Yesterday night we walked along the shoreline and looked all around with flashlights. Besides illuminating the shells, clams, and crabs, the light made dramatic shadows from the people and the sand mounds. I loved the extreme lighting, and took lots of photos, one of which I used as a beginning for this sketch.
We are at Topsail Beach, North Carolina, for my husband’s family reunion. This beautiful part of the country, with its gorgeous beach, warm water, and steady breeze, makes an excellent setting for a week-long get-together.
And it is a fabulous setting for sketching; it seems that everywhere I look, I see a potential sketch. My favorite scene today was a journal writer perched on the boardwalk leading across the dune, her skirt moving with the wind. I liked her air of focus amid all the beach action.
The San Diego Thursday Painters met on Vacation Island in Mission Bay. It was an overcast morning, almost cool, with many people out enjoying the water. The clouds blocked the sun and gave a gentle evenness to the surroundings.
This is another sketch based on photos I took of my sister’s grandchildren. Getting beyond the single unmoving moment of a photograph is a challenge. I think I did better putting a sense of motion into this one.
One of my goals is to learn to paint using photo reference, so when I visited my sister, I went nuts snapping photos of her adorable grandkids. I liked this one because the two figures were in identical positions, and the two facial expressions were similar as well. I think these similarities made it easier to show their shared delight in reading a picture book together.
I love Tuesday evenings because I get to paint with the Tuesday still-life group. It means turning on the computer and seeing a composition you might never have painted, except that a fellow painter thought it would make a terrific painting and set it up for the group. For example, tonight we painted a sewing table, pin cushion, scissors, and bolts of material. The sewing table was not my usual sort of subject, but, as it turned out, a fun choice to practice the artistic skills of simplifying, abstracting, and adjusting. It is good to be back home and painting with this group.
This sketch is painted from nearly the same spot along the San Miguel River near Telluride, as was yesterday’s post. I painted it about two hours earlier than ‘Canyon Shade,’ and the lighting was so different. In this one, the sun was just above the mountains and shining more down than back, giving a soft, muted light to the far canyon walls
Deliberate Sketching 