Dancing Gnome

My son is going to play Liszt's "Gnomenreigen" at a piano competition this weekend. To get him into the feel of little gnomes dancing, my wife asked me if I could make a quick sketch of one to give him the idea. He liked it!

My Next Painting (in progress)

Got a Red Riding Hood theme going on here, but I'm enjoying it.

Just like the last painting, this one will be in full color. But to start, I wanted to unify it by painting in all the shadow color as an underpainting. And I liked it so much, I decided to take a picture of it.

If I hadn't done the first one in full color I'd have been tempted to just leave this as is. So glad it wasn't the first one!

My First Painting of This Year

Not too long ago I finally got to see the movie Frida. Aside from being a really good movie, it also reminded me that I actually like to paint. Digital's fun and all, but it's nice to get all up in there with actual paint. I liked painting in the sketchbook too - I'll move to canvas sooner or later, but it was good to just paint something for the fun of it. The paper even held up well too, surprisingly.

Fishing

I based this drawing on a sketch I did while camping (same camping trip that I came up with the Hobbit Day idea. Did a lot of sketching that weekend!).

One evening we went down to the lake to go fishing, me with sketchbook in tow as well as tackle. At first, my daughter tried fishing. Then, she tried skipping rocks. THEN, she decided it was more fun to just take big rocks and hurl them into the water.

Surprisingly, we caught no fish that night.

Prepping for Art Class

I'm teaching an art class starting this Sunday at the Chinese School. And when I was coming up with a subject for the first class, I remembered my first class from art school. We had to draw our initials, in a way that would represent us. It was a way for the professor both to see what we could do, and also learn a little about the students. So I wanted to do it in my class as well!

To kick things up a bit, I'm also having them make this the cover of a sketchbook that they can use. And, so they could see what could be done, and how it would look at the end, I made one myself to show them:

Anyone who reads this blog won't be surprised at the fairy tale reference for the S! And since we just went camping, I wanted to try something different for the V.

It was fun putting it together - never tried stitching a sketchbook together before, and it came together well. I also asked my kids to try the same assignment. They're working on it now - coming up with some interesting work! I'll show it tomorrow as more examples, to help generate ideas.

New Sketchbook 3: the other daughter's request

My oldest daughter wanted me to draw a picture of her. I like doing that – she's old enough to sit still, and I get practice doing faces.

With this one, it looks like her – three years ago. I guess parents really do think of their children as little, even when they're still little. Either that, or my ability to shave years off a subject when drawing them means I will have an incredibly lucrative portrait business.

New Sketchbook 2: a son's request

The kids have pillow pets – if you don't have kids, you may not have heard of them. If you do, you've probably heard (like us) the theme song sung repeatedly: "It's a pillow! It's a pet! It's a PILLOW PET!" All three kids have one.

Gavin's is a bee, so he asked me to draw a picture of him as a bee. But then he said to add a beehive. Then honey pots. The guy knows what he wants in a drawing.

I offered to color it for him, but he said he wanted it as a coloring page. So I decided to not only oblige him, but see if I could make a downloadable coloring page for the site. Here it is, and maybe this will be the first in a series of coloring pages – especially if they keep giving me requests!

One other thing – after I drew it, I remembered from a while back that Bee Movie had the main character in a turtleneck. Just to make sure, I looked it up – he does wear one, but they look quite different. I thought about changing it anyway, except that we live in New England. I haven't seen Gavin without a turtleneck in months, so it was only natural to draw him that way.

A New Sketchbook, and a Daughter's Request

Been off this blog for a while (although I've been keeping up with the lunch notes). The main reason is that I've been working on something, potentially for a publisher, so I can't post anything yet for copyright reasons – not a bad thing. But, in the meantime, I finally broke in the new sketchbook that Santa dropped off in my stocking this year. While I was sketching, my three-year-old asked me to do a drawing of a ghost. After I did that, she asked for a scared dog. How can you say no to a three-year-old? Well, in a case that doesn't involve running with scissors or playing with Mr. Wall Socket, that is.

After, she asked me to draw the "dog rectangles." It took me a while to figure out what she meant, but I eventually realized she was talking about the thick dashed motion lines from the Frog Prince book I did for her. So the second one is the dog running away, rectangle style.