Our dogs seem to sleep 90% of the time, and are a natural subject for a quick sketch. Daisy (here) is perfect for a 20 minute sketch, she stays nearly as still as any piece of fruit or still life I might set up. Too bad I can't draw her snoring! Pen on ecru paper, 5" x 7".
I do think about when the dogs are no longer with us, and I hope quick sketches like this capture the essence of what it is like to have them around. They have a good life, lazy bums that they are.
Time for something abstract after the super-realism of yesterday's sketch. I'm going to call it "Fly Like a Cheesestick." Pen, watercolor, and water soluble pencils, 5 1/2" x 8". Yes, I just scribbled here and then colored it in. Sounds easy, but it's very methodical, and did take a full 20 minutes.
I was sort of inspired by an art assignment in college where the teacher had us scribble on a piece of paper for a minute. After the minute was up, we had to pick a very small (maybe 1") section of the scribble, and we enlarged that section on a projector to fill a 24" x 36" sheet of illustration board. Then we had to select a short snippet of music, and color in our scribble with colored pencil, oil pastel or crayon to fit with that piece of music. It turned out great, of course... everyone's was completely different, and the final critique where we could hear the music and see their art together was just a blast. I should definitely try the whole process again. It may sound wacky, but sometimes wackiness makes good or great art.
After sketching my embroidery floss a few weeks back, I thought it would be fitting to sketch some metallic blending filament as a companion piece. Ooh, shiny! Pen and colored pencil, 5 1/2" x 8". What a difference "being in the mood to draw" makes, sometimes - here the 20 min. just flew by. I do feel I can anticipate the scope of a sketch in that timeframe better now than I could in the first month.
Why not... a 20 minute sketch about sketching and a few other things I love. In pen (the bleed-through paint splotches don't count). I do love doing this project - some days I am feeling more "inspired" than others, but isn't that true for everyone? I am pleased that sketches, paintings, and random doodling are filling up my notebooks now. I do love doughnuts too, they would be a real weakness of mine if I ate them often, which I don't, fortunately.
This was a lovely bunch of grapes, just asking to be painted in 20 minutes. Watercolor and water soluble pencil and crayon, 5 1/2" x 8". My paper dried too fast tonight so I wasn't able to get the water soluble crayons to actually be soluble to their best advantage. It still looks nice and vibrant anyway - I really enjoy using those for quick studies. It was pretty hard to render these grapes so fast, I definitely could have used at least another 10 minutes to get more definition, but there's always next time.
Here's a lovely little fraktur-style tulip in honor of the first day of Spring. Pen, watercolor and water soluble pencil, 4" x 6". 20 minutes just hasn't been enough time for past designs like this, but I was determined to do one to what I consider finished in 20 minutes. I made it slightly smaller than the others and used the pencils for more color saturation. It might even make a nice little needlework design, in any color scheme (though I do tend to prefer the traditional colors of yellow, red, green, black and blue myself).
