sketches

This sketch is the one hundred and eighteenth in a 365-day challenge to draw a picture a day, every day, for a year…

Day one hundred and eighteen: This study is the second in a two-day series about the useful qualities of the natural world. When I cut matte board, I match the pencil line I’m about to cut with to a shadow created by the track the razor follows. The shadow is the perfect guide to slice away the line. I like the way the black of the matte cutter ended up looking like a starry night sky.

This sketch is the one hundred and sixteenth in a 365-day challenge to draw a picture a day, every day, for a year…

Day one hundred and sixteen: Travel kept me from finding adequate time to do much more than get this sketch “done.” It’s a spontaneous exploration of randomness and repetition. I started by freely doodling a some random lines in pale yellow, which I then very quick traced with a series of six more colors. I repeated with process with the same colors, this time backwards in order: green, lavender, violet, red, orange, tan, yellow. I marked the white spaces that emerged with shapes and lines in black. What you see here is the result.

This sketch is the one hundred and fourteenth in a 365-day challenge to draw a picture a day, every day, for a year…

Day one hundred and fourteen: Easter weekend has been very wet in Dayton, with overcast skies and long showers prevailing over sunshine. Unlike the Twin Cities, however, Spring has certainly sprung, and colorful buds can been seen throughout yards and parks. Soon, we’ll see the same up north. Today’s sketch is just a simple little preview of the flowering feast to come…

This sketch is the one hundred and twelfth in a 365-day challenge to draw a picture a day, every day, for a year…

Day one hundred and twelve: Browsing through photos this evening, I came across one I took in Venice last November of a palazzo at night. When I saw the building in dim light with a faint reflection in the still canal I immediately remembered James McNeill Whistler’s etching of a similar subject. It was clear to me that Whistler’s print was an attempt to capture the mysterious aesthetic of Venice at night, when buildings seem to float like ghosts, hovering between the deep, endless blacks of the water and the sky.

This sketch is the one hundred and tenth in a 365-day challenge to draw a picture a day, every day, for a year…

Day one hundred and ten: All day I’ve had an image in my mind: the form of a runner, fragmented and repeating as if caught by stop-motion photography. My quick sketch of the idea led to a series of layers to which I spontaneously added and removed pigment. On a whim, I changed the base layer from light gray to ochre. I loved the effect, and it reminded me how chiaroscuro woodcuts use colors beneath lines. Experimenting, I tried changing the base color to see what would happen. One example using magenta is below.