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This week's challenge for Illustration Friday is the theme "secure." As I sorted through various possibilities, I tried to think of situations to represent extreme insecurity. Because I'm not crazy about heights, being on a trapeze would be high on my list of insecure situations. So, the moment of a successful "catch" would represent the opposite.

This drawing is from my sketchbook of a few weeks ago. Ripley was resting on her bed with two of her favorite "security" objects:" a stuffed toy and a bone ... just like a little kid with her blankie.
I'm working out of the office most of the day tomorrow, so I'm posting early.

What am I thinking? It's after midnight and i have to go to a meeting first thing in the morning, and I'm sitting here playing with Painter. Oh, well. I thought I'd try something warm and fuzzy, so the concept here is "nightlight." Now I really *must* toddle off to bed. Yawn.

Current Mood: content

I was a little late for Illustration Friday last week, so to make up for it I'll be a little early with this one. There are five different interpretations of the theme "bubble."

Click the image to see more of Bubbles doing her act, and four other illustrations.

Link to other illustrations

Current Mood: happy

Last night we attended a preview performance of Sheridan's "School For Scandal" at the Taper. Our regular theater-going companions had guests in town for Thanksgiving and weren't able to accompany us, so they offered us their tickets which we gave to our daughter and her friend. Although I remember reading Sheridan in college (I think it was The Rivals,) I had never seen one of his comedies of manners performed on stage. It was a marvelous satire, and more than a little difficult to keep track of. The play skewers the habits of the idle rich, whose favorite pastime is destroying the reputations of their fellows by circulating innuendos and malicious gossip. It was apparently written with specific gossips in mind, which must have delighted the audiences who knew who was who. As I often try to do, I drew the characters during the play using my favorite soft pencil on drawing paper. I found out the hard way (making a mess) that it's nearly impossible to add watercolor on top, so I am scanning them and adding color in Photoshop, as I've done here. My intention, as always, is not to get a perfect likeness but to capture the feeling of the character and suggest the costume and their attitude. After all, I do want to follow some of the plot! I'll most likely be putting the rest of the cast drawings on my website when I do the next weekly upload.

Current Mood: alert

(Right click for bigger)
The stormy gray clouds have blown away eastward, and we are left with a brilliant blue sky punctuated by bursts of amber leaves. It looked so bright and warm outside that I went out barefoot, in shorts and T-shirt to draw a few items in my garden. On the porch, the warmth of the sun was deceiving. I realized later that the temperature was really in the low 60s, and probably even a little lower in the shade. This is the dangerous point at which I dare not find something that catches my eye, because I will foolishly stand there and draw because I know that the light will change in the time it takes to run into the house and change. So, I compromised. I did foolishly stand there to drew this fancy pelargonium leaf in soft pencil in my sketchbook but made color notations for coloration later. A botanical note: the plant that most of us grew up calling a "geranium" is really named pelargonium. This particular type is called a zonal because of the zones of color. Oh yeah, about the color. I finished it off indoors in colored pencil, in the comfort of my office/studio and a big cup of coffee. Brrrrrrr.

Current Mood: artistic

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Well, I only heard about "Illustration Friday" today, a day late, as usual. But it sounded like a pretty entertaining activity, so here's my watercolor illustration entry for the theme "cling." I painted it today in my nature journal.
The concept came from the O'Henry story "The Last Leaf." If you didn't read it in English class, you still have time to read it now - it's short. "The Last Leaf" is about friendship, art, superstition, hope, dreams, illustration and above all, love.
Read: The Last Leaf here
Get out your hankies.
P.S. One of the fall leaves I collected a few weeks ago (and which was still rustling around my desktop) volunteered to serve as the model. Thank you, leaf.

Current Mood: thoughtful

After a happy Thanksgiving, for which we were all very thankful, we spent Friday afternoon at the Getty Museum, thinking, foolishly, that everyone would be in the stores grabbing the first holiday bargains of the season. Wrong. They were all at the Getty, taking out of town friends and relatives who only had a day or two before they traipsed back to the ice and snow of wherever they came from. The line of cars was backed up Sepulveda Blvd. for a quarter mile or more, and we despaired of getting in. As it turned out, we were among the last 50 or so cars admitted to the parking lot before it closed and people were required to park two miles away and take a shuttle. Two remarkable things about the Getty. 1) It is a world class museum, with Rembrandts, Cezannes, Durers - exquisite works from ancient to present. You could lose yourself in its collections and return again and again and not see it all. 2) It is completely free. You do pay for parking - a mere $7 a car ... and after that you just walk in and enjoy yourself. Kelly took Aunt Vi through some of the painting exhibits and to the gardens while Glenn and I visited a special exhibit on watercolors and an adjacent gallery of sculpture. The watercolor room contained exquisite works from Durer, Blake, Turner and more, but it was too dark to draw anything more than a display of artists materials and some tools. (More about the watercolor exhibit in a later post.)
In the sculpture gallery, I took a few minutes to quickly sketch a small bronze statue of Zeus, the head of which I scanned.

Current Mood: content

Right-click for larger.
I got all of my Thanksgiving shopping done yesterday to avoid the crowded stores. Today all that remains is some cleaning up, steaming the tablecloth my grandmother and great grandmother embroidered, getting out the tableware and squeezing the avocados occasionally to make sure that they will be ready for tomorrow's guacamole ceremony.

Aunt Vi will be joining us tomorrow as well. Earlier this year we didn't think she'd make it this far, and although her ankles are weak and painful her repaired heart is strong. She has serious osteo-arthritis in her shoulders and ankles. Even though she takes glucosamine and chondroitin it is the result of years of wear and tear as a hairdresser and later as a switchboard operator (the shoulders, I mean.) She has a hard time walking now which disappoints her. She had hoped that with a mended heart she'd be able to get more exercise. Now the mechanical part of life is letting her down. Several doctors have said she is not a good candidate for foot surgery.

Mandu, our 20 year old cat, is faring acceptably well but she periodically slides into a few days of an upset stomach or other GI problem and refuses to eat. We dose her with the medicine Woody the vet concocted and a few days later she's back on her feed and acting like her old self. I tried drawing her this morning but only completed this much of her face before she laid her old head down to nap. We are continuing to give her fluids two days a week, a process that she now tolerates quite well. Woody says our care is keeping her alive and I believe it.

So tomorrow we will serve turkey to all (including Mandu, Miss Foggy and Ripley), along with cranberry sauce and stuffing, sweet potatoes and green bean casserole, giblet gravy and pumpkin pie. And we will rejoice in the gathering together and knock wood that all will be present this time, next year.

Current Mood: reflective

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Every year, about a month before the Rose Parade, Pasadena blocks off Colorado Blvd. so that a ragtag group of revelers can put on their own version ... the Doo Dah Parade. A cadre of bagpipers playing Camptown Races usually leads the pack, followed closely by a huge flock from the Red Hat Society, and it just gets crazier from there. One of my favorite "entries" was a family in a minivan who periodically parked, got out with a map in hand asking the crowd for directions as the "dad" tried to find Disneyland and the kids whined. The "mom" kept yelling at everyone to get back in the car. They'd drive about 50 feet and repeat the performance. Great stuff. I'm for any event that tweaks the blue noses of the establishment, and the DooDah is classic rowdiness. From 1960s prom queens to Tina Turner drag queens, it doesn't get any better than the Doo Dah.

Current Mood: busy

Mike came home for the Friday night high school football game last night. His old team won the league championship and moved on to the first game in the playoffs, which they also won. So we had the pleasure of his company for breakfast this morning. While Mike and Dad discussed photography, f-stops, focal lengths, depth of field and other good stuff, I drew a detail of the cyclamen Glenn brought me as a surprise the other day. Cyclamens are favorites of mine because they survive from year to year, given adequate attention and the right conditions. I have five or six white ones outside on a patio table, but this is the only pink one I have. They will put on seed which you can collect to grow new plants.

Tomorrow is International Sketchcrawl Day, which, for me, isn't really that different from any other day. I usually draw what I see when I meander around the city. But someone has dubbed it that and made it official. Anything that has to do with drawing is ok by me. Check out the details at Sketchcrawl. Ladies and gentlemen, start your pencils.

Current Mood: creative

Until I make the time to take a life drawing class, I don't get to work from human models that hold still. So I've taken to going to museums and drawing from sculptures, or, at times, drawing from a photo of a sculpture. This is a little practice sketch I made today from a statue attributed to DaVinci which is in a Baptistry in Florence. This was done on drawing paper with a soft mechanical pencil. Although I'll always enjoy the feel of a pen, there's something nice about the way graphite glides over the paper. (Right click if you want to see it a little bigger.)

Current Mood: industrious