Road Trip - Sheep (on green ground)

Sheep (on green ground)   charcoal, watercolor and relief ink on paper   10.75 x 15

Road trips take one off of the beaten path and add discovery and excitement to our lives.  Every so often, I feel the need to enlighten my studio experience.  For some time, I had been craving a drawing experience, as most of my time is spent painting, a more complex experience.  Charcoal conte pencils were used to render the sheep on a sheet of unknown paper (when will I learn to be a better labeler?).  Watercolor was added here and there, as was a sprinkling of powdered charcoal and some blasts of water spray from a bottle.  No method to my madness at all.  Just a trusting of design elements and my hard-won experience of failure and success at creating images that hold my interest and express my personal sense of visual aesthetic.  Relief ink was printed on top...that being the most unreliable of the processes.  Water, pressure and placement are all unreliable variables.  I am thrilled by the layering of pigments and yet, at the same time, am striving for simpler shapes...a combining, of sorts, of traditional realism with a more modern simplicity, where details are highly edited and discarded.

I am pleased.  Road trip....yeah!

A Freath of Bresh Air...drawing a portrait from life...Tanner Dionne

Tanner...a sketch

is how I would describe our young model Tanner.  (I had a friend in high school who would interchange consonants on word phrases....it was playful and fun....a sort of word game....after all....who doesn't love flutter-bies?) Tanner posed for our drawing class.  An interesting-looking free spirited art student, a senior in high school.  After the sessions we proceeded to comment on our work for the evening.  Tanner's comments were so fresh and elegant that I handed over the critique to him.  He was astute, complementary, and had that beginner's zen eye.  A marvelous experience.  Thank you, Tanner.