Drawing People: 32 portraits of people I've never met in real life.

Lots of people sketching is happening these days. I will write about them one by one - today I share a bunch of faces from an online portrait party that happens every week on zoom: Pencils4Tea - hosted by a wonderful artist Kirsty Lockhart - it is happening on Thursdays 6-7pm UK time and is a free and a very friendly place where each portrait is timed by a song. One of the things I realized when I looked back at 2024 was that my "listening life" was a bit dormant so I am trying to remedy that this year since Pencils4Tea has a Spotify playlist it became a good source of inspiration! Kristi also started a pencils4tea substack - check it out! 

A Beautiful Bouquet - a series of experiments.

I recently got a beautiful bouquet to enjoy and sketch - looking at the same subject many times, in the course of several days is something I highly recommend to anyone - especially to someone who sketches. It was glorious when permeated by the morning sun and illuminated in the evening rays. And it inspired some experiments!

Flanders Poppies!

The "house with red poppies" is on my sketching calendar - and my friend alerts me when the time for poppies is upon us (Thank you, Jennifer!) Every year I try to make it out to this place to paint at least once and I also try to bring others to enjoy it. And every year it is a surprise - how red these flowers are, how many there and how hard it is to choose what to sketch there :) There is a house on a hill and that hill feels like a wave - and it is covered with the reddest poppies you've ever seen! I brought a whole arsenal of tools with me to this painting outing and ended up with a minimum set of colors.

Sketching on a Campus of San José State University

Two views from the same bench on the campus of San José State University. 

Stencils, printmaking tools, ballpoint pen and actyling markers. Click on the image to see a larger version and some finger smudges (somehow drawing with markers always ends up being a finger painting ordeal for me!).

House with Tulips

This was one of those outings that was planned, then did not happen on time, and then happened unexpectedly on a different day. And it was such a good part of my week that I loved these two sketches for that only. However, I struggled a lot with the shapes of the house and lack of focus on the page. I was overwhelmed by the abundance of shapes and colors, and let go of all the thinking and only moved paint on the page until it was time to run to the next thing in my day. Gouache is a perfect medium for this way of working I think - there is much layering on this page with paint, pencils, crayons - and it allowed me to create all the iterations. Click on the image to see it larger.