Giraffe sketch

Tonight's sketch is a Giraffe.  We saw these beautiful animals in the Maasai Mara in Kenya.  They were one of the many animals we saw but these are some of the most graceful and serene of the Earth's creatures.

Wagon Wheel repair

More drawing today, the challenge of art is your desire to produce a piece usually is restricted by your ability.  Sometimes the piece comes together effortlessly, other times it is a struggle.  The answer for the struggle is to loop back to your basic skills and work on them.  So I am practicing my drawing skills and this drawing of a wagon wheel repair stand is a practice piece to work on the drawing.  Painting is drawing with a brush so they dovetail together well.

Water Gourd

Happy Saturday, I worked on this after running errands today.  The Native Americans used gourds for Water and seed storage containers.  This makes for a good drawing practice and good shadow studies.  This one was made by the Cahuilla Indians of California.

Thunderbirds - Design

Design is an important consideration which in the visual arts sometimes takes a back seat to the discussion of composition.  Design gets talked about for furniture, architecture, and models of cities, but not everyone thinks about it in art.  Too often the starting artist tries to copy things exactly as nature presents it, but the secret in drawings and paintings is they need to be designed and simplified.  The Native Americans intuitively knew this and I am always amazed and awed by the great design and simplified representations used to convey ideas.  I have copies some of these designs as in the Thunderbirds above because these simple sketches easily and superbly represent their ideas about the mythical birds which carried the Thunder through the heavens.

Anvil

Another quick sketch from tonight.  This is a practice work and how I relax and de-stress from the day's work.  So enjoy and I will continue to post these for you.

Water Pump

A pencil sketch of a water pump is today's posting.  I have done this over the past two nights as part of the nightly recovery from the work day.  This is part of the 10,00 hours of practice necessary to reach mastery of a skill.  Much work is still needed but it is definitely on the way.

American Dipper

This is a colored pencil sketch of an American Dipper.  They are probably one of the weirdest birds in the United States.  They dive into streams and walk on the bottom of the stream and eat insects off the rocks.  I had heard of them long ago, I finally saw them on the Arkansas River in the Royal Gorge area of Colorado.  We probably saw ten or twelve of them resting on the shoreline and the ice.  They are little and immune to the water and the cold.  They have strong claws to grasp the rocks under the water as it rushes by.