Early Morning

Today promises to be frying hot – 91F or more. The house is already closed up to keep it cool – thank goodness for modern insulation! – so we don’t have to use the air conditioning. I took this image not too long ago on a considerably cooler day, and that is what I want to think about rather than suffocating heat! The plus side of the heat is flowers love it and as it is too hot and bright to go outside for strenuous activities, it is a perfect day to do things around the house, like sewing and such. Domestic life suffers in the summer around here.

Drawing Practice

Frustrated with my inabilities to realistically do perspective and depth, which I attribute to my lack of depth perception, I’ve decided to re-edu-um-cate myself!  I signed up for an online gouache class by Lena Rivo, which has been great, as well as bought an eBook version of Bert Dodson’s Keys to Drawing.  I have decided to dedicate part of each day to doing at least one of his exercises if possible.  The hope is to improve my drawing skills, which are the problems behind some of my painting issues.

First exercise is contour drawing.  The purpose of this is to get used to the idea of checking what you see against what you draw, and get the idea into your head that what you see is not what you think.  This means looking at angles and curves as well as relationships of parts to each other.  Here are my exercise examples, diving in feet first!

Next was fun – look at your hand face on – that is, fingers in your face!  Close an eye.  Draw!

And then, imagine a pepper.  Draw it.  Then get a real pepper and take a good, strong look at it, and draw.  My imaginary pepper is at the top, and the real pepper, in three positions and three variations of drawing style, are below.

Very glad I chose to do this!  More to come.

Wooleryness

My box of knitting – a sweater in the round, to be steeked into a cardigan. The whole process of steeking entails sewing down a bead on either side of where you CUT THE SWEATER. From there, well, let’s wait until then! Too scary to contemplate for a first-time activity.

Oh, how Covid-19 makes you bored and brave (or foolish) at the same time!

You would think that a pair of cherries would be easy . . . uncomplicated . . . a breeze!

Not!

But now that I have begun to focus on simplifying everything, and moving into detail, it actually got easier.  So, rather pleased with the final result.  I took my time and find the results worthwhile.