Drawing from Nature

The drawing is "I Want More Out of Life", September 26, 2008, pencil...lots of heavy 9B black, smudges (accidental and on purpose), a smattering of hard leads carved in to model the blacks...the push and pull of layers, opposing forces, order and chaos...

The two photos are studies that I've made from the things I found around the yard, the dried grass coiled and laid on the weathered wood of the porch floor, the evening light raking across it, the strong verticals of the wood grain, and then the classic beauty of a snail shell...shapes and lines that catch my eye and wind up repeated in my drawings and paintings...

Inspiration all around!

Photographic accidents

This is a very crappy photograph of one of my recent drawings, I loved the paper and the way the graphite covered it, it's soft and fuzzy, but this is not an ideal photo of it...lighting a graphite drawing is always challenging because of the reflective nature of the medium, and scanning it hasn't been easy either, the paper took some abuse while I worked it, so the scanner catches all of that and makes it look worse...maybe someday I'll snap a good shot of it...

but I loved the glare so much when I had the overhead light on, I had to get it...well, just because...

Why not?

The "Colors", Waterfall and details

"Colors"...this is what I often call colored pencils...the colors...I've started playing around with the "colors" again, these are the monoliths by Creatacolor, woodless pencils, although they're annoyingly fragile, and very often will break under pressure, I love them to bits! I shred them into a dry powder with my fingernail, saturate them in water, squish and mush them around, dip the point of the pencil in water and scroll it around on its side...oh such lovely textures, just like paint! Yes, so...last weekend I was fooling around on the porch, enjoying the September sunshine, and opened a new sketchbook of tall narrow paper and made this Asian style vertical landscape-like mess...I took several close-up shots of details...they're just as pretty as the whole thing...

I started off with working the colors dry, just scribbling randomly, light to dark, and with a small-ish brush, I went into the dry work and soaked it, then went back in with the pencils and shavings from the sharpener...as you can see from the details, there's chunks visible...
Sometimes I have way too much fun!

Windstorm

It's windy outside today, so this drawing feels right to post...Ike is coming our way, I can feel the humid Gulf air in the wind, it's going to be a steamy and stormy day...

This drawing June Windstorm, June 19, 2007 a pencil drawing inspired by the weather at the time, is a whirlwind of marks that seemed to spiral out of control while I made them, and then I managed to tame them...I like the drawing better every time I look at it, there are little places within the whole where my eye finds a place to rest and study the textures...when I finished it, I had my doubts...but I always remember those stormy days in June when I made it. I love stormy weather as long as everyone is all right after it's over...it frightens me so much when the wind knocks things about and the lightning is close...

There are storms coming today...I'll have my pencil ready to record what I feel and see...

Inspiration from nature and going with the flow

I really do love lichen...I collected pieces of it off of tree bark when I was a kid, it just looked sooooooo...cool.

Ruffles and lace, so fragile...beautiful...

I'm sure some people would say "eeuu, gross..." and some people would think seeing this stuff growing anywhere in abundance is a scourge and needs to be eliminated because it's not supposed to be there because it's somehow bad...to me, it's life.

This cool blue patch is on a chunk of wood in our yard...we had cut a tree down several years ago and I've created a wild flower garden around the large rotten parts that were left behind along with the stump, and I've been admiring the various forms of fungus growing there for years, and this particular piece that had been once shaped as a chair (and even used as one while it lasted) is now fostering a small pine tree that had doubled in size this year, from the death of one tree comes life, I love having this part of my garden...

This sort of thing inspires my art...this is where some of my shapes and flow comes from...

Fluid Improvisation, 2007
pencil drawing on paper, approx. 12 x 9

My pencil just rambled everywhere in this one...it's a bit chaotic and the eye really has no particular place to rest in it...which I don't mind really, I like to find my own way around sometimes anyway, I don't like it when someone approaches me with: "Can I help you?" Look, if I want your help, I'll ask for it...go away...please...let me look around and enjoy myself without the pressure...I guess that's why I was such a lousy student...I always baffled my teachers, I just preferred flailing around on my own working it out... "just let me do it!" I wanted ownership of what I did, I didn't want someone to come along and finish it for me just because I asked for help, which someone did once...they just made a mark on my picture to "show me how" and I threw it away because it was no longer mine...the proper thing to do would have been to use a clean piece of paper and showed me how on that...oy, some egos are just intolerable...




This little one came from my small daily sketchbook where I fiddle with my pencil while waiting in waiting rooms of doctor's offices or waiting for my Fred to pick me up from work...it too has that chaotic spirit to it, doing it's own thing that I love so much...

What I see...

This is a photo I took of a rock in my garden, just a random old thing, crusty with layers of minerals, its pedigree a geological history from way back to who knows how long ago, and here it is on my acre enjoying the light of day on one of my Fred's creations in the garden...it's one of my favorite rocks...it's not "a sparkly", I'm sure most people would've overlooked it, especially when it was covered with dirt...but my Fred and I both agree that it's a very cool rock with lots of stuff going on in it...


It's stuff like this that inspires me to draw, things like rocks and bark, leaves and flowers, mushrooms, moss, and lichens are so beautiful to me, their patterns free flowing...gorgeous...

Wandering Ripples, January 26, 2005
pencil drawing, approx. 3 x 7

Night Shadows Suite

Mixed media experimental fun...Night Shadows Suite

Bristol paper, 11 x 14, impasto acrylic layer, heavy handed graphite scrubbed over dried acrylic (kneaded eraser lift here and there as needed), pencil drawing, and then watercolor/acrylic wash splatter...

The Eighth

This one has a little bit of everything happening in it...a pale wash of gray, pencil, and colored pencil...particularly that gorgeous tuscan red pencil...love it...
After I finished it, I had to give it a couple of days to look at it before I could decide which way was up...arrgh...but I settled for this way after about a week...it just seemed right...

Graphitint and pencil sketches

These are two small sketches from the sketchbook I carry with me every day, I doodle around in it to pass the time while I'm waiting for my Fred to pick me up from work, or I'll doodle on my lunch hour at work...tinted graphite experimentation on top of pencil, add water, and presto it's a different drawing...I like the red one best...

Untitled sketch, [indigo], June 29, 2007 pencil and tinted graphite approx. 3 x 3 inches

untitled sketch, [one of my favorite colors from the Graphitint box, "Port"], June 10, 2007, pencil and tinted graphite, approx. dimensions 3 x 3 inches

Geology

Digging deep into the geology of my drawing history...but not too far back...just looking into that sweet spot that I found almost four years ago when I finally started drawing the things that I saw in my head...and all around me...and my pencil and hand began to agree that this is how it's going to be...




Here's a little one that I made back in 2004...just feeling around on the paper surface with my pencil, letting it roam, doing things that felt right, that felt natural...keeping them small, this is only 2 x 5 or something like that, it's a little one...





And this one...I made ridiculously small, 1 x 1 inch square...just to say I did it, you see...


There's a dragon in this one...





This one is untitled, but all were made around the same time in December and January 2004-2005...


Fire...

Dusk...




Stained Glass...


Just a few little things...it's funny how they came about really...I had just about given up on this part of my life because I was so focused on writing books...but the pencil gave me something else to think about...I started doodling around on scraps of paper while I was thinking, and my doodles turned into this little batch of drawings in a sketch book that a friend gave to me as a present...it was the right size, the right shape, the paper had a nice texture...and then I just couldn't stop...