Contours

Maya came over after school today and is having a sleepover tonight.  After dinner we were racing through her homework and my drawing in order to watch a movie.  So I switched to speedy contour drawing mode when I drew some of the seashells she brought home from the beach in South Florida last week.

Chiaroscuro Environments

A big part of chiaroscuro drawing is including the whole environment withs.  Only then can the object merge with the surfaces around it and become contiguous and a part of the whole rippling surface.  I counted separate objects for the sake of my bean-counting;  it's really not possible to separate out individuals from the whole in these kinds of drawings.

More Chiaroscuro

For today's chiaroscuro drawings I started out with Jesse but then switched to some of the nuts and seeds left over from last fall's frenzy of seed and nut collecting.  Those with dehiscent lines have split open; others have wrinkled and are beginning to lose their outer husks;  and one is beginning to expel thousands of tiny dandelion-like feathery seeds.  The pecan has developed a few splits and some chunks of shell have fallen out.  I don't know if the pecan was helped along its way by someone playing with it or if the inner meat froze and swelled when the temperature dropped below zero, thereby starting some hairline cracks.  All of these nuts/seeds have sat on a table on our back porch all winter.

It was very tempting to use lines on these small objects;  but I made myself slow down and draw the values and textures.  Slow and oddly relaxing.

Chiaroscuro

Chiaroscuro is an Italian word that means light to dark.  A chiaroscuro drawing is more visually real than an outline or contour drawing, because we don't actually see outlines around forms but we do see darks and lights.  Jesse was sleeping this morning , rolling over every few minutes.  I decided to draw only the darks and skim over the patches of light, allowing the form to emerge by itself in this way.

It's not so easy to do a chiaroscuro drawing if you like to nail things down, as I do.  I had to keep resisting the urge to fence in the form with firm outlines (to which I would then add values, sort of in the manner of coloring in a coloring book).  I started at the darkest place on Jesse and worked out from there.  Sometimes I didn't get very far because he would roll over just when I was getting into the drawing.  Some, like 4346, are hard to make out.  There is a little grin line that can hint at what's going on there, just as the ear forms hint at the head in 4347.

Little White Mystery Flowers

In the woods today up on a high trail, slightly different ecosystem from the trails on Jones Mountain, A and I came across a large group of little white flowers unknown to us.  At first we though Solomon's seal for the unfurling feeling, but Solomon's seal only unfurls leaves and then drops its little flowers.  We would guess liliaceae family for the parallel veining on the leaves, but beyond that it's a mystery.

Up in the left hand corner of this page is a nice sample of yellow celandine sap.  The flowers are beginning to emerge, and the sap is up and plentiful.  Has anyone out there ever used this sap as a dye or ink?  The docent at The Cloisters told me it was used in Medieval times, but she didn't know details about how it was prepared for use or if it could be used as is.

Moving the Cows

F and I are both getting ready to leave on vacations; so we rushed last week to finish orders, and now we're actually getting some time to make bags for ourselves!  Drawing 4331 is of a nice, slumpy, soft little bag that I made out of a market bag from an epicierie in Carpentras in the south of France that F and I got when we were in France two years ago.  I like the relaxed slumpy aspect to this bag and am trying to get it in the larger carry-on bag (see yesterday's drawings).  This is easier said than done, but much analysis and prototype-making today has finally given me a good idea of how to proceed tomorrow.

I pulled into our road this afternoon on my way home and had to halt in front of a group of students who were getting ready to  move the herd of cows from a field on one side of our road to the pasture on the other side of the road.  I love to watch the moving of cows, and it was especially fun this afternoon as there are so many babies, and not everyone was happy to comply.  The students encouraged them to leave the little field, walk down a short slope, then cross the asphalt road (and keep going in spite of the distraction of a few cars), travel over another patch of grass, and then go through the gate and down the hill into the pasture.  A large cow and three babies refused to leave the little field.  The students were yelling Hooooooo bow-ah, c'mon!  The cows ran to the back of the field. Finally a student caught one of the babies and carried it across the street (4334) while the other students walked behind the mother, who was interested in following the student with the calf, and chased after the other two babies (4332 and 4333).  I drew as fast as I could but only caught the gestures.  Like drawing a river flowing!

Designing from the Inside Out

I want to make a travel bag to take to Barcelona in a couple of weeks.  P and I travel very light-- never check bags and like to use public transportation and our feet to get from airports to wherever we're staying.  So I need a bag that will fit under the seat in front of me and also be light enough to easily carry through long hikes from concourse to concourse and from the airport shuttle stop to the hotel.  And of course it needs to hold everything I plan on bringing.

I already have two bags that I like very much-- drawing 4319 is one that F made as a market bag prototype and that I've used as a carry-on bag before.  It 's just a little bigger than I really need and lacks a flap.  Drawing 4320 is a canvas messenger bag that I bought in Brooklyn and that I use on most trips these days.  It's a good size and is relatively light;  but it has heavy, clunky hardware on the strap and en excessively stiff patch of Velcro.  I would also like a flat outside pocket for magazines or small books.

On the right side of this spread are obsessive drawings of everything I need to bring along for two weeks in Spain.  Included are two pairs of jeans, two sweaters, four shirts, four pairs of underwear, 2 each of socks and bras, a small canvas bag of toiletries, and the all-important Scrubba and its companion thirsty, featherweight laundry drying towel for doing super fast hand laundry at night,  thus enabling the clothing supply to be sparse.

On the left is a drawing of my proposed bag.  I piled up all the folded clothing and measured to get the dimensions.  I stuffed everything into the messenger bag, which was closest to the dimensions I had gotten, just to check, and everything fit fine with a little extra space.  So I proposed a shorter height.  I redesigned the strap so that there was no hardware at all and thinned out the velcro a bit.  Plus I added a flat pocket across the front (but have since decided it would be best across the back so that the flap doesn't interfere with it).  I decided to go with a lined birdseed bag, super lightweight but strong material, and put a Lotus fish recipe bag design- a lazy dog fishing with a school of fish eluding the hook- on the flap for fun.  More fish will swim across the back pocket.  Can't wait to make it tomorrow!