Tag Archives: colored pencil

Squirrelly

All over the map this last week or two… this must be what squirrels feel like when they’re about to cross the street.  If there has been any theme it has been small fluffy animals – kittens, chicks, and most recently puppies.  I’ll just blame that on my friends and their adorable little critters.  But there have also been landscapes, lettering, botanicals, and urban areas that caught my eye, so here they all are.

A word about small fluffy animals – I’m learning that it only takes a few lines to age them drastically.  The puppy for example – I really struggled to keep him a baby, all soft and round.  The result is a very pastel, low contrast piece, which might make a nice greeting card at some point, but it won’t knock anyone’s socks off.

And a word about the Bungalow style, which is part Art Nouveau, part Craftsman, part coloring book.  I am always really drawn to these styles, maybe that’s because I like to use line so much.  Thick, dark lines with nice solid color fills, bold negative spaces, unabashed contrasts.  I used the American Bungalow magazine from the library as inspiration for these studies – it’s a pleasing publication, partly because of the lovely high quality paper it’s printed on, and partly because of the focus on “human sized” homes, although most of the homes probably have at least three times the square footage of our tiny cottage.

 

Mail Order Chicks

sketch of young chicken

"Mail Order Chick", mixed media by Kerry McFall

Tracy’s maill order chicks arrived about 10 days ago – talk about modern day miracles!  The post office calls her as soon as they’re in town, and there they are in their little shipping box, all cozy and warm and intact.  She does her Chicken Lady magic to be sure they aren’t dying of thirst and/or constipated, puts them in their new cardboard box home with special feeders and lights, and they begin their little Dance of New Life.  They cheep indignantly for no apparent reason, they peck at invisible things.  They scurry about in a panic when a camera invades their space.  They fall asleep standing up, and s-l-o-w-l-y tip over onto their beaks… it’s a hoot!

I drew this one from my photo taken when they were just past the fluffy stage and not quite into the Ugly Pinfeathers Stage, although you can see by her tail that it’s almost Pinfeather Time.  She still has remnants of the little “egg tooth” on top of her beak.  I’ll have to ask Tracy what breed this is – I call them Chipmunk Chickens, but I’m pretty sure the real name is something vaguely Welsh or British like Easter Egg Orphington or Buff Barred Linkhamshire.

When she grows up, this chick will be moved to Tracy’s backyard, where she will reside in sumptuous luxury in the Palais des Poulets – that’s French for Chicken Palace.  I’m sure their coop is without equal in the world of Backyard Chickendom.  I’ll have sketch it one of these days!

The quilt analogy in the background is reminiscent of some of my very early chicken-related art, which you can see in my Gallery of Works.  I didn’t realize how close the colors were to those pieces until I just now looked up the link.  Odd.

Living In the Moment

sketch of salad ingredients

"Chickpea & Cucumber Salad", mixed media by Kerry McFall

Ever have those times when there are so many ideas bubbling in your head, that you simply can’t begin?  So you lay in bed and fret, wishing you had the energy to do the six things on your to-sketch-today list, PLUS go downtown and help with the photo survey of your dying neighborhood, PLUS run errands and buy groceries and clip the cat’s nails, PLUS spread the barkmulch before the weeds take over, PLUS edit the video from the Muddy Creek School Quilt project, PLUS change the sheets on your now-sweaty bed…  I have those days a lot.  The worst part is the things-to-sketch list… I absolutely ache to start them.  But this weekend I reached a compromise with myself: I gave myself permission to stop fretting, and to simply live in the moment.  If the sheets need changing, don’t rush through it just to get to the next thing on the list.  Just take my time, do it right, maybe stop for a snuggle with the kitty or a cup of tea.   No multi-tasking.  And so I moved through the weekend at a slow and steady pace, not feeling guilty about what I couldn’t get to, took a stroll around Bald Hill Farm (yes, the sun WAS shining!), and wound up my Sunday afternoon leafing through “Real Simple” magazine and making a salad.  Naturally, the luminescent cucumber, the blazing backlit basil, the little heart- shaped garbanzo beans, seduced me into starting another sketch.  But that’s okay.  It trumped everything else on the list, because it WAS the moment.  And I was totally in it, that moment when the scent of sliced cucumber and fresh-picked basil wafted through the kitchen.  It had to be done, right then.  And here it is.

The list in my head is just as long as it was Saturday morning, actually longer if you count that I added doing a sketch from Corey’s photo of her “commute” in Peru framed by a design incorporating her photo of an antique textile with dragons on it.  But that’s okay.  Its moment will come, eventually, and I’ll be in it, more relaxed if this whole approach works like it’s supposed to!

Shadow Cat

 

"Shadow Cat", mixed media by Kerry McFall

This is a cat who is no longer a kitten, a cat of unexpected consequences.  I set out to sketch from a photo I stumbled into online of a fluffy yellow kitten, all wide-eyed innocence.  (I would credit the photographer, but I can’t find it again on the Internet and I vaguely remember it was by someone using a pseudonym that had the word flowers in it.  Sorry!)  I saw the photo and immediately thought – hey, cool shadows.  Very exaggerated.  Wonder if I could make that work?  Without even making so much as a pencil guideline for placing the eyes, I grabbed my Pentel brush pen, drew a border, and slapped on a couple of whiskers.  Footdang – too bold to capture the kittenish fluff.  But I was already committed, so I kept going.  Not bad, but with each stroke the cat got older, further and further away from generic cute kitty.  Closer and closer to a real personality.  Interesting.

I switched to colored pencil, then watercolor.  The watercolor wash wasn’t dark enough, and the paper wouldn’t take another wet layer, so I let it dry and switched back to dark colored pencil.  Still too pale.  Back to the brush pen – bingo!  I don’t think I’ve ever felt as good about contrast in one of my sketches as I do about this one.

As usual in a portrait, there’s something not quite right about the mouth, or rather the chin.  But what a sense of accomplishment.  And next time, I will draw those few pencil lines just to get my bearings before I bring out the ink.

 

Dogface Butterfly… is that an oxymoron?

"Dogface Butterfly", colored pencil sketch by Kerry McFall

I learned when we visited the Santa Ana Botanical Garden (Claremont, CA) last month that the state insect of California is the Dogface Butterfly, not perhaps the loveliest of names.  I literally had to sit down and draw out a dog’s face on my sketchbook before I could see where they got the name… if you stretch your imagination, you can almost see a black-eared yellow dog laughing in the upper wings.  At the garden’s butterfly house they had specimens of the Dogface under glass, but no live ones, which was disappointing, but my recent Google search offers the excuse that they are very fast flyers.  That search also showed that a yellow-only version of the Dogface also inhabits Peru, which is where my daughter Corey has just started her new job.  It felt kind of like karma that during her graduation visit I had stumbled upon a butterfly that she might actually see in her new town – that is, if she goes to the Inkaterra hotel to see their butterfly garden.  Having a butterfly garden at a hotel sounds like such fun!  I wonder if it lives up to its potential?

Samara – Word of the Day

 

Chinese Elm Seeds, mixed media by Kerry McFall

Swirling up with tiny tornadoes, poofing underfoot, filling the gutters and drain grates, Chinese Elms are prolifically sowing their winged seed – “samara” –  this year.  I’ve never seen this volume of papery seeds before.  The same seems true with maples and other trees.   Odd… Perhaps a premonition on a supernatural level of coming hard times, make your seeds while you can…

But on another note, here is the Seal Court fountain sketch from last weekend, digitally altered and generally fussed over:

Seal Court Lily, mixed media digitally altered, by Kerry McFall

 

Claremont, California

In the festive whirl of Scripps graduation, I found a few minutes to sketch the fountain I’ve been admiring the last few visits in the courtyard at “The Coop” on Pomona campus.  I’ve heard people say that the Claremont Colleges have more fountains per capita than any other campus – and they’re all gorgeous.  Water is more about the movement of light than anything else, so fountains are challenging.  I started another sketch of a fountain in Seal Court  on Scripps campus, still working on that one.

And on the plane and in the hotel, I played with a vintage portrait from Artist’s magazine – another example of how many colors go into red hair! –  and a slightly absurd moose photo from the airline magazine that provided another water challenge.

All in alll, a good trip, and I hardly cried at all during the ceremonies!

Tomato Chairs

chairs serve as tomato cages

"Tomato Chairs", mixed media by Kerry McFall

Done!  Not only did I get the basil and tomatoes planted, I spray-painted the old metal chairs I’ve been using for tomato cages… I now pronounce the garden ready for a visit from the Queen.  The chairs were part of a patio set left on the curb by a neighbor years back, with metal crossbars in the place where the seats used to be.  They are perfect to use as substitutes for tomato cages, but far more elegant – a nice bit of re-purposing.  Here is a birds’ eye view photo if the sketch doesn’t quite make sense:
chair as tomato cage

Tomato Cage Chair - Bird's Eye View

 

One Among Many

"Horsetail Fern", mixed media by Kerry McFall

Funny how a meadow filled with horsetail fern looks like a mountain covered with Douglas Fir, especially through the camera lense.  I found these Saturday at Snag Boat Bend, in the area near the parking lot – which was as far as I ventured because it was a spur of the moment stop and I didn’t have my mud boots with me.  The negative space between plants is exactly a vertically flipped mirror image of the plant itself.  I find that I am always looking for patterns now, ways to abstract the plants and animals I’m focused on and turn them into patterns… this one may take me to some 1960’s sci-fi “Jetsons” kind of shapes.

"Nearly Normal's Outdoor Dining", mixed media by Kerry McFall

And in a completely unrelated sketch, here’s one for Alice, who misses Nearly Normals in Corvallis, but apparently not enough to come back here after she graduates!  The patio this summer features one plastic owl statue lurking among the pink flamingos near the water feature… to frighten away the sparrows and other crumb-seekers I assume, with limited success.   Let us know the next time you’re home, dearie, and we’ll treat you to something “normal”!

Forget Me Nots

"Forget Me Nots", mixed media by Kerry McFall

The smaller the flower, the more detail seems to be called for.  These are such simple blossoms that they lend themselves well to abstracting and incorporating into patterns.  The only real challenge here was that I haven’t quite managed the shape of this tiny clear glass vase (but I just read an article about how to better deal with symmetry in such attempts), and I didn’t have the exact shade of blue pencil I wanted… the perfect excuse for a trip to the art store.

Forget Me Nots do a little trick called “self seeding”, which means there are waves of blue all over the yard and garden until the foliage begins to get grungy, then I yank them all up.  The miracle is that next year, there will be even more!