Saturday, February 18, 2012

Walking Sketches 18FEB12

Today we had some of my daughter's cousins over, while their mothers visited. They were kind of restless, so we went to the park to vent some energy running around, and socializing. Of course, I brought my mini sketchbook with me, sensing a good opportunity to get some quick drawing done.
We didn't stay too long, but the fact that my daughter was entertained with her cousins freed my attention enough to get some exercise walking around, and to get some impressions down from the folks and things I saw while I was there. These on the left are rather quick shots. Clockwise from top left: A girl walking on the sidewalk, checking her cell phone (so many folks stuck looking at the little screens these days, but that's no surprise). In the middle, a little girl, towing her little brother on her toy wagon. Good old Radio Flyer, it was. Some basketball player stopping his game to text. A man and his bicycle riding toddler, looking to the side at some other activity. My daughter swinging happily on the swing set, and that same couple of kids with the wagon on their way out of the park.
I stopped my walking for a while, so I could stretch my legs on a tree stump along the walkway. The pattern in the tree trunk said "draw me", and I thought it was a good idea to try something more complicated, at least while I was stretching out. I started outlining it, and then said, the heck with it... lets go at it a bit painterly. Even with a little pencil stub (I couldn't find any decent ones in my bag) it was fun to go from outlining to just shading values out. The texture was so complicated, with mold, and bark in different stages of decomposition, that I had to look at it a bit more like a whole, thinking in terms of light and dark. This helped out a lot. At first, my drawing didn't look anything like a tree stump, but once the values were more or less in place, I could work on a bit of detail, and fill in the voids. It actually looks like a tree stump now.
Well, that's it for this one. Hope you liked it. Thanks for dropping by.

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