Goals for 2008 - Month by Month

When I set goals, I want to achieve them. When I miss my goals, I get grumpy, and nobody likes a grump. To help me achieve them, I try to define them in time. So, here's a look at my 2008, art-wise, month by month. (And of course, I reserve the right to change plans! :D) If you can't get through the whole list - you'll see more art history, research into technique, and book reviews this year!

The image in this post is a CP work - based on a "start" on the Nintendo Digital Sketchbook :D.

January

• Composition research (book reviews, info gathering)
  
• Anatomy of the head (daily sketching, sketching from memory)
  
• Mendelowitz drawing exercises
• 3 starts
• 1 planned, executed, finished piece
• update website
  

February

• Composition research (book reviews, info gathering, piece based on research)
• Rib Cage Anatomy (daily sketching, sketching from memory)
• Mendelowitz drawing exercises
• 3 starts
• 1 polished piece
• update website

March

• ukiyo-e research (book on Japanese prints, internet research, contemporary practitioners)
• Arm Anatomy (daily, from memory)
• Mendelowitz exercises
• 4 starts
• 1 polished piece
• update website

April

• ukiyo-e research (more research, research in action - project)
• Hand Anatomy
• book from reading list
• 3 starts
• 1 polished piece
• update website

May

• Color research
  
• Pelvis Anatomy
• book from reading list
• 4 starts
• 2 polished pieces
• update website

June

• Color research
• Leg Anatomy
• book from reading list
• 4 starts
• 2 polished pieces
• enter one art competition by end of June
• update website

July

• Degas research
• Foot Anatomy
• 4 starts
• 2 polished pieces
• update website

August

• Degas research
• Perspective study
• 4 starts
• 2 polished pieces
• update website

September

• Research on a master
• Perspective study (2nd month)
  
• 4 starts
• 2 polished pieces
• update website

October

• Research on a master (2nd month)
• Focus on interiors
• 4 starts
• 2 polished pieces
• update website

November

• Research on a master
• Focus on exteriors
• 4 starts
• 1 polished piece
• update website

December

• Research on a master
• Focus on landscapes
• 4 starts
• update website

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to everyone!

Thank you all for indulging me in my look back at 2007 this week. It has encouraged me to press on in the new year.

One final project I began in 2007, my website. This week I added a page of all my art history research links, it's in the sidebar. See you all in a few days!

Looking Back on 2007 #2

Yesterday I posted about some progress I hope I've made in 2007. Today I want to look at what I've read and who I've studied.

First, here's a look at how it has gone with colored pencils:

February	November

Artists I've Studied

• January: John Singer Sargent
• February: Vincent van Gogh
• March: John William Waterhouse
• April: Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres
• May: James McNeill Whistler
• June: Georgia O'Keeffe
• July: Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell
  
• August: Gardens in Art
  
• September: Claude Monet
• October: Claude Monet
  

Some of the Books I've Read

• Bet Borgensen, Colored Pencil for the Serious Beginner
• Ann Kullberg, Colored Pencil Portraits
• Gary, Simmons, The Technical Pen
• Robert Beverly Hale, Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters
• Arthur Guptill, Rendering in Pen and Ink

Looking Back on 2007 #1

Sorry for the drought in blogging...that time of year. It is also the time of year to begin looking back and seeing all that I've accomplished (and not accomplished :-). I'm likely to have a couple of these kind of posts - one on "practice" and one on research. Today we'll tackle growth in practice.

Back in July I did a mid-year review. For this year-end review, I'll try and just demonstrate the growth I've seen.

Portraits
This is my favorite subject area and one that I desperately wanted to grow in. I think in some ways I have improved, and still others that I will tackle in 2008.

January	November

And to think I rather liked the one back in January! It's rather embarrassing now to look at that first one. Incidentally, when I saw this post of Laura Frankstone's last year, it convinced me to form a daily drawing habit.

Color
My goal in color was just to stop making excuses and jump in. I did do that - and I'm still swimming despite a few urges to just get out of the color pool! Tomorrow I'll show you my first scribbles with CPs and one of my latest.

Blog
I've now posted over 200 times! When I began, I wasn't sure if I would continue beyond January, but here we are and I've found a new pasttime. I have been making posting daily Monday through Friday my goal lately, that is likely to continue. That's roughly 70% of the time. I've posted roughly 60%. So, not bad compared with the original goal of making it through January.

Daily Habit
In 2007, I wanted to make sketching a daily habit. My measurable goal for that was to fill a moleskine. Happily, I did fill it along with a few others and have stacks of other work lying around.

Art Business
My goals in this area were along the lines of "look and learn". I've gotten to know several new artists through their blogs and done some reading. I'm most proud of being a part of "Fine Art Friends." This group of ladies have been a support to me through the latter part of this year and I'm looking forward to learning more from them.

Still Playing Around

This is tonight's effort on the DS. Hmm, not thrilled with it. A few interesting problems cropped up, things to ponder over as I crawl into bed:

• that red soil just doesn't look right - the texture isn't there, but I also think that the interaction with the greens is creating a problem.
• I pepped up the color of the distant mountains (thinking about the red issue), that wasn't a successful fix
• there is difficulty here with distance

Thanks to Susan Borgas for yet another reference photo.

For your wish list...

Christmas gift-giving has begun around the Welty house - at least for the adults who buy their own presents. :-) A couple of weeks ago I read about converting a Nintendo DS (one of those annoying portable game systems that teenagers are constantly hanging over) to a digital sketchbook. I read about it on Charley Parker's Lines and Colors blog in this post. So hubby and I decided to get one for each other for Christmas.

It arrived yesterday and I can you tell already, I love it! You know that 50 starts project for 2008? Well, you better believe that several of those are going to be done digitally. I can play with color, learn about values and color interactions, learn to handle something looser than a pencil - and all this in something that fits in my pocket. No mess, no spills, no bulky storage, no canvases to buy, no paint to waste, just all fun. (Another benefit - no photographing to get it in a blog post, just copy a file and there you have it.)

Of course, if you wanted "finished works" for printing and the like you'd have to invest in one those digital drawing tablets (beginning around $1K), but for a play-around, this is excellent.

Above you see a few images that I did on my DS today from WetCanvas references. Thanks to paul444 and kdkbrown for the photos. To see what can be done with this little setup, check the Colors! gallery - you will be amazed at what people can do with something that is no larger than your hand! Oh, and if you have java installed on your machine, be sure to watch the playback on some of the images in the gallery - very interesting. And yes, you can watch your own playbacks right on the DS!

Breadth or Depth in Drawing?

Should you learn to draw lots of things? or learn to draw one thing well?

"The work of most mature artists reveals a pattern of periods of intensive concentration within a narrow framework of special problems alternating with periods of exploration and experimentation. It is not only wise, but essential, for the beginner to travel a similar path, concentrating on areas of particular interest as long as they remain challenging but, when success comes too easily, moving on to something else."

Mendelowitz's Guide to Drawing, p. 16

In the interests of exploring and experimenting with pen, I decided to try a color sketch in ink. I found a pack of Pilot Precise V5 pens on sale. It had black, green, red, blue and purple. If I were to continue in this medium I'd have to upgrade to artist quality inks and a few more colors, but as an exercise this was great fun. Actually, I think the limited palette really worked in my favor - I had to focus on values, because I just didn't have the right colors for the objects. It was like a fun little puzzle to solve - choosing a color based on value and interaction with nearby colors, then choosing a stroke to hint at surface texture and value, and then seeing if I was right. It's not flawless, but I really enjoyed doing it!

Thanks to Scott Liddell for the reference on morguefile.com

Character of the Artist

Does this sound like you?

"...the unique discipline that characterizes the artist - an inner control in which deep satisfaction and dynamic dissatisfactions alternate to stimulate continued growth. Through such discipline the art student discovers and reveals personal abilities, establishing the basis for mature artistic expression."

Mendelowitz's Guide to Drawing, p. 16

I think it rather hits the nail on the head! Forgive me for the second post without an image, I've been working on drawing the skull from different angles from memory - with a little drawing from the tv thrown in. That, I must say, was an interesting exercise, one that I must try again.

Makes a Mother Proud...maybe

So we're sitting at lunch the other day and I offer the boys a clementine (aka a satsuma). My eldest pipes up "oh, those oranges are so yummy." Knowing that I had never given him one before that he liked, I look at him questioningly. He responded, "Oh, I traded Jessie my bag of Ruffles for her orange the other day. It was really good." At first, I was proud, my son trading chips for fruit at the lunch table...good, noble son. Then, I thought, does that make me a good mother or a bad one? ;-)

This is the son who a year or so ago said (and I kid you not), "I'm going to hurry up and eat this pork chop so I can get some broccoli." My husband, who doesn't eat broccoli and never will, turned to me and said, "that's like every mom's dream."

And you know he's going to be hearing that story a lot in the years to come! :-)

Even if it's not realistic...

"Although making accurate descriptive drawings need not be the ultimate goal, learning to see size, shape, and space relationships and developing the discipline and control to translate convincingly what is seen onto a sheet of paper, provide a basic and essential vocabulary for the artist."

Mendelowitz's Guide to Drawing, p. 12

The example given is a line-only sketch of Matisse's, entitled Acrobat. It completely conveys the person, but also conveys more than that.

This describes the elusive thing I have been searching for in drawing. My rendering skills are improving, but they tend to fall "flat". There isn't alot of expression in them, they don't convey that "point of view" that I quoted last time. So, while I hope to improve my rendering skills in the coming year, I also, very much hope to improve the expression that I make in drawing.

One of the exercises in the above book was to draw a chair (I chose a stapler) from many perspectives, using the pencil-at-arm's-length to get angles and sizes. Part of the idea was to see how many different shapes one object can take, depending on your perspective. I struggled against outlining the whole stapler - I tried to follow the values that I saw, instead of relying on a strong outline. I was running out of time (and growing tired of staring at a stapler), but I found that I was at a total loss as to how to convey the different textures on the stapler. In some of the sketches, it looks almost like it's made out of corduroy cloth! I just couldn't settle down enough to spend time refining it to show the curved edges. All in all, one of those thought-provoking exercises.