some things i did

art activities are still taking a back seat to house painting and yard chores... frustrating beyond measure but there is some satisfaction that things are starting to look pretty good and i remind myself now and again that at some point the end will come

one exceptionally hot day forced me inside and so a bit of sketching and mark-making took place - working with chunky blocks of charcoal but also an indigo intense block, and a few charcoal pencils... it was a messy, dirty business but oh so much fun

i used a large piece of drawing paper and just started making random lines and marks across the paper... it wasn't easy though, perhaps in part because it all felt so aimless but i kept on, sometimes turning the paper, erasing, smudging, re-drawing and slowly the process drew me in

it wasn't long before it began to feel like a landscape so i turned the page again, trying to force myself away from that

in the end it all looked rather odd to me so i tore it into large chunks, trying to isolate areas i liked

the piece below was leftover, the only area where there was nothing i liked at all... but it's funny the difference a day makes

when i photographed it iPhoto imported it upside down and i liked it that way so much i duplicated the image and now have a copy of it each way round

and a few more days later i can't say that i prefer one over the other - there are things about each i like very much

last sunday a big wind kicked up late in the evening - it was a wicked one, and the sound of it woke me several times during the night

the next morning i took my phone with me when I went for my walk, knowing the trees would have shed a number of small branches and the sidewalks would be littered with "letters"

they did not disappoint... many photographs and a handful of twigs later, i arrived back home with a good variety of interesting letter forms to sketch - so many in fact I decided I needed a sketchbook devoted just to them

a "y"

a very funky "r"

(this one fits right in with the thinking of the expressive calligraphy course i've been working on)

another "y", because you can never have too many

some of these, if turned, could easily be interpreted as a different letter but I take them as they are presented to me

my favourite of the day was an "f"

photographed below with an "l" from the next day along with a pinecone... thinking perhaps it might be a period because after all, trees use punctuation too

let week i discovered tinted charcoal pencils... 

sketching first with a mechanical pencil, then "driftwood" to emphasise the darker gnarly areas and finally a touch of "mossy green"

and then my laptop did it's thing and gave me a new perspective on it too