Recently Sketchbookish

This morning's subject colored using a warm palette.

The vertical stalks on the left just didnt' add much of anything to the design, so I decided to focus on the ivy and the tree.

I started with a gray Prismacolor® marker. This helped me to work out the composition and simplify things. My work is returning to the asymmetrical designs from the traditional Chinese pantings I fell in love with in my Asian art history class at CCSF taken as an undergrad. Sometimes, I regret not stopping at this stage.

Here is the underdrawing next to the actual subject. I used a Derwent water-soluble graphite pencil and then pushed around the medium with a wet brush. The paper seems to initially resist the water in ways that can lead to some nice accidental textures. After taking on so many of these, I'm finally starting to edit down to exactly what I want to explore.

Fists for breasts. I need to draw hands a lot more but I tend to draw plants, flowers and women in my free time. Maybe more sketches like these will motivate me to draw more beautiful hands.

Last but not least, today I'm sending out a "hearty" "Happy Birthday" to the gorgeous Dulce Lola. I don't even remember how exactly we connected through Facebook, but this woman is one of my favorite folks to follow. Her posts usually involve art modelling and body painting at popular SoCal venues, her art, fast cars, scary clowns and other wonderfully dark and beautiful things. Dulce reminds me of how lucky we are to have beautiful people pose for us and fuel our imaginations and fantasies.