions LOL!
 

Another post

Nothing posted for a couple of weeks and then two in one day. This is one of the sketches I did when we were studying contour drawings a number of weeks ago in Sketchbook Skool.

I wasn't sure how I felt about it at first but now, after not seeing it for awhile, I'm quite taken with the results. Gotta love complimentary colours!

It was done using a photo reference from a class I took years ago where we all brought items in according to the theme of the week - fruit, vegetables, glass, metallic etc and then spent the afternoon putting together still life setups to photograph for our own reference libraries.

Bird's eye view II

Several months ago, I had done a small watercolour sketch of Abbeydale for Nan and Tom's summer party. That led to a request for a bigger version incorporating part of the hamlet surrounding them.

It took me awhile for my brain to get the perspective right when working only from satellite photos but I'm finally happy with the outcome. The preliminary sketch looked like this-
 

I've scrubbed the name out since it didn't make the final cut anyway and for privacy sake because it includes friends' names. The final piece is a combination of pen, watercolour and watercolour pencil work.

Sketchbook Skool 'Seeing' Week #6

This past week's instructor was Liz Steel, an Australian architect and sketcher. The key point being tackled is dealing with a complicated shape/pattern or structure by breaking it down into its simpler components. In the second assignment we'll be doing a building but first up is a patterned teacup and saucer.

Small thumbnail sketches show the detail of the pattern on the saucer and one panel of the cup. Grid lines are used to establish proportions. Since this is meant to be a quick sketch and not an exact replica, wonkiness is  perfectly acceptable. Thank goodness because my cup looks like it's getting compressed by the text to its right LOL.  I enjoyed doing the exercise and it's such a sensible way to approach a complicated or heavily patterned object.

At the Printers

Finally got my cards off to the printers this morning, hopefully to be picked up tomorrow so I can get them packaged up for sale. If things work out to plan that only puts me 4 days behind where I was last year at this time. Considering my xmas muse was late arriving - I tried to book her in for mid October but she was having none of that - I'm quite happy about that.

I ended up with four new designs, just not the ones I originally thought I would. In the end, the row of xmas balls seen below just didn't speak to me when it came time to putting it into card format. Neither did Claire the Christmas sheep (sorry Alison, by next year she should be ready). However, I did manage a humourous snow man and a more traditional bit of pinecones, holly and ribbon that I liked. These two, along with Rudy aka One Cool Dude and this year's Nuki and Friends will round out the class of 2014.

Note to self: images for printing were scanned at 300dpi with contrast increased to 20 in the hopes that the colours will be much more true to life when they're printed. Last year's colours needed to be more saturated - hopefully they now don't come out too garish, yikes. Time will tell.

Sophie waiting for Santa