Spotted Balance

     My art group, ArtsEtc, started off with its usual sketching exercise last month from Carla Sonheim's book that I referred to in this post Sketching. The directions this time were to bring a photo of a giraffe. Using your dominant hand, touch your index finger to the outline of the giraffe photo and slowly follow the outline. As you do this, with your non-dominant hand, using a permanent, fine-tip marker on cardstock (without looking at the cardstock), make the mark on your cardstock that your index finger is following on the photo. I think we were given two minutes. Needless to say, we got quite wonky sketches of giraffes. But they had wonderful expressions and character. I think this is a great technique to use to get whimsical drawings. Then our homework was to make a composition of our giraffe sketch. I decided to keep in the spirit of my theme of my body of work when developing my composition so I modified my sketch while doing my homework.
Here's the photo I used. It's one my husband took when we were on a trip in Etosha National Park in Namibia in the south west part of Africa.

Giraffe in Etosha; Photo by Michael J. Dunn

Here's my quick sketch with my left hand without looking:

Wonky Giraffe

I liked his face. I thought he had a surprised look.
In my composition, I rearranged his legs and here he is in a similar setting as the cat and monk in the last such sketching exercise. If you want to see the cat and monk one for comparison, you can go HERE.

Spotted Balance

I'm having a lot of fun with these sketching episodes! Although I'm not planning to put them to fiber, They are helping me develop ideas and improve my compositional skills.