Ink Drawing

I've been very lazy lately, and so in lieu of a new piece of artwork, I'm posting something I did a while back. Hopefully I'll put something newer up in the next few days.

Jack of All Trades, Master of None

So, I do some block printing, too. Lino-cut for now, but I am going to try my hand at wood-block printing this summer.

Of the pieces you see below, I've included the cut linoleum board for three of them to compare the finished art to the block itself. The best of my work occurs when I execute the cut with the fewest possible strokes.

Right now I'm in the middle of a couple of urban landscapes. One is new, the other is an attempt from a couple of summers ago that I think may be a salvagable failure.

Ahhh.... more color

I just finished this today. I'm trying to to get reacquainted with watercolor, so I decided to do a lighthearted scene. Painting really is like language-learning. If you don't do it every day, you loose your skills.

More from Spring Studio

Maria and I went to Spring Studio again a couple of weeks ago. I've been holding off putting these up because I wanted to break up the black-and-white work with some color.

Blinded by color

So, I have a pretty bad sense of color, suffering from a mild form of color-blindness all my life. It used to be worse when I was young, so as I learned to draw as a kid, I avoided learning to paint, assuming I wouldn't be able to create color art that looked good.

The pieces directly above this post are some of my first attempts at watercolor since around 1990. Most of these were finished in early 2006.

Mandalas and such

I've started drawing mandalas and tile designs in an 11 x 14 hardbound Classic sketchbook. The goal is to fill the book cover to cover. I'm a long way from that goal, but here are a few of the things in it so far.

With My Left Hand

A while back I started a sketchbook in which I was only going to draw with my left hand. Being right-handed, this proved very difficult. I stopped, but now I plan on getting back to it. These are the first two left-handed drawings from that sketchbook. More to come.

Graphite, baby!

(dimensions of "Damsel in Distress": 21.5" x 7.5")

Spring Studio

I went to Spring Studio last Tuesday and sat in on a figure drawing class. The studio is a small room down a dozen or so steps off the sidewalk on the corner of Spring and Lafayette in SoHo. The walls are filled with plexiglass-covered figure drawings in a variety of mediums--watercolor, pencil, charcoal, ink--all from past students. The class was four hours long and consisted of many poses for one, two, five, and ten minutes. The last pose was for four blocks of twenty minutes each, totaling eighty minutes for the final pose.

It's been a long time since I've sketched in a serious studio setting, and I really liked it, so I'll be going back on a regular basis.