Tag Archives: sketches

Coming Full Circle

We are tidying up the house before school starts tomorrow. An ambitious task, given a week or three, let alone one afternoon…

The boys went through a HUGE pile of their artwork in the kitchen and decided what to keep and what to recycle (I didn’t dare look). Aside from lots of kids’ artwork, they found some interesting other items including, a bag with a badge and pen from a toy train festival, two of my missing tax activity statements… for years already lodged (ahem), a pile of receipts for the same, and a few bits of my own mislaid drawings.

Mitsu-Bishi Hi-uni Poni with black wings

These were among them. They refer back to the first tests of the new pencil range that Scott bought in his Pencil Period, which I blogged about when I had just started Endpapers.

Here is another odd pair of sketches. I”m including them just because I have to finish cleaning the kitchen now :-)

Miscellaneous! This was the beginning of my whippet phase, because of Thunderstorm Dancing. And Dexter the ball-obsessed Staffordshire Bull Terrier is of course the perfect foil to a whippet.

Experiments with Blobs (part 2)

School information session (Level 3) on a hot night

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Sue Grisdale talking up the front. From this sketch you will see that the teachers put more effort into their attire than the rest of us. They had been looking after our children all day. We somehow managed to look more hot and exhausted than they…

These sketches might not be very interesting. Most of them are people’s backs. Sorry about that:-) But here they are anyway. True to my own school days, I was up the very back row drawing people… After years of practice, I may not have perfected my drawings, but I have become pretty good at drawing and listening at the same time.

This woman did not remotely look like she was wearing a night dress in real life. But in my drawing, she does. My apologies to her.

This woman was not thin. She was simply of a strikingly narrow frame. If she were a dog, she might be a Saluki. A well behaved one.

Ponytails and buns were the in thing tonight. I think it’s due to the heat and keeping hair off the neck. If I were able to arrange the back of my own head, I might have worn one too. Unfortunately I find that a bit too tricky.

Cabinet Card Faces that tell a story

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Young actress wearing a hat – This was my warm up sketch. Fast and loose.

Waiting for the kids while they are in their drama class on Wednesday afternoons, I am in the lap of luxury for an hour in a big leisure centre. There is a huge room with large tables, very few people and a nearby change room with fresh water for painting. This week I took my altered book sketching back-pack (have ink, can travel) and did some sketches there.

When I want to launch into something without thinking too much or wasting limited time finding a subject, I sometimes like to look at vintage cabinet cards, featuring studio portrait photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries. The faces are intriguing, the costumes often more interesting than today’s garb and usually the poses are wonderfully contrived. They are in black and white so the tonal values and detail are usually good for my purposes.

Italian ballet dancer with smiling eyes. This one was done after I got home and she has a touch of collage. I cut the face first, loosely without drawing an outline, to avoid getting caught up in detail..

This woman looked like she was having a ball being photographed. She had a confident pose, uplifted chin and laughing italian eyes with Audrey Hepburn style eye make-up and brows.

There was something rather sad about this woman’s eyes that touched me. My sketch looks very little like the original woman, but it has retained the inward gaze. Although it’s not a particularly good picture, I find that I like her in a personal way, so she’s going up.

Poolside Poodle doodles

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Live from poolside, more inky sketches, more doggy doodles.

Ran out of Noodlers ink (now I’m not even trying to rhyme) at the pool and switched to Chinese ink (thanks Bella) which is interacting in an interesting way with a wet background.

Featured beasts include Candice and Bronson from Rowville and an assortment of holidaying children from Mordialloc.