A flower for Penelope

Prismacolor colored pencil and graphite on Strathmore Toned Tan sketch paper

(click to enlarge)

This week's topic on Illustration Friday is "Tribute", in honor of its founder, Penelope Dullaghan, who has recently moved on to pursue other projects. Before I launch into my own tribute to Penelope and IF, I'll explain my little sketch:

When my husband and I moved to California many years ago, we were invited to dinner at the home of a family friend. Along one side of their house, they had a profusion of different varieties of fuchsia on display, and I fell in love. I haven't had any in my own garden for years, so when we recently replanted a flower bed, we decided to add some fuchsias. At the nursery, I was instantly drawn in by their names. I love it when plants are named as a tribute to a famous person. I chose two, almost as much for their names as for their beauty. One is Fuchsia "Winston Churchill" (which I love because I'm an admitted Anglophile) and the other is the one I've sketched here. With its red "hat" and white "beard", how could I resist Fuchsia "Santa Claus"?! Such a lively little blossom; the whole time I was sketching it, I kept thinking of the Flower Fairy illustrations by Cicely Mary Barker. You can see her charming Fuchsia fairy here.

Now for my tribute to Penelope Dullaghan:

One of the reasons that I started blogging a few years ago was so that I could participate in Illustration Friday. For a long time, I was a very consistent contributor—I rarely missed a week! Early on, one of my drawings was even selected to be IF's "Pick of the Week" which gave me lots of exposure and encouragement. But most importantly, I got to know many fellow artists that also participated  in IF regularly. (Once I realized that if I commented on a drawing, that person often commented back, the communication floodgates were opened!) I consider a number of these people to be friends: I still visit their blogs regularly, chat with some on Facebook, and a few of us even check up on one another when we haven't posted in a while. For these reasons, I send my heartfelt thanks to Penelope for her devotion to this website that gave rise to such a wonderful supportive community.

Having said that, my recent IF entries have been few and far between. I've had a busy spring and wasn't at my drawing board as much as I'd have liked, but things are a bit quieter now, and I'm hoping to spend more time doing these quicker sketches when I'm not working on a more detailed piece. I will also be visiting blogs, making some new friends, and checking up on the old ones! So, in the spirit of the IF community that Penelope nurtured, feel free to leave a comment and say hello!

A multicolored mango

Mangoes are beautiful. I'm intrigued by the huge range of color that is found on their skins. So this piece was an exercise in color: the outline took a minute to draw, but the rest took hours. I didn't quite achieve the control over the gradating color that I'd hoped for, though. Many colored pencil artists are masters at layering. As for me, I can never quite decide whether I should  layer dark-to-light or light-to-dark. And I get impatient and want to see one area finished, instead of working the whole piece at once. I've included some work-in-progress scans, so that you can see my indecision and impatience firsthand. But first, here's a shot of my set-up...those colors really are that bright on the actual fruit!

I used a LOT of pencils on this one mango!

Starting to burnish...

Frankly, I think I need a break from these painstaking pieces; I feel the need to sketch fast and loose this week. I keep looking at this little sketch I did a while back. It took hardly any time at all, but for some reason, it's one of my favorite little drawings. 

So, check back later this week; hopefully I'll have some sketching successes to share!  

Happy 27th birthday to my son, who brought me this sea urchin shell—packed in his backpack—all the way home from his recent trip to New Zealand! He knows that I have a fascination with drawing examples of radial symmetry in nature (often based upon multiples of 5), which I've previously posted about here.

Before I sat down to draw this "test" (which, I learned, is the proper terminology for a sea urchin shell), I was curious whether or not it was as perfectly round as it appeared to my eye. So, I printed out a little template of a circle the same diameter as the shell. I laid the shell over it on my lightbox, and...wow! Mother Nature never ceases to amaze.

Since the shell is composed of a beautiful almost monochromatic blue-grey-green palette, I ended up using a toned Strathmore charcoal paper (the smooth side) and only graphite and 2 Prismacolor pencils: Jade Green, and White Verithin. (Sorry for the uneven lighting; I was too lazy to scan, so I just shot this at my desk with my iPhone.)

As I examined the shell closely, I was curious about the texture of the surface, and did a little research—they're fascinating creatures! The raised bumps are where the spines had been attached with an ingenious ball-and-socket mechanism, and all of the tiny holes are where the soft tube feet once extended. What an amazing little structure!

Bell Pepper Update

Perfection is overrated. After writing that last post, I went a couple of days without looking at my bell pepper drawing, but still kind of stewing about it. But then, your encouraging, constructive comments prodded me to get it back out, fix it as best I could, and move on. I decided to forgo the inside cross-section I had planned, spent a few minutes on those problem areas, and gave this guy his jaunty little stem hat.

Linda, thanks for suggesting the use of an exacto knife; it's great for removing the waxy layers! I could even feather the area I was working on with the tip of the blade. Live and learn.

Afterward, I cleaned up the paper around the image digitally, as I always do. I eventually go back and clean up the original, but I like my scans to have the same white background. I know it alters reality a bit (no drawing paper is pure white) but the images pop nicely on a white ground. There are probably a number of better ways to do this, but here's my routine: I go into Photoshop and select an eraser with a soft (feathered) round brush. I run it along the edge of the image, being very careful to erase just shy of the image itself. This takes some experimenting with brush sizes, etc; if  too big of a brush is used, or it's too close to the image, the feathering will lighten the edge of the pencil work. Once the area next to the image is clean, it's easy to use the lasso tool and clear out the rest of the background. (I'm not super meticulous when I draw; my paper is always full of pencil dust, smears, etc.)

Oh, and some of you asked about my swatch cards that I mentioned. When I made them, I had no idea how indispensable they'd be. I never do a colored pencil drawing without using them. Click here to read the post I wrote ages ago when I created them.

This little episode has reminded me why I love to draw things from nature—they're not perfect. No one notices if that bump on that squash isn't exactly right. Let's hear it for imperfection!

Bell peppers with spumoni gelato

No, that's not a photo-realistic colored pencil drawing. It's a photo of the spumoni gelato that I just served myself as consolation for messing up a drawing that I've been working on yesterday and today. I suppose it's important to share failures as well as successes, so here's my sordid little tale:

It all started out well enough. Not finding inspiration around the house, I headed over to my neighborhood Safeway to peruse the produce aisle. It never disappoints. Here are my purchases/models-to-be:

The beautiful bright orange bell pepper (not as red as it looks in these photos) was calling my name, so I set it up on my desk,

and chose my pencils (using my indispensable swatch cards).

My plan was to draw the outside and then, next to it, a cross-section showing the inside. I even remembered to take some work-in-progress scans:

I was really happy with how the top and left side of the pepper were shaping up. Instead of going for the blended, burnished look, I was trying to keep that softer colored-pencil texture while conveying a smooth shiny surface. (Does that make sense?) Working on the shaded right side, I was trying to layer the colors without reaching that saturation point where the paper won't take any more of the wax-based Prismacolor pencils. Now, this scan is being kind, but if you click and look closely, you'll see that, all of a sudden, the darker colors shading the right side were coming out all blotchy and overworked looking. (Trust me, the original is far worse than this scan.). I tried burnishing, smoothing, and in desperation, used my blender pen which caught a stray crumb of pencil from somewhere and made a dark streak on the upper right of the pepper. Soooo, I tried to hide that "scar"...the whole thing was like trying to fix your bangs when you cut them crookedly. Ugh.

Now, maybe I could fix it digitally, but do I really want to spend any more time on a drawing that will never be the way I want it to be? No. I'll chalk it up to a lesson learned...and enjoy my ice cream while I ponder doing some "looser" drawings instead of these time-consuming ones. Food for thought...literally!

What do you do when a piece goes awry? Do you live with it? Toss it? Eat gelato?

Two Valentines

I pulled out this oldie for Valentine's Day—a little drawing that I did a couple of years ago for Illustration Friday. (You can read the original post here.) And, for those of you who prefer the sweet and traditional, here's my little sketch of conversation hearts from last year. (It was also for Illustration Friday; the original post is here.)

I also do a little series of "botanical hearts"
—you can see what I have done so far here.

Have a wonderful Valentine's Day!

Wings

" I have made a great mistake. I have wasted my life with mineralogy, 

which has led to nothing. Had I devoted myself to birds, their life and 

plumage, I might have produced something worth doing." 

 —John Ruskin

I was excited to read that this week's Illustration Friday topic is "wings", as I have just finished this drawing of  spotted owl and peregrine falcon feathers. It was a Christmas present for my son; I know, I know, it's January, but he has just returned from three months in New Zealand, so our celebration was postponed a bit.

As I've told you in a previous posts here and here, he's a field biologist currently working with the California Condor group at nearby Pinnacles National Monument. (Pinnacles was recently upgraded to national park status!) Before that, he worked with a spotted owl research project up in the Sierra. With a few months off between stints at Pinnacles, he took a working vacation to New Zealand—backpacking, photographing, and working on a local falcon project.

My son is one of those lucky adults who has a job that grew from a childhood fascination. As a little boy, he would count hawks to pass the time on our summer drives to Lake Tahoe, and requested that his 7th birthday cake be decorated with a peregrine falcon. I was able to unearth this photo (terribly out-of-focus, I'm afraid) to document my culinary creation. Twenty years later, I hope that he'll enjoy this drawing just as much.

Here are a few WIP shots...I always enjoy seeing them in posts; I hope you do, too!

Calendars

Before we get too far into 2013, I want to share the little calendars that I made for this year. They started out as Christmas gifts for my book club, but I was pretty happy with how they turned out and made a few more for friends and family members as well.  Early in the year, I'd thought about doing more of my "botanical hearts" to make one for each month, but that just didn't happen. As it turned out, I had fun selecting from among my drawings to find one that suited each month (sorry, my photos are a tad askew):

I love packaging, so I placed the pages in a festive red box mailer from Paper Source. The little glassine envelope holds a stand and a hanging clip. The stand is a little place card holder that I found at Crate and Barrel. Because the paper that I used was a little too thin to stand upright on its own, I cut a piece of heavy white card stock slightly smaller than the 5 x 7 calendar pages; it can be placed in the stand behind the page.

As an option to the stand, I included a little bulldog clip so that the whole year can be tacked up on a bulletin board. And since the pages are 5 x 7, they could also be displayed in a simple photo frame.

I got a lot of  nice "You should sell these!" remarks, which gave me etsy-on-the-brain again, but honestly, I'm still not convinced that I could make any profit in that scenario. Maybe I'll stop blathering on about it and just try it someday. Then again, I ran across this great piece yesterday on  the fabulous website, Brain Pickings. In a letter to his teenage son back in 1927, writer Sherwood Anderson wrote this wonderful sentence:

“The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.”

Amen.

Nuts Once More

Prismacolor colored pencil on Strathmore charcoal paper, "Golden Brown"

I posted a work-in-progress shot of this piece back before Thanksgiving, and just got a chance to finish it.  (You can read that first post here.) Thankfully, nuts don't wilt or shrivel up like some botanical models, they just waited patiently stuck to a piece of foam core board until they got their call-back:

I was originally going to do at least one more row of nuts, but the square format of these three seemed finished to me. This was such fun—almost monochromatic, it was a great practice in seeing and drawing textures. And I love using toned paper, but it's a pain to scan, as it loses its texture. I'm going to take some camera shots and I'll let you know if it's an improvement.

On another topic, I'm thinking of re-doing my blog banner—all of the images in this one are at least two years old. I like really simple banners, and yet, I want a first-time visitor to quickly get a feel for what I do. Maybe I can come up with a few ideas and get some feedback from all of you! How about you...exactly what do you like a banner to convey?

Pumpkins in December?

Prismacolor colored pencils on Strathmore Bristol, Vellum

It has been far too long since I posted a new drawing, but rest assured that all is well. I've just been working on some "Do-not-open-before-Christmas" holiday projects that couldn't be posted, or surprises would have spoiled. Now that the holiday crush is behind us, I'm re-charged (I'm hoping it's not just a sugar high) and resolved to get back to more regular drawing —and posting!

This pumpkin drawing was commissioned by a lovely woman, the aunt of one of my close friends. My friend had recently given her a framed print of my artichoke cross-section drawing, chosen because her aunt lives in Half Moon Bay, a coastal town north of here (and south of San Francisco). Half Moon Bay, besides being famous for its pumpkins (it hosts a huge Pumpkin Festival each October) is also known for growing artichokes and other vegetables. I'm tickled that she asked for a pumpkin drawing as well as one of Brussels sprouts on their stalk. (The latter has a short season, and since I almost always draw from real "models", I'd better get that one done soon!)

In case you're wondering, I chose to draw this "bird's-eye-view" since it is a companion piece to this one (see original post here):

Here are a couple of work-in-progress shots:

I hope that you are enjoying some relaxing post-holiday time as well. Next up for me...blog visits! (And maybe one last slice of cranberry bread...)

And one last important note: Thank you for all of the supportive comments, emails, and good ol' positive thoughts that you sent my way after my recent post about Parkinson's Disease. Your kind words mean more than you know.