Sketching at the Black Sheep

I was supposed to have a workshop this last weekend, but only 3 signed up, so I reluctantly canceled. I'll be teaching the same workshop, Basic Nature Drawing, again in July, so perhaps they'll sign up again, with a lot more company.

Since I had this unexpected bonus of time, I used it to catch up on things -- like reassembling my kitchen from its construction orgy last week. I finally have most of the stuff into the new cupboards.

It still isn't done, as I have a huge cedar "plank," 6'x3'x3" sitting in my yard on sawhorses, wrapt in a tarp against rain and snow, awaiting my ministrations as sander. A huge task. It's still too wet and cold to deal with. Maybe next week! The plank is destined to be a counter/bar, and since my house is pretty rustic, it should fit right in.

And on Sunday, I went to The Black Sheep Pub again to sketch the Celtic Jam Irish musicians. I've been experimenting with design elements, and I really like how this major sketch came out (I did a couple of small ones I didn't scan in). The musician on the left, one of my favorites, turned his chair, left and came back then switched to playing the "bones" while I was trying to draw him, so he ended up just holding his guitar in the sketch. I love how he dresses the part, in the old-fashioned pin-striped shirt with its simple buttoned collar, the green vest, and that hat. I could only see the girl's head, with that wonderful hat and hair, and I THINK, in retrospect, that she was playing a different instrument. I only got a glimpse of it, and I think it was tear-shaped instead of a violin shape. Ah well...... There were ten of them playing yesterday, seven men and three women. This is just the ones that were closest (and somewhat visible).

When I visit one of my groups, EverydayMatters, I'm always entranced with the heavily designed pages/drawings people do in their journals. Up to this point I've been fairly simple in my renderings, mostly without backgrounds. So maybe I'll give this concept a ride in future entries. The box/line around it really does hold it together!

My Intermediate Nature Drawing workshop is weekend after next, the 21st, so I'll post that next time.

Journaling & Nature Sketching ~ February 7-8, 2009

I gave a journaling workshop on Feb 7 & 8. I was a little nervous because we had two different meeting places for the weekend. I'd never given a workshop in the Senior Center lunchroom, our Saturday venue, and I was afraid it would be clackety. But the big windows and cheery atmosphere proved to be a big plus (and with no echoes) so it worked out great. Here are my students in a composite photo. Remember you can click on photos to get a larger view.

Day 1
In the journaling workshop, we focus on "sketching in your journal" on the first day, and "journaling in your sketchbook" on the second day. So the first day incorporates Beginning Drawing. But because time is limited, it can only be taught in an abbreviated form.

This may take students up only a step or two if they're real beginners. But at least they can learn the principles, and if they practice they'll improve greatly.

This first day helps students learn to plan pages that will look good, using free-form templates to draw areas into which to write. Matching the shape with the item they have drawn (in the photo above you can see a free-form template's faint outline), this shape allows them to either make an interestingly-shaped paragraph or lovely curving lines of text.

I provided a selection of beautiful but fairly simple seashells, and I think some of the students surprised themselves with both their drawings and their writing. The writing on this first day was unguided, because we were just feeling out the process of creating and combining journaling and sketches.

Some of the writing results were very evocative, and I realized I had a talented bunch of writers in the class. The drawings were quite good, too, especially for mostly-inexperienced beginning artists.

Take a look at some of the results here. I wanted to post more, but they take a lot of time to prepare, (as I demonstrated in a previous blog) and I only had time to ready a few of them.

I was very pleased when one of the students pulled out a digital camera to photograph her shell so that she could work on the pattern and color later. This is an excellent habit, one I use all the time, and it can really enhance your capability for adding details to or painting your sketches later on at home.
I provided a sample "fun font" for the students to use to create a title for their page.

Our ending critique for the day gave everyone new ideas about ways to tackle a journal sketch and entry, and they were vocal with praise and admiration for the page designs the others had produced ~ and the wildly varied approaches to the writing. It was definitely a successful first day.

Day 2
The second day is sometimes met with nervous palpitations by students who have never written a poem, haiku, or a guided creative paragraph.

Since I don't provide journals for this class, students have to bring their own ~ and every journal on Day 2 was different. There were large ones, small ones, spiral bound and book-bound journals. I provide heavy pages in the back of the workbook for students to use if they decide they don't like the journal they brought. I always request that students bring unlined journals, but a few lined ones generally show up anyway. If students want to use them, they may. However, I discourage this because the lines seriously compromise a sketch.

The first assignment, after an introduction and demonstration of the way to approach the project, was to create an evocative paragraph from their choice of four simple sentences-and-photos provided in the workbook. They drew from the photos, designed their pages with the free-form templates, then created their paragraphs. When they had finished, I asked them to read them aloud, and the entire class was entranced by the readings ~ wow! Some of us were in tears by the end. Here are some of their creative pages.









We added other things to the pages later: haikus,





experimental borders, etc. I showed them how to cut and paste to mask booboos and attach ephemera. I provided colored sand and a foolproof technique to add a sample.

I worked alongside them, creating a whimsical page about a worm. I demonstrated details of using rubber stamps, simple spot illustrations, attaching sand, using watercolor pencils for quick touches of color, and creating colorful borders and dividers to enliven a page (check out the example).

The students also tried their hand at illuminating initial caps, a cool way to give an average-looking page a real boost. Two of the students had calligraphy backgrounds, and one of them showed us the beautiful and exceedingly easy way to outline words, shown here.

I always enjoy having advanced artists and journalist in my classes. They often are happy to share with the rest of the students the techniques they use, and I encourage this if it fits within the time frame and other limitations of the workshop.

By the end of the day, most of the students had tried most of the techniques, and several had added circular patches of sand to their pages. There's one by my earthworm, above, in case you wondered what that round thing is. And here's a close-up of one produced by a student.

Very soon, now, I'll be posting my new workshops for summer ~ some of them are still in the scheduling phase ~ and I'll try to remember to put up a notice here when I get them posted. Keep in touch!

About that slideshow....

If you were keeping track, last week you'll recall that I had a really spiff slideshow up on my blog, and was trying to figure out how to move it to the right panel as a permanent display. I made the slideshow at Slide.com, and I had read their permissions and conditions more carefully than I usually do, but was still caught by surprise when I clicked on one of my images to enlarge it and encountered this invitation: "Grab the code below to add this picture to any web site, like Craigslist, Myspace, Xanga or your blog!," it said.

I don't want to seem naive here. I KNOW you can right-click on most pictures (ones which haven't been purposely protected from that) to copy and snitch them. I've borrowed a few myself to use temporarily as resource materials when creating an illustration. I've never copied someone else's work or photo straight across, of course, because that's an infringement of their copyright, but I have referred to a borrowed photo to get anatomy or color correct on a piece I was creating.

Actually, I would expect an occasional lift/borrow of a photo of mine. But to see an INVITATION to take it really threw me. It seemed to be a message to any viewer from ME saying I WANTED people to take the pictures, which is not my intention at all since my only purpose was to use the slideshow as a gallery to show potential clients my style and scope.

So I took it down. If anyone who reads this can guide me to the part of the Slide.com agreement that states they plan to do that, I'd really like to read it. I don't have time to plow through that lengthy agreement again just now, but I sure wonder if I missed a paragraph or something -- or if they just do it "because they can."

Nuff ranting, I suppose.

I just finished a two session workshop on nature journaling this afternoon, and I'll be posting the blog about the class (great fun!) within the week, I expect. They produced some really excellent work.

Birds at Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama

[The slide show has been removed. I left up the original posting with explanatory notes in red. Here's the original posting:]

I'm experimenting with a widget. Below, in the slideshow, are some illustrations I created for a birding trail at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. I just discovered if you run your cursor over the picture it comes into focus better and the title I typed in for it pops up! WoW!

Sorry -- I took the slideshow down.


Why? Click on the graphic to get a bigger view. It's kind of fuzzy since it's just a printscreen shot, but I think you can read it.

I discovered late last night when I clicked on my slide show image to get a larger view of the screech owl, that Slide.com ENCOURAGES people to grab your pictures and use them any way they want. When you click on the image of the PrintScreen here ~ be sure to read the print in the blue box!

They were begun in pencil then manipulated in Photoshop. Actually, after many hours of experimenting, some of the later ones were done entirely in Photoshop, from the rough sketch to the finish, using a Wacom tablet and stylus.

If you watch the slide show for a moment, you'll see a grouping of birds, then closeups of the birds shown in the group. They manufactured then positioned etched aluminum signs of the groupings at key points along the trail (at the edge of an open meadow, inside the forest, etc., where people might expect to see those birds. The trail is solely for the pleasure of the people living on the base, because it isn't open to the public. I'VE never even walked the trail!

I'm pretty pleased with these. I'm going to see if I can transfer this slideshow over to the right side of the page so it doesn't scroll down and off. WELL, MAYBE NOT!!!! But I haven't figured out how to do that yet.....

Sorry about this -- but maybe we can all learn a lesson.

That bit of information ~ that they'd suggest photo "sharing" ~ was not obvious in the Slide.com agreement (if it was there at all), which I DID read fairly carefully (more carefully than most, I suspect). I certainly didn't see a note mentioning that they would suggest, encourage ~ and actively enable ~ people to lift your pictures!

And my education continues....

Intermediate Nature Sketching

I've been giving workshops long enough now that I'm starting to get continuing students from previous classes. The Intermediate Nature Sketching class last Sunday was a good example, with three students from previous classes and one new student. There was a real anomaly as well ~ three lefties in the class and only ONE right-handed student! (BTW, the lefties were all returners. Does that mean anything? Naw! Surely not!). There they are in the class photo above, all busily left- and right-handing!

It really made me think about how I design my workbooks, because being right handed I have somewhat heedlessly set up the books to be used by right-handers when, with a bit of planning and forethought I can make them equally well-designed for either-handers by, for instance, putting examples ABOVE the area to be drawn in (instead of BESIDE, where they may be covered by a drawing hand) and placing the drawing area in such a way that neither right- nor left-handers have to draw with their hand resting on the plastic comb spine (not really comfortable). It took awhile for that to sink in, but I paid especial attention to it in the upcoming new Nature Sketching With Color workbooks for next weekend. They're not perfect yet, but they are considerably better.

DAY 1
The workshop went pretty smoothly considering it was a first run for a couple of things. We warmed up by drawing shells, and since this is an intermediate class I had the students working to use the arc of their hand, and paying particular attention to details of proportion. They did well, as shown in the collection of their shell-drawing efforts above.

This class teaches a collection of techniques: how to deal with 3-D shading with regard to cylinders, spheres and planes; seeing and utilizing negative space; a basis for creating realistic leaves, drawing believable eye, and any number of other things.

The workbooks are invaluable for this, as they provide the students with outlines within which to work on specific skills. Sure, the students could draw the outlines to work inside, but that would take up a large percentage of the time allotted for the exercise, and they wouldn't learn nearly as much. I've never gotten any complaints from students about having to work inside these outlines, so I think they are filling their purpose well.

After lunch I pulled out my piece d' resistance, the box of cattails which I had so carefully labored to keep from exploding a few weeks ago (see previous post). They made the trip well, and, in fact, survived being taken home and returning with the students without showing any signs of wear.

The cattail project page in the workbook is very detailed because the students take the cattail home to work on overnight (sometimes they don't have time for homework, but if they do it is much more rewarding and they learn a great deal by trying to puzzle things out for themselves).

We worked on the cattails an hour in class ~ I did a drawing right alongside them so that I could show them ways to work on the texture and shading.

Part of the homework assignment was to add some fluff to the cattail in the drawing, using a reference photo in the workbook of a partially exploded cattail.
An exploding cattail picture is more visually interesting, and I wanted them to get some practice combining photo-reference material with a sketch. Be sure to click on the images to see a larger version of how they worked out the problem. In order at left are: Jan's, Lynns, Kathleen's and Randy's cattails. Nice, huh?

That evening, I finished my cattail, too, scanning it into Photoshop during the process, then taking the series to class the next morning so the students could see how I worked out the problems. That's the 3-step series at right.

DAY 2
We critiqued the cattails as soon as everyone had arrived the next morning, discussing the problems they ran into with the fluff. (I had let them deal with that without much instruction in the workbook. Some of my most useful learning sessions have been when I had to piece together how someone else got a certain effect.)

The second day was spent learning how to draw realistic fur on animals, practicing quick ways to rough in a drawing by drawing PAST it then filling in the inner parts, putting highlights and bounce reflections on eyes and considering how the eye highlights relate to highlights and shadows on spheres, etc.

I had them drawing mostly with ballpoint pen ~ this is useful in forestalling the "sketchy" drawer. Since the lines can't be erased, they don't get made in the first place, leading to a much more "conscious" drawing. And when you're super-conscious of each line you draw, you learn a lot faster.

Because the ballpoint can produce a whole range of tonal values from light gray to black black, it has many of the same drawing qualities as a pencil. After the initial OMG reaction, students often quickly come to prefer it over pencil for sketching (I sure do!). In fact, in the evaluations at the end of the class, Lynn, in response to "What is your favorite medium?" wrote: "pencil, now converting to ballpoint pen!"

After lunch, for our final project, I got out my special effects kit and taught the students how to create white hairs and whiskers against black, then we did the mushroom shown here. They were SO pleased with the results, and so am I. One student declared that she's going to do this as a project with her grandson when he comes to visit. Sounds to me like the perfect fun thing for him to do with Granny.

So there is is. A very satisfying workshop for me, and I think for the students, too.

Next weekend is my Nature Sketching with Color class. I finished the two workbooks just last week and sent them to bro David, who has already printed and FedExed them back. They should arrive on Monday or Tuesday with enough time for me to write up the detailed class plan schedules I work from.

I've tried classes both loosely and tightly structured, and when they're loosely structured the students sometimes don't get a chance to try a technique because we've dallied too long on a previous one.

So I try to keep things moving right along by using the schedule ~ I always know about where in the curriculum I am supposed to be. That's my left brain talking, I guess!

Till next time!

Robbie and the Haggis

This post is a bit of an aside, not being about a workshop, but since it happened because of a workshop it deserves its place in the sun. When my last student had gone, after my workshop last weekend, the weather was dim and rainy and I felt in need of a bit of gaiety, so I stopped by The Black Sheep Pub on the way home thinking to have a jar of ale and perhaps sketch the Irish Jam musicians playing their usual Sunday afternoon gig.

Imagine my surprise to find it packed with folk, the Irish music barely audible from the stairs, and three Scotsmen in plaid kilts standing by the bar! All the chairs were taken ~ I circled the room trying to cadge one from every table, but they were all being saved. So I crept behind the menu board at the top of the stairs and pulled out a folding chair and edged my way back with it to the only free spot remaining (and my favorite place, anyway) right next to the Irish musicians.

For awhile I just relaxed, for workshops are hard work and it felt good to sip my Guinness and just float with the music. Then I got out my sketchpad and sketched a piper and one of the Scotsmen with his bagpipe. And as things started to get really interesting, I began to write:

"The Black Sheep is dim with late afternoon light. The blue-black ceiling, covered with gold stars, hangs high over the rich tapestry of Irish tunes woven from the warp of fiddle and heavy thumping heels and a weft of flute, guitar, banjo and box. The air is redolent with Guinness and what must be baking haggis, neeps and tatties [I discerned this from a little menu I found on the table].

A fiddler rises, bow flying, from his chair in the group and crouches nearby, all solemn and gay at the same time, to fiddle the tune for a small child, entranced, held in the lap of a listening mother. Other mothers dance with their children in the very small open area, and a colleen with carroty hair jigs with her portly companion, his hand tucked neatly behind him at his waist in the Irish fashion. Both of them are improbably light on their flying middle-aged feet. All around me, toes tap, fingers jig on tabletops. My foot wags to the beat.

As I sit, the Scottish trio, with humming drone and a screeling of pipes, circles the pub behind a waiter bearing a silver platter of haggis, to deliver it, all brown and steaming, onto the next table.

Now our Jim Finnegan has declaimed Robbie Burns' famous ode to haggis with marvelous verve to great applause, and one of the pipers ceremoniously stabbed the great roll roundly with a big knife. Finally a kitchen drudge has marched off to the scullery with it to serve it up, with neeps and tatties, to the folk who would have some.

In case you wonder, haggis consists of a finely ground mash of suet, oats, liver, kidneys, heart, blood and possibly tripe of the sheep, heavily spiced and stuft into a sheep's stomach, then baked. On the menu 'tis offered as:
"Haggis wi' Bashit Neeps and' Champit Tatties, $12.50."

I shall have some.

The Irish Jam strikes up again, the Scotsmen having sat down to await their treat. My Guinness stands at half mast as I eagerly await my haggis and tatties. The very air vibrates with heel thumps, heavy strumming of guitar, voices shouting to be heard, and the swirling fiddle and pipes. Laughter rises and dances around the ceiling, weaving through the painted stars (my, that Guinness is good!), as the bagpipe drummer clicks his "spoons" idly, and waiters thread their way through dancers and laughing revelers.

AHH! My Haggis, Bashit Neeps (bashed turnips) and Champit Tatties (champed potatoes) has arrived, and I am savoring it. There is much ado about whether haggis is actually edible, and I am here to tell you that "aye, 'tis good!" How could this Scotch-Irish girl reach this advanced age before getting her first taste? 'Tis spicy and musky, hot and steaming, and truly, most excellent.

Jim Finnegan just sang 'My Heart's in the Highlands" in a voice fit to be heard the entire length o' th' green, followed by 'Auld Lang Syne' joined by the entire pubful of roistering folk. The bagpipes came in on the last verse, and it ended with hoots and hollers, shouts and whistles.

It's after five, now, and the bagpipers have begun winding a final path through the pub, screeling and tat-a-tatting as they play 'Scotland the Brave' on their way to the door.

It's time for me to go home. What a wonderful unexpected celebration for this tired lady on a rainy January Sunday evening!"


Later this week I hope to get up the pictures and entry about the last workshop. I tried several new things, and I think you'll enjoy seeing how they came out.

Nature Sketching Basics Workshop ~ 1-10&11-09

I finally got smart and started taping up a welcome sign to the entry of whatever building I'm giving my workshops in. It's eye-opening how many students have mentioned being glad to see the sign! It's printed out on my computer then slipped into a plastic page protector. I fasten it to the door with tape which has one end folded over to make a tab. When I take the sign down I fold over and press the sticky part to the plastic envelope, so that the next time I want to use it I only have to pull up the tab, the sticky area comes up, and I have an instant sign hanger. Click on the image to see a bigger version

While I was photographing that welcome sign, I also took a snapshot of my Basic Sketching Workshop gear in front of the building. The wheeled pack in front is my Drinks Caddy. It has a pullout handle, and contains my electric teapot, instant coffee, teabags of all kinds, hot/cold paper cups, and creamer. It gets quite a bit of use in some classes, in others it is barely used ~ except by me! At least, now that I provide the opportunity for drinks, I don't have to feel guilty about sipping hot coffee in front of them.

The long-handled caddy with the two plastic boxes contains my display books, supplies, and workbooks. The black and white boxes carry things to sketch ~ in this case, weathered sticks and seashells. I try to provide a good selection so students can sketch something that really pleases them. It usually requires two trips to the car to carry everything.

The Drinks Caddy remains the same from class to class, but for other classes, different things end up in the plastic boxes and I bring different things to sketch. I'm trying to compartmentalize all the classes so that I can just pick up a set of containers filled with everything I need for the class at hand.

On January 10 I had a REALLY small class. I need to figure out just why that is. I think I discussed this in a previous blog ~ maybe I'm just offering so many classes that I'm competing with myself in this area's small population, especially during this economic slump. Well, no matter, I love teaching so I took the class on anyway with just three students, Valerie, Randy, and Jacob, who is ten and homeschooled.

I mention the homeschool part because I don't think I would have accepted someone so young except for that. Homeschooled kids tend to be better behaved and interact better with adults than their public school counterparts. And they tend to have longer attention spans. I KNOW that is a generalization, and there are exceptions, but it fits my experiences so I'm happy to go with it. In Jacob's case, it was well founded. My lower limit is officially twelve.

Jacob turned out to have a great sense of humor, and we all enjoyed working alongside him. He got his first experience with tortillons (blending stumps used for shading pencil) during the first day's class, and was so intrigued that he went home and created a number of large ones out of different materials so he could experiment with what works best. You can see his assortment on the table in front of him here.

In case you are a bit puzzled at Jacob's headgear, that is his invention: an Airbag for Pedestrians created from a grocery bag, which he demonstrated during a break. Never a dull moment!

Day 1
As usual, the students got right to work ~ here's Valerie's sea shell and Randy working on a leaf. Our first critique illuminated what worked successfully and what could be done to improve the drawings. Critiques make useful breaks, giving students a chance to stretch and refresh at the "drinks bar."
Randy turned out a particularly nice shell, using many of the techniques we had just learned about shading and reflected light.

Our final project for the day was to draw a wild turkey feather, and the students turned out some nice drawings. Here's Jacob at work on his.


Day 2
We turned to landscape basics to give the students the confidence they need to go outside on their own landscape sketching trips.

They practiced contour drawing in the workbook, working from a redrock photo, to give them a handle on how to tackle an outdoors scene, which can intimidate even seasoned landscape artists. Then they drew common landscape items -- dead sticks, shrubbery, foliage, and tree forms.

With such a small class, I didn't want to hang over their shoulders, so while they worked on their landscapes I sketched them at work, using a modified contour drawing technique in ballpoint pen.

Valerie took this picture of me sketching, and here's what they looked like from my viewpoint, hard at work. I admit to crowding them elbow to elbow for the picture. In actuality, they had a bit more space for working.

They were all working on their final landscapes when I drew this.



Here Valerie is at hard work on her landscape, and below are the landscapes they all produced. Valerie did the redrocks, Jacob produced the waterfall, and Randy drew the rocky canyon. As you can see, they came a very long way for beginners, and I am very proud of them all.

Next weekend is my Nature Illustration Techniques class, but so far I only have three sign-ups for that class, too. But even if the numbers don't reach five for this one, I think I will hold it anyway, even at that low enrollment, since I want to run the new material in the reworked curriculum past some students.

Reworking two classes at once got confusing even to me, and last time I blogged I was thinking my cattail session was for basic students, but it's actually for the intermediates and I am eager to try it out. I think they'll love it. Cattails are WAY cool to sketch.

In the meantime, I'm now working on the Watercolor Pencil Painting class revisions. It is shaping up nicely, and I've created some new materials for the workbooks. This page from one of my Costa Rica journals is in the workbooks, to serve as inspiration for those trying out the watercolor pencils. It's one of my favorite journal pages.

I'm hoping to get a good signup for the February 7-8 class ~ several have signed up already, so perhaps it will grow a bit larger.

Today was the inauguration, and I watched it with a great deal of interest. What a marvelous panoply (had to look up the spelling on that one!)! I was positively entranced.

Enough! Back to work on the watercolor pencil class workbook. I have to get the .pdf to my brother's printing company in time for him to print the workbooks up and FedEx them to me before the class begins, and I haven't finished the second day's workbook yet!

I'd love some feedback if you have a minute. Are these entries getting too repetitive and boring? I love to showcase my students' work, but if there is something more I can write about that you want to know about, let me know.

How about something on dealing with students with Altzheimers?

Cheers,
Irene