A plethora of sketches

The Goose Family

Let me introduce some local friends. This was at Lake Elizabeth last year, I'd forgotten it, as I was digging around for fresh sketchbook to carry around with me I found this in a partly used one.

This a a dry river/stream bed near here. There are a lot of these right now, we are way behind on our rain. Fortunately, the rain that has missed us has floated on over and fallen as snow in the Sierra, so it will go into the watershed.

From a Lee Brown photo, w/permission

If you haven't checked out A Day Not Wasted, by all means do. The photos are wonderful, especially for painters. This is a photographer with a painter's eye! I received permission to give three recent pictures a try. My proportions are all out of whack on this sketch, but it's the first one (excuses, excuses) but I hope to do a watercolor of this. The foreground boat is a lovely turqoise against deep green pines of the Northwest forests. I'm still finding my way around this picture. The other two are seascapes, one of which I have begun in acrylic.

Les chats des Paris

This one is thanks to "Paris Through My Lens" a wonderful blog. This photographer lives in the American south but loves Paris and visits it often and takes the most atmospheric photos I've seen of it. This one is in Les Jardins du Luxembourg. Thank you Virginia for allowing me to work on this one! A tree in the foreground has been removed, artistic license. This was a test, it shows me that it will be necessary to mask the trees and wash the background in dark, then make the kitty a lot brighter tortoise shell so he/she becomes the focal point of the painting.

Two for one

Two separate sketches scanned together, lazy me. It is just sooo much more fun to draw an experienced face! Could you ever get a comparable expression on anyone under 40? No! It takes years of experience to really polish the art of expressing oneself. I got the idea from Carol Marine, on her blog she did a series of wacky faces.
The hand is a bonus, an empty page, and I have the model with me wherever I go.