Drawing Tuesday - hands

Hands are a great subject - you carry them with you everywhere! Feet too, but they're usually in shoes. Unfortunately for both the viewpoint is somewhat limited. 

Lots of info about hands in this (long) video - https://youtu.be/2CmrMRXoA8Q. Interesting to see the underlying shapes analysed.

In three minutes, without words, you'll get a good idea of proportions and shapes of parts of the hand - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDvqUXG75k&ab_channel=draweasychannel

There's much more info on the internet, but best is to use your eyes of course!

From Sue B - i have been doing pictures from photos of my cousin’s grand-daughter…

From Ann - Here is a drawing of my left old hand! A good exercise..at least I had a still subject.

From Gill - I challenged myself by drawing on the back of another.

 

From Jackie - pen and ink sketches of hands:  making a pot, playing the cello, playing the flute, picking a flower and doing yoga!!

From Sue S - Good to put my feet up for this one! Here’s my take - sketched in caran d’ache (un-wetted) -

From Janet B - My feet in flip flops, my ankles in ankle warmers and a glimpse of calves in jeans. A fun drawing morning. 

From Richard - No-one deserves to see my feet, so wrinkly left hand it was. I’m right handed and did not have the courage to try ‘'wrong-handed’.

From Carol - Some hands sketched a while ago. Am engrossed in making some coil pots ...

From Judith - Didn’t fancy drawing my feet so mini quiz  ‘match the feet’ - Ostrich, dinosaur, venomous platypus, bald eagle, coot, rhino, lemur, crocodile, hedgehog!

From Joyce - Followed Sue’s idea and put my feet up for half an hour! Stabilo water soluble black crayon.

From Hazel - I drew my feet when I attended an online course with the Royal Drawing School recently. The class was called The Body Clothed with tutor Susan Wilson. We used ourselves as models and drew hands and feet quite often. It was an inspiring course. I used a Conté carbon pencil to draw with.

From Mags - I had root canal treatment on Monday and was still recovering ... So I'm sharing a drawing I did in June with prompt of ' holding' . I drew my left hand in pencil holding a Romanian ceramic bowl but then got carried away with watercolour....

From Najlaa - The first one is from a picture of the gloves in Metro newspaper. The 2nd one my decorative hand.

From Helen - produced for my art group when we had the same topic

And mine - Munakata  is my favourite 20th century woodblock artist, so I looked at his treatment of hands. The light areas have been cut away and the dark areas printed. It was interesting, informative, and even somewhat daunting to consider the relationships of dark/light, positive/negative space, drawing vs cutting while doing these. Time well spent.

Drawing Tuesday - ingredients

The theme is self explanatory: the bits that make the whole. But the whole of what - most likely, a recipe, but it could be other things too.... 

Sidenote ... It's October, and for the daily drawing crowd, that means "Inktober". I started and was enjoying the "visual research" inspired by the prompts, but very quickly fell by the wayside. In researching "how to draw with ink"  I watched a couple of videos that may be of interest. One is 20 tips for beginners, and another gives two simple warm-up exercises that will help develop a steady hand and fluent lines.

From Helen - 

From Ann - Coloured pen drawing of ingredients...and collage of onions.

From Hazel -  an illustration made using scraper board for New Society in the 1980s. It was for an article on food entitled 'Fish - festive, frugal ...' I think fish is more expensive today!

From Judith - Know your fungi, are these an edible ingredient. Found on Marshes south of Walberswick

From Najlaa

From Richard - I keep trying to reproduce a meal, with these ingredients, which the mother of friends of ours in Puglia gave us once. Unforgettable aroma from the kitchen then it tasted fantastic. I’ve not quite cracked it yet! 

From Sue S - A colourful array of fruit ‘n’ veg. Caran d’ache & soluble wax crayon.

From Jackie - neocolour crayons... fridge veg basket full again ... supper decisions to be made!

From Joyce - here’s one I did in lockdown for Urban Sketchers.

From Mags - Ingredients for Waldorf Salad (  apples and walnuts) using homemade botanical inks bought from Amanda Thesiger during East Kent Artists Open Houses. No green so no celery ( perhaps I should have drawn with it.. ) 

From Janet B - Bread and butter pudding; most of the ingredients

From Sue B - a quick sketch of white and red onions in a favourite provencal green bowl…pencil only!

From Gill - I scratched into a piece of Tetra Pak , took a print from it by hand, then added crayon.

From me -  "Ingredients for a takeaway curry ... and ecodisaster"

Poetry Thursday - Cordón by Laura Chalar

 

Cordón

With gray fingers the rain
comes sketching the trees.
Behind the closed windows
people wake up to Sunday.
And the broken floor tiles shine
like the finery of the poor.

- Laura Chalar (via) 

Laura Chalar was born in 1976 in Montevideo, Uruguay, where she trained as a lawyer. She is the author of six books, most recently Unlearning: Poems (Coal City Press, 2017).

I was delighted to find this poem on my first post-lockdown journey on the Underground - which was very empty at 11pm on a Sunday!

Drawing Tuesday - queues

 A topic that might need a bit of explanation? 

Across the pond, the word for a queue (of people) is a line or line-up. "Are you in this line-up?" or even "Is this the end of the line?" Across the pond, call it a queue and the answer is "Huh?" - !

So, if you can't find a convenient queue to draw "from life"  - there used to be one at every grocery store, where have they gone? - consider the term more broadly ... lines of similar objects. 

Definition:

1.  BRITISH
a line or sequence of people or vehicles awaiting their turn to be attended to or to proceed.

2.

COMPUTING

a list of data items, commands, etc., stored so as to be retrievable in a definite order, usually the order of insertion.

1. 
   

If you're interested in the origin of this strangely-spelt word, look here  - but don't scroll down too far, the discussion goes down a rabithole about Old French spelling! 

A relevant factoid: "Cōda means "tail", and this is the original meaning of the word "queue". In the middle of the 18th century, a "queue" was a plaited pony-tail hairstyle. They were so popular that they were required in the British army - a rule which lasted 100 years."

From Hazel -  I made this drawing from a sketchbook page drawn whilst waiting in the Wimbledon queue in 2011. Today's drawing was made with dip pen, brush and ink on Bristol Board.

From Carol - Here are some of my little wooden travelling people used for my storytelling. Don’t know when I will get to use them again.  Last time they were waiting for the Red Sea to open – this time it looks like its Tescos. NB only one of them is covid secure!!

From Judith - Queues of shoes

From Sue S - A tricky one to find immediate reference for , so used my photo of July 2018 - a queue @ the RAF Centennial show @ Horse Guards Parade. Just pencil with red highlighting rear fuselage.

From Gill - A monoprint with crayon added.

From Ann - I couldn't resist drawing this queue forming at the post office. I saw an interesting range of individuals ...poses and colours plus the stop sign! Strange times...

From Sylvia - Here is my queue.

From Mags - Queuing for the British Museum??? 

No social distancing  and masks, though I suppose if you're headless...

From me - an object that always makes me smile, which the giver (you know who you are!) discovered in a City Lit pottery sale some years ago -

Drawn as quickly as possible with the left hand and a soft pencil - of course it rubbed off on my hand because I started on the left, as is usual with the right hand. It's really only a warmup drawing, but time is short at the moment! I'd like to return to this object. One day....

Drawing Tuesday - glasses

There are many videos on youtube on drawing (drinking) glasses. The three I watched were chosen by length, or rather, shortness.

This one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpbW3Aq0PB0&ab_channel=CircleLineArtSchool -  comes in at 6-1/2 minutes. It has no commentary and starts with "sketchy marks", which made me fear that the artist didn't quite know what he was doing, but I liked that one area was done at a time, initially - and then revisited to balance up tones. An eraser appeared for the tidying up at the end, and adding highlights. One pencil was used throughout (or at least you never saw a change!), the tones resulting from pressure.

The second video was much shorter (3 minutes) and quite sensible, I thought, with sparse commentary, including saying what was being used when. OK, it's drawing a crystal ball, but that's only another kind of glass? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_XBYqoiAOI&ab_channel=FineArt-Tips

The "how many media can you use in 4 minutes" prize goes to this extremely realistic, gold-rimmed glass - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjY71Qp40sg&ab_channel=MarcelloBarenghi  - and you get to see the original at the end!

Of course there are other types and forms of glass than drinking glasses - the crystal ball being one such. Consider also looking glasses, and the glasses that most of us carry around on our noses for some or all of the day. 

Objects made of glass? - beads, light bulbs, car headlights (ok they're probably plastic) ... Sea glass? 

From Carol - A small but quite satisfying drawing today. It made me think about refracted light and of course how to show thick lenses which I might not have thought about before.

From Sue S - an Inherited glass inkpot filled with green marbles. Decided to swivel the lid for more shapes. 

From Richard - Thought I’d do these decanters then do another sketch more truly of ‘glasses’ but I can see I won’t! This seems confused rather than blended between the aquarelle textures when dry and wet, but it’s all learning for me. I might work it up better. I’m finding the photos show me how much I seem to miss with my eyes!

From Judith -  lots of negative spaces this week!

From Joyce -  my glass came from my Grandmother’s house when she died many years ago.

From Mags - Various interpretations in different media of the Victorian glass eyebath given to me as a small child as a vase for daisies. Why is it that the quick biro sketch in my daily drawing sketchbook or the tryouts on my paper 'drop -cloth'  are more satisfying than those done 'properly'? 

From Najlaa - perfume bottle

From Gill - Two monoprints of glasses.

From Ann - I completed this week or so before...of three vases. Loved the intricacies of shapes and patterns forming. 

And finally - my computer glasses turned into a "tracing" monoprint - 

A piece of glass (appropriately!) was inked up, a piece of paper laid gently on it and the drawing on top of that, then the drawing was carefully traced. I had blotted the ink a bit with scrap paper, but the smudges are due to a bit much ink left on the plate, or perhaps to unexpected finger pressure during tracing. I feel that they add to the feeling of blurry vision!