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.

I'm Getting Attached to My Monk

     At my art group ArtsEtc, we've decided to start each monthly meeting with a quick sketching exercise from a book called "Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists: 52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun (Lab Series" by Carla Sonheim Amazon.com even though we are basically fiber artists. We only spend about 15 minutes doing it to get our creative juices going. Our sketching leader chooses the exercise and this last time the instruction was to quickly draw 30 cats. I knew I wouldn't have time for details, so I only drew the outline of the cat over and over; no eyes or whiskers or other details. I only had time to get 22 of them on my paper before time was called.
     Then the homework was to choose our favorite drawing we made and to put it on a 5 x 7 cardstock and develop it into a composition and bring it to the next meeting. Here's mine.

Guardian

I used a combination of watercolors, acrylics, Shiva paintstiks (I love those), and a black Sharpie fine point marker.

     The other homework was to bring a photo of a giraffe. Intriguing. In the meantime, I'm monoprinting and texture rubbing fabrics for a couple of quilts I'm preparing.