Laurelines

The things you put in your pocket...

for no good reason: souvenirs of today's pre-dawn dog walk. If I could ditch the dog, I'd be able to draw the world materializing before my very eyes. The dawn is really thrilling when you think about it.

August: Drawing to a Close, Part 1

Saturday morning I went to the café to sketch as usual,  but forgot my paints. Decided to leave the figures in black and white. I like the immediacy of drawing and painting on site and thought I might lose some of that quality if I painted later. I note my sketches are becoming more portrait-like as the weeks go by, which may or may not be a good thing. At any rate, it is what happens with me and a pencil and those people out there.

August: Drawing to a Close, Part 2

There's a big difference in the offerings at the farmers' market as summer winds down--- there are many fewer flowers, fewer kinds of vegies. It's the second- to- last week of peaches. Corn is going, going, gone. Acorn squashes, those stolid little citizens, are making their first appearances. Here's, though, a hearty bouquet I found and bought. And drew, of course. And painted.

Thinking it might be fun to show some of the stages, too. But, then again, it may not be fun at all since I left out the whole last phase. Oh well, you can't complain--it's free.

Jacuzzi high jinks: Blind Contour Friday #4

I had so much fun drawing this in the tub last night! Occupational hazard of in-bathtub drawing is you get wet marks and smudges and warps on the paper, but you also get nice and clean, so there's that. I usually add color to these, but I thought the funny watery lines looked fine all by themselves.

Check out this weeks other BCF participants:  Inkfinger, Rachael Fowler,  Callathump, Lindsay Olson,  Koukla Carolyn, The Seeks, Monkeypaints, Lilpilydaze, Karen's Blog, and of course Wally Torta.

Gang of Five

Last Saturday, I was lucky enough to meet four of my favorite artists in the flesh and here they are!  Not only are they superbly talented and brainy people, they are lovable, too. A rare combination. These sketches are cheesy and I apologize to my subjects for them. I don't usually draw from photos and I'm not good at it. Still, I wanted to let it be known that something special happened last Saturday in Richmond, Virginia and that it meant a lot to me.

Here are their links. Can you guess which is whose? This isn't rocket science, folks. Learning Daily, 

Wally Torta's Journal,

Struggling to Paint,

Big Harry's Artwork.

Mountain lines

Well, it was foggy, rainy, misty for much of the trip, so the mountain lines were really tame, almost invisible. Instead of deep vista sketches, I made do with creatures from the Biltmore House.

Gnomic gargoyles:

A foppish lion, one of two at the entrance, carved of pink marble:

And a boy throttling a swan or two, in the Winter Garden. Halfway through drawing this, I was told I wasn't allowed to sketch inside the house. I protested to three people, successively higher up in the ranks, and was allowed to continue if I promised to be discreet.  Which was hard, because my natural tendency is to sketch while swinging from a chandelier, nude,  bellowing out the Volga Boat Song.

Of course, fog wasn't everywhere...

    it was only blocking the Scenic Views. For example,this pine tree was across the street from an overlook.  Gee, thanks, fog. That tree was really fascinating:

The Quilt Garden, a sliver of it, at the NC Arboretum, was unbefogged:

The fog was beginning to roll in just as I started this and it came in full blast before I could finish. But just so you can see my good intentions:

On the road a tad

Off for a few days of drawing in the North Carolina mountains. Hope to be able to post sketches while I'm gone.  What with one thing and another (and the prospect of a lot of travel this fall),we've been stuck here this long, hot summer. This mini-break comes not a moment too soon.

Blind Contour Friday # 3: Me, myself and I

Except for the middle drawing where I look like Dobby the House Elf, these aren't bad representations of the Artist in Question. As for the candlelabra--- I looked house-wide for the thing with the most contours, so I could blindly draw it. This won.

To see more exquisitely skewed Blind Contour Friday drawings visit Niff's blog, Inkfinger.  She's the instigator of this enterprise.

Or you can go to these sites :

Rachael Fowler, Bearskinrug, Kimlan Cornell, of Sock Monkey Drawer, Wally Torta, Elaine Phipps, Lindsay Olson , Koukla Carolyn, The Seeks,  karen Winters,  LilPilyDaze, and Learning Daily.

A simple thing or two

Not much, just these, evidence of purple life in the universe.

It's a quiet night here where I live.