So I Think I Can Draw Now

 ...at least, I'm happy with my style, or my "handwriting" as my terrible-except-for-a-couple-things first drawing teacher called it.  I'm most comfortable with flowers, of course, because that's what I've been focusing on.  But I think I could pull off other still lifes (lives?) competently.  I have never, and doubt ever will be, the kind of person who can draw what I see in my head.  Reference materials in real life, please!

So...here are some of the completed drawings from the last year.  After I went back to ceramics in the fall/winter, I neglected putting lines on paper for a while, but they ended up on clay, which I'll share more of soon.

Big Dogwood
34 x 23 inches
ink on painted paper

Big Dogwood detail

Titles for these are hard because I could just name everything in them (long), pick and choose (simple but boring), or make up something esoteric and thought provoking (would be a lie somehow??). 

Big Iris
19 x 15 inches
ink on painted paper

Big Iris detail

Iris, Salsify
22 x 9 inches
ink on painted paper

Peony, Hyacinth, Spiderwort
22 x 9 inches
ink on painted panel

Cinquefoil, Coreopsis
34 x 23 inches
ink on painted paper

Cinquefoil, Coreopsis detail

Spiderworts, Peonies
42 x 9 inches
ink on painted paper

Spiderworts, Peonies detail

Due to the nature of painting paper and the non-flatness of my materials, the drawings are hard to accurately photograph, and I am also not very good at that skill to begin with.  I'm not set up with a big wall in a light-controlled area (nor do I ever think I actually need a tripod), so I'm going to spring for a professional one of these days to do that.  I know my limits.

In September I'll be in a show with the flower pieces at the KC Artists Coalition!  Pretty excited to have them up together.  Now, to figure out how to present them...

Learning to Draw II

 By April I was already feeling better about my abilities and coming to terms with my handwriting.  Age and not comparing myself to others drawing the same thing goes a long way!  I was getting used to the tools and materials and finding what I liked best.  Turns out, it was ink and detail brush.  Thank you, Rapidograph Black India and the leftovers from my Design I class at KU.

Since everything shut down in mid March, I had a lot of time to draw and listen to books while trying to keep my existential dread at bay...

pencil on painted newsprint

daffodil with ink on painted newsprint
36 x 22 inches

I think this daf looks like it just sneezed...I was playing around making my own colored ink out of acrylic paint and spray gun medium, and spending more time on each drawing. On a walk after a rain, I took pictures of a daffodil patch, and immediately came home and drew it.

field clover head; ink on painted newsprint

A little too stylized but this one got me excited regardless as I was playing with washes and layering of ink.

Rattlesnake Master
ink and paint on painted newsprint
22 x 18"

If I have a color around, I will throw it on something in lieu of washing it down the drain.  The messy background and simple drawing make me happy here.

detail

striped squill found on a hike
36 x 22"

Really going after blown up small stuff and adding color here.

surprise lily greens that look like fries
22 x 18"

I think this is birch???
ink on painted newsprint

I began making more complicated drawings, letting my maximalism show through, and thinking of these are collages of drawn pictures...this is the first step.

Learning to Draw I

 I've never considered myself very skilled at rendering images or drawing in any meaningful way.  I can sketch out a plan to put wood pieces together or something like that, but, especially compared to my peers in college drawing classes, I basically was very bad.  So I didn't draw for real for about sixteen years, give or take.

Then I got an idea to make big paintings of flowers and decided I needed to be able to draw to be able to paint.  Initially what I wanted to do is just really pile weird stuff onto canvas, using up some of my infinite stash of paper ephemera, and then paint something sweet and simple on top.

Anyway, drawing is hard.

I found my old newsprint pad and charcoal from school.  To save paper, I painted over the sketches with old house paint I had laying around and sketched again and again.  

Started out very rough using images from a 1970's houseplant book to work from.

oof...charcoal on newsprint

charcoal on newsprint

These were closer to the first idea flash I had when I decided to go down this road.  One thought I had was to make ceramic planters and use those in my paintings, then sell them beside the canvases.  I like tie-ins.

charcoal and pencil on painted newsprint
dried Yucca pods

first use of ink and brush on newsprint

Rattlesnake Master

 I kept working, trying to build up the very atrophied muscle in my brain that pushes my hand to make a line.  I liked the idea of being expressive, probably because then it wouldn't look as much like I didn't know what I was doing.

I had a large collection of dried pods and stuff I focused on first.

I made this one up.

Plantain and sweet clover

Started looking at pictures I took over the years for reference.

Antelope-horn Milkweed

Maybe going super zoomed-in would be a thing I wanted to do?  Worked for Georgia O'Keefe. 

This was the jumping off point of the rest of my year's art endeavors and a new series that will continue indefinitely. 

All this started in February 2020...

If you want to see more process shots of drawings, check out the archived stories under the Drawing collection on my Instagram.

Inspired by Queen Anne's Lace

This field is now an ugly apartment building on Troost and I'm pretty sore about it.

 Queen Anne's Lace is one of my favorite things on Planet Earth.  It's beautiful in the breeze, it feeds pollinators and caterpillars, and every part of it is edible (it's wild carrot, after all).  Every stage of its life cycle is appealing to me, even the dried seed heads.

Playing with a little macro lens I got right up in that inspiration.

Is it going to eat me?

Sketched a little.  Actually, probably a lot, but I painted over most of them.

This one got me excited.

another sketch that has been painted over

So I decided to lay the groundwork on the canvas...these images were pulled from my Instagram, and were taken in my makeshift basement painting studio, so they're not great but I like to show process shots.

There were several more layers of paint than this, but the point is that I put a lot of color in this then washed it out and added papers and whatnot.

This stranger lives inside the painting forever.

I scratched into the surface like I was doing to my ceramics at the time.

Last step before adding ink and paint.

Aliens? What is this?

Weird I'd reference O'Keefe...not vaginal at all.

In summation--I made a few more, but using this single type of design didn't bring me joy like the repeated use of orzos does--although this is quite a similar shape when you get down to it.  I'm glad I went through this exercise, as it got me to start drawing, which led to a lot of very good things, but for now I'm going to be keeping this idea on the back burner.  Summer 2019 I got a wild hair to buy hundreds of feet of canvas, so I think the spark was that I was trying to figure out how to use it and make bigger work in general.

See current works in progress on my Instagram.

Mini Collage Number Forty-One

Gravitea
ink, magazine cutouts, matboard
4 x 5 inches

Here comes my last five mini collages, folks.  I have run out of old pieces of 4 x 5 inch matboard pieces--I can't believe it!  I'm so glad that I was able to use up some old stuff and even incorporate it into some designs.  I would have had more if I'd not left them out in the rain for a few days, therefore causing a bit of mold to grow on some of the paper.  They were mostly protected in little clear envelopes, though.

Today I'm installing larger mixed media work at Parisi Cafe in Union Station, through the Now Showing program--!  Very excited!  Pictures to come.

P.S. I'm sorry the title to this one is a pun.

Mini Collage Number Thirty-Two

It Was a Lovely Trip
reproduced map from a calendar, found photo, ink, vinyl,
matboard, painted book page
4 x 5 inches

Still feeling happy after my nice trip to San Francisco.  Saw cool things there and highly recommend a visit to anyone and everyone!