PAPER TONES AND CHARCOAL PENCILS

I have been playing with charcoal pencils lately. It started when I was at everybody's favorite craft store, Michael's, and I found this stupid awesome sketchpad with toned paper. There was one with grey toned paper, but I went with the brown, because why not? Hashtag carpe diem. 

And since I now possess toned paper, I can't just use graphite because that goes against every fiber of my art heart, which is no good for no body. Also, charcoal is one of my favorite mediums to use and well, logically I couldn't go anywhere else. So here we are! 

I pulled up a photograph on Pinterest to imitate using a white charcoal pencil and a HB and 6B charcoal pencil. In my opinion she kind of looks like Faith Hill, but I mean, worse things could have happened.

Then I started to incorporate color, and just, hold on to your seats, kids.

All of this art stuff I've been doing lately has been good for my soul. I am re-starting to create my own art and it was Drawing 111 where I fell back in love with art making anyway, so it's also a little like going back to my roots.

"You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have." - Maya Angelou

Spray Paint: Origins

I got to try my hand at illustrating an article. I had no idea what article I was going to pick because there were no guidelines. It both overwhelmed me and excited me.

Once I found my article (which took me probably an hour to find and then hmm and haw over whether or not to do it) I had to decide how I was going to design the illustrations. I created a matrix and with the help of my professor we came up with several ideas. Then the rest was up to me.

I am super happy with how it turned out, for sure.

i'm getting better with green

This was my outside assignment. We had to do our own botanical illustration, so I painted from a picture that I took at the Botanical Gardens in San Diego. 

This one is from class today. We had 30 minutes to go pick a spot, paint a picture and get back to class. Then we were supposed to take what we had just painted and recreate it on a larger scale. I like the little one the best, so there you go.

botanical illustrations are not my forte

I found it a little funny that a couple days ago I stumbled across a blog in the "Blogs of Note" that linked me to the author's gallery website. Take a look at her floral prints, they are beautifully rendered. The reason that this is slightly humorous to me because this week in my watercolor class we are focusing on plants - mainly close ups of different kinds.

Yesterday we worked from flowers in the arboretum, and there were those beautiful western irises we all love so dearly. Today Mr. Teacher Man told us to go outside and pick a flower that we would like to paint. There is a beautiful bleeding heart plant outside the building that I knew is the one I wanted to paint because it looks like this:

I have grown up being told not to pick the flowers. If everybody just wanted to take 'one flower' then there would be no flowers at all! So you better just leave those alone Natalie Dawn, lest you be in major trouble. So, it kind of hurt my soul a little to break off a stem of these pretty flowers to paint. And it hurt even worse when after I was done the pretty little pink blooms got tossed in the trash can.

(Sorry for the poor quality photo. The lighting in our classroom is really not that great and my camera was just my cell phone. It didn't really want to cooperate because it was up too late last night and didn't sleep very well at all. It always gets grumpy when that happens...)

But you can see what we were trying to do. Nothing like Miss Margarethe can do, but it's really my beginning attempt at this type of painting. The idea is to be very detailed, and well really, that's just not my strong suit. Have you seen my artwork? Detailed it is not!

On the flip side, I think I have a new favorite flower - calla lilies, poppies, and now bleeding hearts. I bet that would make a pretty bouquet though, don't you think?