There Will Be (cadmium red) Blood TONIGHT!

fun with new pens

There is a battle going on nightly in my house.  It is waged with pen, pencil & paper.  It is waged between the Pinterest-pinning, doodle-loving, letter-making whimsicalist (yes I totally just created a word) and the Leonardo-admiring, charcoal-wielding, traditional-technique-practicing realist.  The whimsicalist doodles on the realist with her new color pens.  Meanwhile, the annoyed realist can't find the good pencil sharpener and the drawing exercises never turn out perfectly anyway.  Sigh.

When imagining this journey, I saw myself sitting down daily to work through drawing exercises and sketching life around me.  Enter the world of art journals.  There is a whole genre of art out there I wasn't really aware of.  People who create fun pages of words and doodles and patterns and textures and color  - with some or no realistic drawing incorporated.  It feels more crafty to me, but it is tempting.  I try to mix it up - do a little of both.  Whimsy is winning lately.  I want to believe it's my inner illustrator at work.  I've created motivational sketchbook (art journal) pages trying to convince myself it's okay to veer off a bit.  So far I'm not falling for it.  Sometimes I think, "Hey, that turned out kinda' cool."  However, usually I think, "Okay, that was fun, but tomorrow I need to do some 'real' art."

Hence the dilemma.  Is this helpful, useful, or does it matter?  Does any kind of practice advance my skills?  Or is it just lazy and another form of procrastin(art)ing?  Someday there may be answers.  The journey continues and I'm wondering how many diverging roads there will be in these yellow ochre woods.  Onward ho... or ... to the battlefield!  There will be blood tonight! (best movie ever!)

Art practice for the realist.  Blind contour giraffes - a lesson from the Drawing Lab book.  I must admit - I used to hate this technique, but it's growing on me.

Dream a Little (art) Dream

blind contour

pen sketch

Yesterday?  Blind contours - Bleh.  A good exercise for eye/hand coordination, but my perfectionist hates the results.  As soon as I finished them, I HAD to sketch the same subject.  See - it's not all happy pretty art in the ole sketchbook.

Five days in & this little venture has now invaded my dreams.  It's part of the journey & variety is a good thing, so . . . The Dream . . .

First day of classes, first semester as an art major (the 2012 me).  Loving my classes - some art, some not.  I enter a large crowded room thinking it's Modern Printmaking.  Exciting!  I'm not really listening to the reading of the syllabus (who does, right?) and instead chat with an old friend while removing everything from my bag searching for a drawing pencil.  I realize we've been split into two groups and I can't hear a thing the tall skinny eastern European instructor says.  He soon moves to our side & stands by an old projector, but I still can't understand him and can't see all that well because of my stupid contacts.  (I'm sure this came from my discovery last night - in reality - that I can see much better while drawing close if I take out my contacts.)

Back to the dream.  Everyone is writing on Etch-a-Sketches or tiny little digital pads with a stylus you have to put together.  I am completely confused.  A fellow student furiously pokes the buttons on her pad, answering questions for some test.  I have NO IDEA how anyone knows what the questions are.  Only then do I realize the name of the class is Qualitative Analysis. (Does that really exist?)  Oh yeah - the math class I had to take to complete my gen eds.  I hear - "It's actually easy & fun if you know a little bit of QA." . . . right.  Magically-appearing paper tests are handed in - except by me.  I leave - going directly to the Art Department to drop QA and get into Modern Printmaking, but the office is dark and I don't remember my advisor's name.

Then the cat woke me up, so we'll never know if I'm in Modern Printmaking or still sitting in QA wishing I had an Etch-a-Sketch.