nanke's stuff

Last Thursday my friend Vicki and I went to a life drawing group of the  Jackson Civic Art Association.  I hadn't done any life drawing for years, and was a tad nervous about doing it, especially with a group of people I'd never met before.  They couldn't have been any nicer!  Both Vicki and I were welcomed by a small group of very friendly women (later a man named Gordon joined us), and I felt comfortable being with them right away.  The model was a beautiful young woman named Iris, a daughter of one of the artists.  Iris was an experienced model, and she was a joy to draw.  This group uses clothed models, and they pose for 20 minutes at a time - no short warm up poses to start with.  So, my first drawing was my warm-up.

I decided to focus on doing portraits.  Iris has the most beautiful face and hair, and it was a real pleasure to draw her.   I only took charcoal pencils with me,  and I think next time I'll take along some graphite pencils, too.   I did get interrupted by a phone call that I had to take (I had my phone on "vibrate only", in case you're clucking at my rudeness), so I tiptoed out to the hall to take the call, then tiptoed back in when I was finished.  Because of the call, I only spent 10 or 12 minutes on one of the poses, and it shows.  I'm thinking I might play around with at least one of them a bit more, now that I've shown them to you "in the raw",  just to see how far I can take it.  If I do, I'll post it  so you can see if there's any improvement.  I'm not entirely pleased with them, but maybe playing  a bit will make a difference.

I hope you have a super week .... that's what I'm planning on doing!



 

I wanted to draw, but as often happens, not much was appealing to me to do.   Personally, I think it's my inner critic in a snit, but today I ignored her.  So, after wandering around for awhile actually talking right out loud to myself (to the confusion of the dog who  thinks that all conversations are to and about her).  Fortunately my sweetie wasn't here.

I decided to start small, so I got out one of my sketch books, divided a page into sections with a Micron pen (.005, my favorite) and chose one of my necklaces to sketch.  It didn't take long before I was immersed in what I was doing, so when I finished the first one, I chose another one.  After all the sections were filled on the page with different necklaces, I decided to forge ahead by adding color.  When all the color was added I, rather compulsively, proceeded to fool around with a border.  I'm not sure it adds anything to the thing as a whole, but I had a good time doing it.  And, I just might start adding color to it when I'm finished with this post .....

We've been having a lot of problems with our internet connection, and finally got a whole new system.  I think this one will work better than the last one (meaning faster).  We live in an area where our choices are dial-up (we've had that and it's slow enough to make you crazy), satellite, or wireless.  There's actually another choice which we've tried,  it's like another cell phone or something.  Can you tell I'm not very skilled or informed about these things?  We just switched to wireless which we began yesterday, and after having a wee problem with it, I think maybe now it's working ..... I really, really, hope so.

Anyhow, I've finished the Man.  Well, that is, I've done as much on him as I'm going to do this go around.  I'll probably tackle him again, but it may be years .... no really, before this dance with him, it had been many years since we connected.  As you can see, his hat and clothing weren't the focus of this drawing.  I find his face both compelling and challenging to draw, and as interesting as I find him, I also lose patience with him after awhile.  He really doesn't say much, though I talk to him constantly when we're together.  So, without further ado, here he is: