Big Catch-up Post - Drawing Moving Targets While in Motion

I thought I would do lots of drawing this week:  impossible!  Once I got to NJ, drawing slid down the list of priorities unless I could do it with N as part of some other activity.  This first drawing was the last still drawing that I did while on this week's trip to help my son with his two little kids while his wife had to be out of town.  I took an early flight out of Asheville, and the people in the waiting room were sleepy and mostly looking at their phones.  I drew the one person I saw who was reading a book.  On board the plane waiting for take-off, things were still relatively calm.   

I was drawing some slowly moving people in the Charlotte airport in between flights, when a woman came and sat next to me.  After a few  minutes she told me she liked my drawing.  We started talking a bit, and then she asked me to draw her.  So she went and sat across from me and posed.  She was wonderful to draw with her beautiful profile and her great scarf.

Waiting outside of Newark for my daughter-in-law to pick me up I spotted a small person in a long black robe with this incredible stark white tightly ringletted/dreadlocked/braided hair getting into a limo.  I drew as fast as I could, and she constantly moved.  It was a good warmup for my next drawing (4029),  five-year-old N, who helped me draw many of the rest of these sketches.   As soon as we arrived at his house we drew Gill Man.  I started at the head, and then N grabbed a pen and added scales and toes and fingers and properly electric eyes.  Then N popped a ring pop from his Valentine's bag into his mouth and told me to draw him, which I did, in the approximately 10 seconds, before he took off.

I should add that during most of these drawings with N, his two-year-old sister, A, was spinning and wheeling in the background, busily sticking Frozen stickers to pieces of paper, making toy sandwiches in her toy kitchen, scrabbling through N's tiny legos, which she loves (she calls all the figures 'Guy'), and putting the guys to sleep in between the squares of cloth that I had brought her.  In the drawings above, however, A was at daycare, and N and I were on the train going into Manhattan to the Museum of Natural History.  It was bitterly cold outside, but N sat calmly on the train and drew things out of his head.  He carried his colored pencils and notebook and gum (that we bought at the station) in his man bag, which you can see in 4030. 

 

 In the museum we mostly raced around and up and down stairs and checked out things and ate and bought the necessary gifts and saw a movie about natural disasters and many taxidermied[?] animals.  He drew animals and dinosaurs with me for a while, then would buzz off to some new thing, and I would race after him.

The best process for us was that I would start drawing something and he would sidle up to see what I was doing.  Then he would decide I wasn't doing it right, and he would say he would finish it.  And then he would finish it, race away, and I would chase after him.

Saturday morning N came down and played legos in his pjs for a long time.  Later his dad and sister and he and I went to a science museum together.  The drawing on the right is of a building that N made in a skyscraper exhibit activity.  This was shortly before the building was knocked down with great glee by another child.

Monday N and I went back into the city for another go at the Museum of Natural History, which I believe he considers to be a large gift shop with interesting exhibits tacked on.  On the train I drew a pile of luggage that the woman sitting across from us was dealing with.  At the right, a quick beginning sketch of some dinosaur bones, made in the few minutes while N was playing with a computer at the corner of the cabinet of bones.

A true motion study-- N on the train, the train shaking and shuddering, N adding to the drawing on the left (of him drinking a smoothie) while I drew.  On the right a drawing that we did together of an ostrich nest diorama.  We didn't see many things, but we saw very well the things we did see.

This is my favorite drawing of the whole week.  Nate started drawing on the train going home, a chimney of some kind.  Then he began spinning out a story and acting it out with his pen and a yellow pencil as he drew and narrated.  When he finished, he gave the book back to me and I drew his profile on the other side of the page.  I like how his drawing seems to come out of his head.

These last three drawings I did at the airport on the way home-- two people eating and talking next to one of the glass walls at a corner of the Body Shop.

The last drawing was calm and still.  Nothing moved except the woman's hands.