Drawing 101

Had my first class today for Drawing 101 at the community college. I think I'm really going to like it.

The teacher talks/sounds just like Mo Rocca. I had the theme song from "I love the 90's" in my head all through class. It was hard not to giggle.

One thing he talked about that was interesting was "the zone." You know that place you go to when you are really really engrossed in a drawing (or painting, etc) and time disappears and your mind completely relaxes? I love that. That for me is better than any therapy could ever be.

Illustration Friday - Balance

This was done with pen and colored pencil.

I learned a few things doing this illustration.
1. If you give me a photograph, I can draw it fairly well. Trying to draw something that comes out of my head is very difficult for me. So these exercises are a real challenge for me but it's forcing me to practice something that I have avoided for a long time.

2. I can't draw hands at all!!! What are those things? Talons? Sheesh!

New pens!

I grabbed my rapidoliner pen after not using it for months and discovered to my dismay that it was leaking like crazy. So I happened to pop into a small art supply store and with the intention of purchasing another. This store did not have any rapidoliners but did have a set of 4 Faber Castell PITT artist pens. I haven't had a chance to play with them yet but they seem pretty good.
The real test of how much I like them will be how opaque they are. I've been using technical pens since I was in high school and just fell in love with their precision and how opaque the black was.

I am actually doing laundry at 7:30am. I abhor laundry and tend to put it off until I am forced to tackle the huge pile. As tempting as it is to hole up in the house all day in my jammies, I do need to run some errands therefore I must wash some clothes or I will have to run my errands in my jammies.

One of the highlights of my holiday break was reading the book that was written by my grandmothers cousin about the history of our family. It isn't published but it should be. So much stuff that I didn't know! She actually starts in the 1860's with my great-great grandfather in Southern Italy. She emigrated to the US when she was 18 months old. It's a great read if only for the look at life of Italian immigrants in the early 1910's and 20's. It is almost 500 handwritten pages that I devoured over 2 days.
I did some work on my family tree about 5-6 years ago but I haven't done anything more since then. This book has really energized me about working on the family tree again. Though, like a lot of people who are descended from immigrants, you can only go so far before you have to start trying to get records from the old country. Since I don't speak or read italian, it seems to be a difficult task. Certainly not impossible though.

Illustration Friday-Magic

My very late submission for Illustration Friday. The theme was "Magic." The first thing that popped in my mind was the "fairy godmother" who swoops in and makes everything better. Since I don't have a scanner, I created this completely digitally using procreate painter (the poor man's version of Painter) since my demo of Painter has expired.




I just discovered the site yesterday. What a fun idea!