missing person report

someone deleted dad's foreign woman sketch, and all her comments!?

these are sketches

Well, one looks semi-decent this week. Incidentally, it was not from the usual spot. Tracy had to be at school early, so I had a few extra time units. Rushing is perhaps a weakness for me. Sorry I didn't make it to the challenge, but if these are all "out my car window" does that count?

KEEPING AT IT CHALLENGE - "Out My Window"

Like Dustin's view from his study, let's all draw a view from our window. Make it your home. Your street. You'll be glad in a couple of years to have the history. Make it as detailed or as simple as you wish. Do a bunch. A bunch from the same window, a bunch from other windows. And since this is nearly mid-week and is, I think, quite challenging, let's set our posting date a week from Saturday, March 7. "Window Saturday." Meanwhile, keep posting your daily keepings at it. The good, the bad, and the uglies. Those are your opinions. They change over time. They move up the scale.

Not keepin' at it.....low battery maybe?

the drawing on the left was started around 4pm, and within the 10 mins that i was sketching it, the sun set and the shadow changed on me.

the other is the view from the office window in the school on the second floor.

i think i might need to do a larger drawing to get motivated to do some sketches again...or i just need some sleep. I have been burning the candle at both ends lately.

KEEPING AT IT - TRYIN' TO WITH A CAN, A KIWI, & A ZEBRA

In my own attempts to "keep at it" I have come to a slump. Lack of zeal, same old stuff, not improving, worse if anything. So I thought I'd open a window for some fresh air. Different paper, different sticks--smooth copy paper and my Hobby Lobby Copic and Prismacolor sketching pens. I'm interested here mostly in tones. I'm going to go try and find a voice for this stuff--before they dry up in my desk. The bottom one is with pencil, the top one ink.

gleanin' like ruth, nuthin but the truth

"exercise all the control of which you are capable over each individual stroke"
Theo Kautzky

FF Phone & Gumballs

Waiting for Mom who went to wash her hands. She came back fast, so I did have to ask her to wait.

John Torreano says, "By defining your overlaps and not overemphasizing the intersection of shapes, you will see how volumetric form can be created without "modeling" the shape with shading." Intriguing idea. I like to try for that.

paper test

Just testing out the broadstrokes on a smooth paper - this is printer paper. It's good, I might have to pursue this option in the future.

Some sketches

All warm and fuzzy for ya this week - workin on bushes, the proportions of things and not getting rushed. Had to develop a new method of using the camera - anything within 2 feet of the lens is blurry, it must be one of those infinite focus lenses, for "flexibility". Well, taking the pictures from 2.5 feet away helped to reduce blurriness and show some strokes.

DOUGIE'S EGG & FIREPLACE

Hi Dougie! Good to see your here!

ARIA'S EGG & FIREPLACE

Hi Aria! Happy to see you here!

GLEANINGS ON THE WAY

"Each drawing you do will change you in some way."

Danny Gregory

SKY SCULPTURE

This was another "Kwik Trip Quick Drawing." The antenna on the roof looked like something out of Star Trek. Or Luke's Leggo box.

KEEPING AT IT CHALLENGE - "Revision"

For the sake of all who liked drawing eggs, bags, and cans, and want to do more, or for those who didn't get a chance to post any, let's have a week of "revision"--as the British schoolmasters call a review.

Revision:

Perspective Practice: Ceiling Corner
Blended Edges Practice: Egg
Hard Edges Practice: Paper Bag
Blended & Hard Edges Together: Soup Can

Now that you know your subject, let your imagination fly! And don't forget to post your normal drawing array. Until "Revision Saturday," then.

TREE-MANIA 1 REDUX

TITLES & LABELS

If I may make a suggestion: Keep giving titles to your stuff--an entertaining part of the creative effort. And I think it's a good idea for us to add "labels." If your labels are all the same, we can click on it and find all your stuff at once. Or for us who want to read all the comments on our own stuff--new comments do come in after things leave the main page--one click and there is our gallery. I have been using for my label "FF Stuff," and "Quotes" for the advices. Click on Quotes, and there are all our teachers in the same room. Oila!

MF Can

Happy can time!

TREE-MANIA 3

TREE-MANIA 2

chalk soup

my humble offering....a very quick sketch, but one with some color. I honestly think, after trying it both ways, that the way to capture the "simplifying" aspect of this challenge is to use color. Otherwise, with black and white, i found it too difficult to find the right black tone for the color "red" or for any other color for that matter. So i ended up reducing everything to a back basic cylinder shape, with a single light source....you all know the drill there.

TREE-MANIA 1

bag-o-rama

I seem to be developing this nasty habbit of getting inspired to complete the challenges after we are already onto the next one. I loved drawing eggs after i saw how awesome all your eggs were. The after the bag challenge was "in the bag," I wanted to try some more of those.

I think all your drawings inspire me to draw. Thanks.

Oh- Can- AHH- DUH!

Here is my first attempt at a can. It is a can of cashews. If you look under FF's "oval post" you can read my lament over drawing circles, and cans in perspective.

FINDING FIVE MINUTES--OR ONE

This is the house next to Kwik Trip in Elroy. It's old and tired. But I have always liked its many angles and roof lines and several chimneys. As well as a bit of a telescope feel. The gas was pumped and paid for. While I waited for Mom to come of the store I drew a quick version of the house. Bad. So I started this one. Then I saw her coming out of the door. I drew even faster.

These last three pictures are examples of my own attempts at Keeping At It. They were all drawn under one minute. Hardly the best stuff I've done, but in the daily doing, even if in those gap-moments, I find a continual honing.

"Hippo Soup"

Waiting #1

This is the original of the bank drawing. I added the cabinet top at home to complete the scene. But what caught my eye was that plant trying to crawl out of its pot. The version with the additions muddled that focus. The additions were pencil, so I erased them. I prefer the simpler, original one, but the whole thing would look better without the cabinet fronts, with just a table edge, I think. "There is no accounting for taste."

And I tweaked it with Curves!

Ovals

You don't always have to draw the cross piece, but it helps to try always to see it.

Waiting for the Teller

Bank pen and brochure.

GLEANINGS ON THE WAY

"Approach your subject as if it were a still life."

Rex Brandt

GLEANINGS ON THE WAY

"The painter must leave the beholder something to guess."

E.H. Combrich

"KEEPING AT IT" CHALLENGE 4

From the "Soft Edges" of an egg to the "Hard Edges" of a paper bag--this week let's mix them in one drawing. At the same time let's all practice simplifying, "reductionism," getting rid of too much visual clutter, choosing which details to love and keep. So . . .
Whoever will, you are invited to this week's Keeping At It Challenge: Draw a Campbell's Soup Can.

To better see the soft edges of the round cylinder with its reflected light, and the hard edges of the can's flat edges, it will be worth your while to take a minute--one of five, time it--to cut out a piece of white paper the size of the label and scotch tape it on. Oooee! Look at those tones! Do a few quick sketches. Then tear off your taped paper and go at the red and white with all the jumble.

Post your Challenge drawings on Soup Can Saturday.

PS "Don't wait till Saturday." Post some of your other non-can stuff as you go. If you can't and we have a Saturday Splurge of posts, that's good too.

GLEANINGS ON THE WAY

"Exactly right is all wrong."

Ed Whitney

FF Bag 3 & 4

I was having trouble with the tones. It finally dawned on me that a brown bag is a mid-tone, a "5" on a 1 to 10 scale, 1 being white and 10 black. I was making some of my bags too light. So I drew a bag on a bag, that way the mid-tones would be right--nothing could be lighter than that. I scissored it out and glued it into my book. As you can see it looks bad. Way too dark. The actual, living bag under the light has--here's my "Aha Moment"--has tones lighter than the actual "5" of the bag. Rather than a white highlight on a red tomato--easy to see that changing of body tone--the dull paper had a whole side as a dimmer highlight. Hard to see. I see them now.

I tried again, this time in watercolor, pushing up the tones for the lit side. This one looks better to me.

FF's Bag-2

I thought the inside shadows were as interesting as the outside. I liked this picture at first, now I think it's too dark.

FF's Bag-1

After a few attempts, a closer look at a paper bag.

SERPENTINE

My dragon--bending the curve without kinking it.

Ellie

MF Piccy Wiccies

Stopped by a Estabrook one morning, just couldn't stand the same view all the time. The building on the left looks really twisted, but hey, that's what I saw.

























Dropped the shading bend for a bit.














Bags are good because they tempt you to just keep shading and shading, slowly ruining your sketch with each new stroke. This was a lesson in self control, and "Dustin's Aha!" moment of artistic reduction.








-mf

Two Canvases - A Brief Tutorial

DFM SCs,

In response to recent discussions on the darkness of some of the sketches:

Do not fool yourself into thinking the jpg is any less transformable than the paper. The computer does not know what looks good - your eye knows. You are still an artist in the time between when you put down the pencil and when you click "Post It!"

Pixels and LCDs and photons and phosphors are not paper, and only the Pattern Recognition Supercomputer in your head can be trusted to make the digital canvas look like the parchment canvas. The magic wand called "Curves" is the most direct route to this end, so that is what I will be showing you.

Dad is the only one I know of that has Photoshop, but he also has the GIMP. Plus, the GIMP's just better. (In my Pattern Recognition Supercomputer, anyway.) So that's what we'll be using.
www.gimp.org


Open your scan in the GIMP, go right to Curves, don't touch anything else yet.
Colors->Curves

The idea here is that the lower left corner is black, and the upper right corner is white, and the diagonal line is all the grays in between. What you can do with Curves is make the blacks blacker, and the lights lighter. You can do other things too, but this is the only type of curve I know and trust. Plus, it's all we really want to do.

Click on the line down near the lower left, and drag it down. Click on the line again up near the upper right and drag it up. Try to keep the line from touching the edges. Adjust until the image looks like your inner artist wants it to look. Here you can see I needed just a touch of black, but a good deal of white.


I also threw in a Color->Desaturate (Luminosity), which removes all color and makes everything a shade of gray. It may make the image too cold, but I'll leave it for now.

All of this is done to account for the strange little things your scanner or cheap digital camera does to your sketch as it is translating light into pixels.

You are Done! Post!





-mf

"KENDALLS"

"Kendalls" was the original name. Levi Kendall ran the first RR office here out of a box car on the site. They called it "Kendall's Station." The first part, without the apostrophe, stuck for the name of the town. Now they have dropped the s.

This was drawn with a fountain pen in less than 3 minutes. Chris was UPSing something at the Ford Garage. But the UPS website was again unreachable--modem jam. So she came back sooner than expected.

WALNUT SCHOONER

An old ship from the childhood of boys.

KEEPING AT IT

"Don't wait until Saturday. Find your five minutes each day."

E-EGG

i love erasers and i erase as much as i can get away with. hahahaha.

Definitely NOT in the bag

This is my first attempt at a bag....it is a gold fish bag. The snack, not the fish...there are all kinds of pictures and words that i didn't draw because it proved to be WAY too difficult for a skectch....it would have taken hours to get everything exact. I'm not pleased with this by any means. Hopefully my future atttempts get better.

MT. FUJI EGG

I have found that with two light sources intriguing things happen. There's that overlapping double cast shadow, but best of all is the double shadow on the egg itself. To me the double curve has the shape of Mt. Fuji, with the base being the reflected light. To see the mountain it helps to squint.

FF

1 more egg

I really liked the egg challenge- more so, after i saw both of your posts! Thanks guys. Here is one more offering. Now it is onto bags, i guess. Maybe i'll draw a bag on a bag...how ironic. Like drawing a cow on cowhide!

"KEEPING AT IT" CHALLENGE #3

After Perspective and Soft Edges, let's do some Hard Edges. A "soft (or blended) edge" describes a rounded form. A "hard edge" describes a form with sharp turnings, folds, and corners of high contrast. This week, whoever will, let's draw a paper bag. Post 'em on Bag Saturday.

EGGSPLANATION