A Step Forward, A Step Back

It often seems like every step or two forward means a step back, and sometimes a slide down, far down. Or it could just be me and how I see things, like my pursuit of art. All the videos in the world merely show me how much I have to learn and how far away I am from adequacy. My view of my own adequacy. At least I keep plugging away, trying more things, being as daring as time allows, and often resenting the demands that being an adult make on me.

And then there is art.

Trying different media, different colors, different paper, and learning that I need to put down a shield when working with certain pencils, pastels, and charcoal. 

Quick sketches  to see if I still have it. I really should use clean paper instead of sketching (scratching) on paper (newsprint) where I've sketched other faces, body parts, interesting objects. Cropping can only eliminate so much and newsprint is especially smooth and erasing intruding lines would damage the sketch. I rather like this one, not only because it is nearly accurate, but because it didn't take me long at all. 

The photo on a new box of colored pencils. That pugnacious chin and unusual angle were all it took to interest me. Not bad for another quick sketch. 

An older drawing that I keep refining and working on. A touch here, a new technique there. I'll finish it one day . . . or maybe I'll paint this one. Yes, I know the right (left actually) eye is less vivid than the left (to the viewer), but it -- and I -- is still evolving. For now. 

Another drawing of one of my granddaughters. This one is Savannah. It is also when I began to toy with the idea that less is more. The original photo was posted on its side and I maneuvered it into a full frontal straight up and down image. Computers are wonderful and I'm getting better with PhotoShop -- barely. 

Another sketch, and the most recent in this collection, of Mahesh Jadu. The actor is currently portraying Ahmad (heavy on the ACH as if you're clearing a hairball) on Marco Polo. Mahesh is one of the villains of the show. His long, pointed nose interested me first and that is where I began the sketch, all done in sanguine hard pastel. Another not quite right sketch, but I do find his face and this sketch fascinating. 

It didn't dawn on me until I searched for the name of the actor playing Ahmad that his face was familiar because I had enjoyed his portrayal of Ophir from I, Frankenstein with Aaron Eckhardt. He does have a very interesting face and demeanor and he's from Australia. I would've thought India or the Middle East, or even the USA would be more likely. Wherever he was born, raised, or lives, I still find his face interesting and will definitely draw him again. I do that with faces that intrigue me. 

I am toying with the thought of reducing faces to basic elements to see how much of the person is recognizable. Not so much body parts, or facial features, although faces are part of the exercise, but light and shadow. Can I sketch a face and make it recognizable by just sketching the light -- or the shadow? I sketched two eyes, the hint of a nose, and the mouth but nothing of the light or shadow or rest of the face and it was instantly recognized as Sharon Stone -- which it was. I did that sketch in colored pencil more than 20 years ago on a piece of printer paper because the minimalist style intrigued me. I have it somewhere, likely in a folder in an old filing cabinet in storage in Ohio.  Asking for someone to go looking for it will be futile. Oh, well. Someday.  

There you have it, some of my recent forays into art as I exercise my artistic muscles and try new media. Some are good, some are less than good, and one or two are approaching mediocrity. Art is a process, a journey, and I am still on the path. 

That is all. Disperse. 

Chasing The Past

Last year I jumped back into art in a big way, buying supplies, and trying out new media -- new to me -- and kept coming back to where I began 50 years ago when I discovered I could draw. As with everything in my life, I went from drawing pictures out of my piano lesson books to Sunday comics in the newspaper and eventually right into painting portraits in oils with brushes and pigments and linseed oil. I didn't know all the techniques and how it all went together and I plunged ahead experimenting with canvas boards and stretched canvas and eventually buying canvas and frames and stretching canvas on my own. Good thing I had a job by then at the age of 15 and bought my own supplies. The supplies that come in a single Xmas gift of painting materials didn't last long. I got a scholarship to the Columbus College of Art and Design when I was in 9th grade at Westmoor Junior High and our first lessons were in soft pastels.

I fearlessly attacked still life and more portraits, drawing fellow classmates when I'd finished with the model posing at the front of the class. Hands a dozen different colors and scattered sheets with finished portraits and the occasional still life. I raced through everything with an ability I never questioned and didn't appreciate -- or fully understand. I was in my element, testing the waters of various artistic disciplines offered in the art classes in high school. Never enough, I experimented with sculpting clay (and plaster of Paris at home), cutting lineoleum blocks for block printing (still have the scar where I gouged out a hunk of skin over the knuckle of my right index finger), screen printing, and finally into painting again, at home with the oils and frustrated with acrylics because they dry too fast and end up looking like hunks of stretchable plastic. Watercolor was fun, but we never had enough time in class -- or in the classes at OSU where I got my first taste of live nude models on Saturdays all summer long. I never learned about using negative space or glazing or dead layer (grisaille) paintings that lie beneath the glazes.

Here I am after nearly 40 years of ignoring the artistic abilities seething just beneath the adult facade of wife, mother, and working to earn a living because it's the mature thing to do, give up dreams for the reality of making a living that I stumbled through half alive. Art won't make me a living or feed my children and neither will writing. "Wake up, girl. Get a job and make sure to marry some guy who will take care of you. You won't make it any other way."

My hands were always moving, picking up a pencil to sketch an interesting face in TV Guide or Woman's Day or evenPlaygirl.  I couldn't help myself. No matter how I ignored the pull of the pencil an interesting face and whatever pen or pencil was closest to hand, even crayons on occasion, I sketched what interested me and hid it, put it away in a book or left it laying around until someone else put it in the trash. The drawings were more mature, more refined than what I produced as a teenager. I clung to the knowledge that even as I got older the art would always be there and would get better as I matured and viewed the world from a different perspective. It would wait for me --

-- until I took another plunge into the artistic stream when there was no one to stop me, to remind me I had obligations, to tell me no and found that my drawing skills had atrophied. The art didn't wait for me and I wasn't about to let go after I got used to the idea that I'd have to start all over.

Some of the skill remains beneath the rust and dust and I scraped it all away, dusted my atrophied skills, and did what I never had to do before when I was younger. I drew the same thing over and over, taking it apart and drawing the parts that make up the portrait. An eye drawn repeatedly, first the right and then the left, until I approached something almost like the photo. Lips in colors. Lips in pencil. Lips in charcoal. Refining the technique and the anatomy one feature at a time.

A year ago I finished this drawing -- in colored pencil, a medium I am not yet completely comfortable with -- and the features are distorted. Disheartening, but it was a first effort.

Click on the pictures to ee the actual size. 

Talk about a square jaw. I got that down, but it's still wrong. The proportions aren't too far off, but they're still not right. I sketched other faces from my desk calendar, pictures of my granddaughters pulled from Facebook, pictures of my grandchildren, Sierra and Connor, whatever picture stirred my juices.  I still hadn't conquered this portrait. It took me 6 months to get up the gumption to try it again. 

I can't tell you how many times I practiced the eyes, nose, ears, lips, chin, and ear and finally ended up with this version. I erased so many time I thought I'd ended up with fuzzy almost there lines and would never get to the point where I was satisfied. I covered pages and pages of facial features, my Great Aunt Ann's facial features. Still not there.

Getting closer. Still not happy with the eye and the lips aren't quite right. I saw my mother in every line, recognized her eyes that looked liked Aunt Ann's eyes. Of course, she was Grandpa's sister and Mom looked so much like her. I didn't realize at first why the proportions were off. I figured it out when I noticed the cheeks weren't full enough and the double chin was minus the other chin. Aunt Ann's hair was just like Mom's, the same dark brown, thick and perfectly coiffed. Aunt Ann owned a chain of beauty shops and she had learned much over the years she ran those beauty shops. She knew fashion and style and how to fix hair. She was always perfectly turned out.

Yes, that is a mink coat. I still have her black ostrich feather hat, the one that still has the haute couture label in it and looks like it was worn by Betty Grable or Katharine Hepburn or even Grace Kelly. It was the height of style in the 1930s and would've been a lovely contrast with Ginger Roger's blonde locks, dramatic. 

The angle of the photo is off, shot from too far below, but the finished result is really close. Not perfect, but an improvement on the one I did 6 months ago. It's in pencil because I'm comfortable and have lots of experience with pencil. I'll give the colored pencil version a shot again now that I'm almost there or I'll break out the oils and do a painting to hang on the way. If it turns out subpar I can always paint something else over it and give acrylics another shot. Or maybe charcoal.

That is as close as I'll get on this version, and it's really close this time. I'm happy enough with it to sign my name and add the date. Still a bit rusty, but much of the rust has been gouged off and the art is still there ready to be honed. I'll jump right into the middle of the stream with one of the media I haven't tried. I even got some pastels and will eventually get a set of pastel pencils. I like control and I like pastels -- or at least I used to like pastels. 

Time to scrape off more of the rust and chase down the old enthusiasm and intrepid nature. At least I'm willing to bear the erasures and scraping off layers of paint and dive in again. There no reason not to, except the urge to write another book or finish one of the several books I've started already. Rust gets into the most surprising places. I should buy a wire brush and get to scraping.

That is all. Disperse.

First Steps on the Road to Art

I've been spending more time drawing and a little more time working with the colored pencils. I have found that there is a lot of flex using colored pencils that makes it more like painting and not just drawing, although the drawing is also necessary. Oh, you can trace and transfer the tracing to paper and color or paint the drawing in, but I've always preferred to rely on freehand drawing. My skills, as I've said before are rusty through disuse, but they are basically intact without too much rust needing to be brushed -- or banged -- off. That at least is comforting. I had worried I had lost even that much ability. Good thing something has remained.

The following are a few preliminary sketches and some color experiments with the colored pencil. I still have so much to learn -- and relearn -- but I'm getting there.  As one friend reminded me, the only way to resurrect one's skills is to practice, practice, practice. I believe I may even have mentioned it in previous posts.

I am excited about delving into the realms of transparent objects (glass, water, etc.) and discovering how to do glazes and washes with colored pencil, which will also require the use of solvents and oils. Not oil paints, but mineral oil, like baby oil, especially where the Faber Castell colored pencils are involved. And now, on with the show -- sort of.

In one class I am taking, the assignment was to paint a couple of cherries. I'm afraid my shadows are too dark, but it was a first try. I will redo them when I get the time. It's a good start -- not great but good. Must start somewhere.

In another class, the assignment was to have fun with the circles. And I did. To me, circles mean more than just circles and spheres. Sometimes they can be olives or eyes looking through a hole in a wall or through a hole in the door. The triangular white infiltration on the left side is light from the window shining on the paper. That's actual natural sunlight streaming onto the page and not, as I first believed, a fault in the camera from when I installed new batteries. Murphy's law -- or, if you prefer, Murpy's law. They are the same thing after all.

Yes, those are my granddaughters, Addison and Victoria in one of their modern poses. The sketch below is my attempt at blocking them in colored pencil, a beige, I believe. The positions are a little off, but what would you expect for a drawing that took about 15-20 minutes? Again, beginning somewhere. I really don't like the dark colors of the photos and would have preferred something with more light, like their Easter pictures from a couple years ago, but these are recent and they were what I could download off their Mom's Facebook site and are -- yes, you guessed it -- a beginning. My focus was on trying to get their faces right, even with Tori doing the fish mouth kissy thing. Kids!

As always, if you click on the pictures you might even get a better view of the drawing. It's not bad for a first sketch, especially when considering it has been a couple of decades since I picked up a pencil to draw anything, let alone portraits. It's rough, but it's down on paper.

The debris in the picture behind and around the sketch is my cluttered desk and art supplies. I need a studio, but this will work for a start. Again, have to start somewhere -- and I'm not even finished buying what I need to draw and paint with. Yes, you do actually paint with colored pencils. You can draw with them, but the finished product is painted in a sense, so drawing with colored pencils -- as opposed to using them on a coloring book, especially when you've drawn the images -- is painting. Colored pencil is just another painting medium. Ask any artist.

The final indulgence I will ask of you is a sketch in the truest sense with graphite pencil of my grandchildren, Sierra and Connor, my son's twins. The picture is before Easter the year Connor died modeling the clothes I sent them for Easter.

Connor is the handsome little fella on the right and Sierra is obviously the drugged-out looking Pebbles-looking beauty on the left. The colored sphere in the lower right corner beneath Connor is a sphere I was working on when I decided to take these pictures. I may share it at another time when I've finished the other spheres on the page for that particular assignment.

As you can see, a rough sketch -- very rough -- of the twins. I had decided I needed more practice sketching before proceeding to paint the portrait. It's the largest photo I have of the twins that is usable for a reference. I didn't do too badly, but some of the rust is still showing. It takes me longer to sketch something like this than it used to, but more practice will mend that little hiccup.

One thing I had forgotten over the years is how much I enjoyed sketching and painting and observing the world closely the way I once did. An artist notices all kinds of details, like Sierra's drugged out appearance and the redness of her nose and upper lip where it has been repeatedly wiped and the way Connor's jaw line is so much like my sons (including his father of course), but also his grandfather, my ex-husband, Dave. I drew Dave many times when we were married and Connor has the same rounded and somewhat fat jaw, as a child of 2 years old would have. Sierra also has baby fat and the same rounded jaw line.

I'm not happy with the eyes or Connor's nose, but that is what practice is for, smoothing out the flaws and becoming better at drawing. These likenesses are fair to middling and not too awful (no, compliments are not being fished for here) and that is a step in the right direction.

Click on the photos to get a closer view. 

That is all. Disperse.

Cyclopean Rock Walls and Art

At first I thought the neighbors were stacking wood for the coming winter, a winter that may come sooner than expected if the rains over the past 15 months -- or the past long, cold, and snowy winter -- are any indication.  The sound was wrong, which was my senses telling me that my ears were correct. The neighbors were stacking up rocks in various areas of their lot. The rocks have been moved over subsequent days to the pile just outside my bedroom window from the other piles scattered about and rock wall is the only thing I can come up with since the site is too farm from the house for a patio or BBQ pit and far too close to the racing track for the 4-wheelers when the kids come up for the weekend -- or most of the summer. I could just ask, but that would be nosy and rude and I'm not that curious, except that the sound of rocks being kicked, pushed, and dropped out of the bed of the big red Ford truck tends to keep me awake when I want to sleep and closing the window fails to lessen the noise. I am more effective at shutting out the noise -- or at least ignoring it -- when I'm drawing or writing and far more the former than the latter.

The rocks are far too small for a cyclopean structure like the walls of Macchu Picchu or the great monolithic stone structures that predate modern civilization in the Middle East, and far too heavy to just drop out of the red Ford truck bed, and the pile would be much bigger. It would be fascinating to see how such massive multi-ton rocks are moved and fixed together, but I suppose I'll have to wait for a more enterprising type of neighbor to find that out since my back isn't equipped for such a task -- and I lack the equipment to live 200-ton polygonal shaped rocks into a massive monolithic structure to last for all time. I'd rather draw.

And drawing is what I have been doing -- quite a lot lately.

I've been sketching my granddaughters, Tori and Addison, and trying to get their features just right. They do make such odd faces in their selfies, but that's the way things are done nowadays. The point isn't actually to get an accurate sketch for a portrait, but to become better at rendering the subjects with a semblance of likeness that is recognizable so I can finally do the portraits. That takes a lot of drawing, erasing, sketching, and more erasing. It also takes numerous studies of their features: mouth, nose, eyes, hair accessories, and, oh yes, mouths. I have always had some trouble with mouths. I'm better at eyes and hands and hair than mouths, but I'm getting there. It's not like writing fiction, which has always been difficult for me, but more like writing nonfiction, which is a relative breeze. Remember, my sketching and drawing skills have not been taken out of the box for more than 20 years. In other words, one score and a few years beyond. Not enough for the 4 score and 10 I'm supposed to live (twice over and another half score which I wold rather choose), but definitely a whole score and a handful of years of leaving my artistic skills in the box. At least I didn't keep the box in the cellar where damp, mold, and rust could erode them further. Just in a dry box on the back shelf of the closet where spiders spin webs and dust collects even with the closet door shut.

I could probably jump in and be closer to brilliant with something easier, like a butterfly or spider or even a deer and her 6-month old faun. But I've always preferred drawing people and that's where I once upon a time excelled. I plan to excel once again.

I also take out time to practice with my new tools - colored pencils -- and learning how to apply the color effectively and which brand of pencil I prefer. I'm currently stuck on finding the right kind of sharpener so I don't waste the pencil as the hand-held sharpener chews up wood and spits on the color in unusual lengths. I've tried several and will doubtless try several more since I can't just carve it with an X-Acto knife and hone the edge with a bit of sandpaper as I once did with graphite pencils and charcoal. Colored pencil is a very different beast.

I've tried Prismacolor, but the quality is iffy sometimes, though the feel of the pencil gliding smoothly over the roughest paper is as creamy as spreading softened butter over a craggy English muffin that has been toasted, although a bit less tasty.

Colored pencils that come in art kits are far too dry and a bit stiff as they tend to be more filler than color and don't give the brilliance and color needed for a portrait. Might as well go back to pastels if that is my only choice -- and it isn't.

I bought a box of Faber-Castell and they have been lovely with a creamy feel and great coverage. Best of all, the pencils stay sharp longer than the Prismacolor, though a couple of the colors are a bit drier than the Prismacolor, specifically white and cream. I can see a blending of pencils in the future.

I've also ordered a set of 40 Caran d'ache Pablo colored pencils which are the Cadillac -- or Mercedes Benz if you're European -- of colored pencils. They cost like the devil, but I'll reserve my judgment until they arrive and I've had a chance to try them out.

There are numerous brands of colored pencil on the market, and I'm not about to try them all, but Prismacolor, Caran d'Ache, and Faber-Castell's Polychrome are the best of the pack. Faber Castell is the only brand that is made with a mineral oil base while Prismacolor and Caran d'Ache are wax based and both have a problem with blooming. That's the white stuff that collects on the surface of the drawing in the same what that the wax in chocolate blooms on a bar of chocolate when left alone in the drawer or cabinet for too long. The trick to getting rid of bloom (something that occurs mostly with the darker colors, probably because the lighter colors blend with the bloom) is to use the natural oils in the hands to tone it down by running the fingers over the bloom.

The other problem with colored pencils is color fastness. Prismacolor's colors have a varied range of light fastness, from I and II to VI. The higher the number, the sooner the brilliant colors of the art will fade in the sunlight, and Prismacolor has a serious flaw in that area, as it does with the quality control in making their pencils (breakage, ill fitting color and wood, color falling out of the wooden casing, crumbling, breaking inside the wood when the wood splits, etc.). Caran d'Ache and Faber Castell have a much better track record where color fastness is concern, as they do with quality control. Sometimes when something costs a lot it's not greed but quality materials and quality control that end with the higher price. Add to those factors that the Faber Castell colors last longer and keep a sharp point longer as well as providing superior color coverage and saturation for less work and fewer layers, and at least the Faber Castell, at a more modest price than the Caran d'Ache, is head of the pack -- so far.

It's rather like my days in the past when I worked with pastels. Different colors had different levels of hardness and coverage and I preferred the right pastel for the right part of the face I was drawing/rendering. I'm sure the same will be true of colored pencils. I know that the Prismacolor white and cream pencils are far superior when it comes to coverage and feel on the paper since Faber Castell tend to be drier and require more layers to achieve the same level of coverage and color. No doubt there will be more differences for me to discover as I rediscover my drawing abilities after taking them out of the dusty, spider-web covered box and use them until I gain the facility I once had.

Every day is another chance to keep the specters of Alzheimer's and senile dementia at bay while I exercise my brain -- and my talents. At least this is something I don't have to wrestle into submission as I have had to do with writing fiction. As far as I'm concerned, it's all gravy -- or colored pencil drawings -- from here on out.

That is all. Disperse.