May 10: Nature Month: Jack in the Pulpit

Jack in the Pulpit: colored pencil on textured paper

 I love these colors.  I was so excited about the shape and pattern of this plant I decided to create a radial design instead of just drawing one flower.

Nature Month: May 6,7,8 and 9

Beard Nest: black and white pencil on gray

 The prompts for these four drawings were: nest, oak tree, bird of paradise and elm tree.

The nest in the beard was done with black and white pencil on gray paper, inpsired by the book, The Bird in Santa's Beard.

 Live oak drawn with white pencil on black paper.

Bird of Paradise: colored pencil/gray paper

Camperdown Elm: brown pencil/tan paper

It's hard to capture the true colors of a Bird of Paradise. Their colors actually seem to glow.














The Camperdown Elm is an actual tree that grows in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. I kept thinking of Steven Speilburg's characters when I was drawing all the variations in the trunk.

Cinco De Mayo: May 5th

Happy Cinco De Mayo!
Fiesta Chihuahua dances to celebrate.

Nature Month: May 2-4: Lily, Birch Trees, Rose

Nature isn't second nature to me HOWEVER,
every mountain climbed yields a new reward in the learning process. So I carry on, pencils in hand. It may prove to be a long month unless I figure out a way to add more humor to my work. This is very ho-hum for me.

May 1: Happy Anniversary Doodle Day!

Happy 1st Anniversary Doodle Day

I am very fortunate to have discovered the facebook group, Doodle Day. I've been drawing with this group since November 2013...mainly using the prompts listed in the files at the top of the page.

I've drawn things I love and feel comfortable drawing and ALSO things I am terrible at and I've improved. See January 2014: interior and exteriors, perspective, ugh.

So, I'd like to personally congratulate the founder Alison K. Hertz on her page's one year anniversary and thank her for helping me become a better artist and hopefully one day, a published illustrator.

This drawing is my thank you for you, Alison!

Follow Allison on her blog:
http://www.alisonhertz.blogspot.com

April 28,29,30: Last Character of the Month: Hannah, the Hippo Ballerina

Hannah was nervous, all the other 

ballerinas were much smaller.

Hannah surrendered to the music. Her love of dance overcame her anxiety.

With grace and passion, she earned the part.

Three days left in April, one more character to work on. I've chosen Hannah, the Hippo, an aspiring ballerina with an over-sized figure. I'm trying to eliminate the "black" line in my next few months work. Even though I love black lines, I've heard not all Art Directors do. I added 'titles' with each drawing to give more insight into what I was trying to convey.

April 21-27: Vampire Bat-Boy Character Study

Composite: Vampire Bat-boy

Another week of Doodle Day (a facebook group) doodles.  We're still working on characters. I chose a four year old boy with a baby sister. He combines a pair of fake vampire teeth and his bat-cape and becomes "VAMPIRE BAT-BOY".  Here is from top to bottom: Brian dons his vampire teeth and bat cape to become Vampire Bat-boy, Vampire Bat-boy hides, Vampire Bat-boy roars, Vampire Bat-boy leaps over tall buildings, Vampire Bat-boy frightens an evil invader, Vampire Bat-boy is sorry he scared his baby sister. Would love to do a whole book of this character....humm, now that's a good idea.

As I was drawing my character, I was reminded of the great Maurice Sendak's Max, so full of mischief and imagination.