Artomatic one week left

 Yesterday Keith and I went to see the Sketch-crawlers at Artomatic and visit the unseen galleries of art. We had fun but still didn't see it all. Here are a few highlights of things I enjoyed and photographed to share.

artist asked visitors to take a plastic soldier and photograph it and send him the shots... to add to his creation

Jeff Wilson  oil on copper plates of tornados

Christian Tribastone's display of cool drawings with white highlights

Keith admiring Jacqui Crocetta's work we both liked 

Todd Gardner's self portraits as various clowns were fun

Yelena Rodina has some sweet story book style paintings

The Saturday sketch crawlers of Washington DC Urban sketchers

International Sketch-crawl #34 Washington DC

studies of the various gourd hats

We went to the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery and American Art Galleries for our day of sketching. 14 Artists showed up and met in the great atrium where a lovely crowd was gathered for a veggie event that included the Indigenous Gourd Orchestra from the Richmond Virginia area. They proudly proclaimed that they grew and made all their gourd instruments. We set down to sketch them when they began to play. All the members of the orchestra had hats fashioned from gourds too! What a great bunch of music men they were and they had us all rocking to their tunes.

moving targets: the music was a lot of fun, drawing the music men was too  

Washington DC sketch crawlers showing their sketches to the camera woman 

Then we before we went upstairs to draw in the great Lincoln hall we posed for a group photo or two. The gourd guys came rushing over and wanted to get photos too since they noticed we were making sketches of them during their concert.  I guess they wanted to see what we were drawing before we vanished into the museum.

sketching with pencil for a change

this is where Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural Ball was held in 1865

artists sketching while enjoying the Naguchi seating 

From there the group went upstairs and drew in the great hall. Then to lunch and back for a little more sketching. Where I soon found I was running out of energy to draw and not feeling very good about my results decided it was time to head home on metro before it got dark and cold.

second floor sketch of hall where the "Puritan" bronze statue stands on a marble pedestal  

drawing

Keith reading at the laundry 

ikebana arrangement 

I have been drawing sketches daily for over a year now. I began after my male figure drawing group had been on break for a few weeks last year. We left the Warehouse gallery space and were between venues when I decided I wasn't drawing often enough and I needed to do something to keep my skills sharp. I started drawing little things around the house like NYC artist Danny Gregory recommended to us in his books years ago. First with just sepia-black ink then sometime last year I added watercolors to the daily sketching. I make my own sketchbooks. The size at first was small. I began using little 5.5" by 4.25" books I call "pocket books" because they used to fit in my jeans hip pocket. Initially the drawings only took about 10 to 15 minutes. Sometimes if I chose a complex subject it could take me twice as long but it always seems worth the effort to draw something every day. Drawing this way began just for myself only because I wanted the practice. I feel like drawing is a meditation technique I am lucky to know how to do and not using it daily is a waste. I soon realized that I need affirmation and showing my work always makes me fell better about myself and my work. It also elicits complements and everyone likes those. I am lucky to live with Keith who is a floral designer and a great gardener which means we have flowers around the house and yard nearly all year long. I love flowers and really enjoy the challenge of drawing them. Still life seems to be my most comfortable form of daily sketch for me at this point. I have been thinking that my membership in some of the Urban Sketchers groups is a bit odd. My work tends to be still life not urban life. I don't do much with cityscapes or buildings and I don't hang out in public places very often since I live in what is almost a suburb which doesn't have a Starbucks or a nice cafe with interesting people to draw. I do draw metro riders bumps and jarring lines included free of charge by the erratic drivers of the trains. I sometimes sketch visitors to galleries but people are always moving in the city and it's hard to get good representations of them unless you can get them to sit or stand still. I don't get to ride metro everyday or visit museums and galleries or cafes regularly.  So flowers, fruit, bottles and stuff around the house are still and don't change quickly and make good study subjects for a simple morning meditation with pen and ink or a pencil usually colored with my watercolors.
This year I enlarged my sketchbook to 8.5" by 5.5" and it takes a little longer to draw and paint in a bigger sketch allowing more room to make detail. I even made myself a special project book, a huge book to use out at the Chesapeake bay retreat thinking about how much time I would have there without the computer nor television to distract me. That book is a 10" by 13" and required bigger brushes and more time to finish even simple sketches. Size matters and I got a recommendation from Janis Goodman that I should draw my plants really big, like on the wall big. She didn't know that I live in a shared one bedroom apartment and have no room to create such drawings or paintings and even if I did where would I put them? How would I afford frames to protect them or show them? Big has many draw backs but I gather it also adds importance to the finished product if it is big. I enjoy small things and ever since I left collage I realized I was going to have to work smaller than I did back at Pratt Institute in the 1970's.
Showing work on Facebook and Flickr.com has been a lot of fun and I have received many clicks on the "like" thumb or the "favorite" star from all sorts of friends family and even strangers. I want to share my sketches and I am thinking I ought to do something like my partner Keith is doing. He has decided to show his flower arrangements daily on his own website. www.keithstanley.com  for an entire year. I am wondering if I shouldn't do the same here on my orange blog. Daily sketches of my drawing books posted here  instead of the postings on Facebook where I am always distracted by other interesting posts. On Flickr.com I often get side tracked and many times inspired by looking at my contacts photographs from around the world.
Drawing daily doesn't mean I am going to post every day. I find the routine is kind of hard to keep up while traveling. I can draw but having access to post them and time to edit the photos of them is often impossible when I am out of town. So I am going to allow myself the luxury of posting daily sketches as soon as I can not every single day of the year. I will start with today's sketch of the arrangement Keith did yesterday. It is fun to see the sketch and the photos of the sketch subject side by side. I often find that looking at the finished painting next to the subject in a photo of the two together gives me tips on ways that I could improve the painting and drawing. In today's sketch I see the begonia leaves are much too light a green so I went back later and added more. Your comments are welcome here just like on the other venues where my drawings appear but I want you to know that I have to approve them to avoid spamers from sending ridiculous messages via my comments section.

Metro riders bouncy and moving 

metro riders 

National Gallery of Art waiting for a lecture by David McCullough

July come and gone

I was busy drawing and watering the garden and quilting new small squares in July. I filled every day with creativity beginning first thing in the mornings. One sketch a day, mostly garden drawings with watercolor over my water based ink sketches. They seemed to get better as the mornings progressed. What was really fun about the challenge was posting the pictures on face book every day and hearing lots of positive feedback and seeing the other artists posts too. I also belong to the international group of artists who do sketch crawls and there was one such event on July 23rd when it was 101ºF in DC and no one wanted to be outside to do anything. We decided the best and safest place to draw that Saturday was at Union Station the historic train station of the capitol. It has fantastic air conditioning so we never felt the heat until we were outside and there were lots of different foods to choose from and coffees and bathrooms. Perfect place to hang out for hours doing drawings. Lots of people, architecture, sculpture and shops. I also met a few delightful new artists who came for the first time. I think we all had a famously good time sharing our day drawing and talking and showing our drawings. My best was of a hat stand. I saw a hat I wanted two weeks earlier and did not buy it because I was so sweaty from a long exercise walk on the national mall. That day I didn't want to try it on with a dripping wet head and then decide it wasn't right for my head. It was sold when I returned with the sketch-crawlers but I asked if there would be more. "Maybe next month" was the answer... so I sat and drew the whole stand to focus my memory on the spot and I do plan to return.

4 of the artists who came to international Wash. DC group sketchcrawl #32

first sketch was a sculpture up high over head in the station

Quickly some kids waiting on something with luggage and the "texter" with his mobile

 We took a nice lunch break and shared a big table in the food court. Everyone ate what ever they wanted and then we shared some stories and our sketches. After lunch we went off for some more drawing hour and a half upstairs in the train station.

the amazing hat stand! 

 On my way home I kept sketching and got this tall woman tucked up in a metro seat by the window waiting for the train to pull out on our way north. Tourists from Indiana spoke up loudly next to me to point out to me that I was drawing and offered the news that they were the children of a professional artist in her 80s!

The girl with Express bag on Metro Red line train.

I worked on lots of sketches in our flower garden. A few were done in Manassas while I was out visiting my mother on her birthday and a couple towards the end of the month were of other subjects just to add some last minute variety. I was running out of pretty flowers to work from by the end of July the hottest July on record for DC. 

one of my favorites! Orange of course...

done in a rush before the Saturday all day sketch crawl 

Dan Vera gave me that great turquoise as a sample when I visited to share my sketches with him the day before! 

This daylily has an orange-yellow that has outfoxed me for a couple years in photos and watercolor. I think I finally have it right but the photo doesn't do it justice. 

Manassas has some nice day lilies in pots 

Mom's birthday roses were begging to be in the sketch book

Still life in mother's kitchen ready made. 

August I continue to draw each morning. I am still posting on facebook and my flickr.com if You want to follow along on the daily journey. Keith has begun a year long flower arrangement challenge on his website. He is making an ikebana arrangement each day and photographing it to show on his website. Keith Stanley dot com Amazing stuff he is doing! I am so excited to see him get busy and make his creations without so much stress and worry about getting it all perfect, it is anyway quite perfect but the point is he is sharing his work liberally this  year!