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I just finished two scratchboards that I started while at Millen Pond. The first (7”x5”) is my impression of the nice fireworks display we watched from the dock. The second (10” x 8”) was an attempt to capture the feel of the late afternoon sun on the trees on Pine Point. I was really tempted to color this one, but decided to keep it black and white in the end.
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 I continued my larger scale black and white sketching on Sunday with a picture of the large pine in the woods along my yard. In order to conserve paper I used the right half of a page that I had drawn on the day before. Looking at the whole page it looks like the pine is doing the painting over her shoulder while holding a gun to Doreen’s back. She seems unfazed by it all.  On Saturday we hosted a GALA Plein Air outing at our home. For a while I had been thinking of trying to do larger drawings on the big pads I use for figure drawing, so that’s what I did Saturday instead of trying an oil painting. I have felt that the figure drawing sessions I have been attending regularly since January have improved my overall drawing skills. I feel a little freer and my lines are stronger, especially when working at a larger scale. Here are four flowers I drew during the day, as well as a sketch of Doreen as she painted.
We begin each figure drawing session with six, 2-minute poses. These quick drawings are very challenging, and I have not done well with them, but last Thursday something clicked, and I ended up with 4 nice drawings which captured the gesture of the pose with a minimum of lines.
 I just returned from a week at Millen Pond. It was a great week, with good weather and many visitors. I didn’t feel like I got a lot of good drawing done, but when I looked through my sketchbook there were a few I liked. I did do one oil painting, a view of the pond from beside our cottage, Edgemont (all the cottages have names on Millen Pond). I worked on this for three mornings at the cottage and finished it up with one day in the studio. The hardest part was getting the right color and value for the trees on the far shore. I studied that all week and think I finally got it relatively close.
I did miss my figure drawing sessions while I was up there, and there weren’t any willing models, but I did catch Denise while she was reading, and Carolyn and Matt while they shared a blanket.
Here’s a few random lake scenes – the neighbor’s dock, fireworks over the lake (I’m trying to do a scratchboard of that), the obligatory picture of the Millen Pond bridge, and one of the old trees on Pine Point..
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Some of the best work I've done isn't hanging on a wall; it's sitting in a box in my closet that's full of my old sketch books. I fill up one or two books each year. Some of the sketches end up as a basis of a more formal work, but most don't. They’re more important to me as a pictorial diary and also as on-going training; learning to really see and to understand shape, light and color.
This blog is to share my sketches as well as my sketching experiences. Archives
January 2020
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