Sketching

A few years back I went through an 'artsy' phase.  I had bought a book, years, and years, and years...AGO, and it sat on a shelf in a book case for that long basically untouched.  Oh, when I first got the book I was 'gung-ho' to learn to draw.

Then, life took over, things got sticky, and the book and my art supplies gathered dust...literally.

Finally, one day, the art book coughed, wheezed and sneezed at me and I decided, what the heck?  I took the book off the shelf, blew the dust off and flipped the book open to the last page where I had written notes in the margin, (around page 90), and I remembered I had just drawn a pencil sketch of my foot.  Wow! The sketch was pretty darn good and I was excited to move forward.

I found the sketch book I had used for all this books exercises, and flipped the page to a new exercise. Which happened to be a new chapter.  Perceiving the Shape of a Space: The Positive Aspects of Negative Space.  Uh-oh!

I was determined to carry on, and carry on I did.  It took a long time to finish the book, but my art skills had increased substantially.  I discovered I don't like working with pastels or oils, but water coloring was a perfect fit.  Boy, did I have fun.  My favorite 'project' was "An Ugly Corner as Cityscape".  Yes, I had to find a picture of an ugly intersection and draw it.  At the time I didn't have a camera, so I had to depend on the Internet to find one for me.  I checked large cities, but most of those showed only the pretty side because they want people to come visit, and nobody wants to look at ugly when they are paying a thousand dollars for a vacation.

Undeterred, I eventually ended up at my hometown's website.  I didn't really have a lot of hope I'd find a picture of an ugly intersection.  But, lo, there was a picture of one 'butt ugly' intersection.  (No offense, hometown).  Now, not only was this going to be a 'butt ugly' picture, it had to be big. 18x24 inches, to be exact.  THAT was quite a project.

The book ended a two chapters later.  So ended my artistic education, and my artist career. The book went back on the shelf and began to gather dust.  My colored pencils, water colors, and brushes went into a box along with assorted sizes of watercolor and sketch book paper that is also collecting dust.

Then a couple of days ago, (I had no yarn for crocheting projects), I opened the box of artistic supplies, and pulled out a sketch book.  I flipped open the cover and discovered the start of a few sketches in which I had apparently lost interest.  Well, hot diggity!

Oh, my grey matter went berserk.  Why didn't I think of this before.  I could draw all sorts of images to put on the merchandise in my store.  Yes, I'm a bit rusty at the moment, but the possibilities are endless.  Already there are 18 pages of sketches.

In walks my nemesis, good old Frankie, looking over my shoulder.  I've already scanned and set up a new file on my computer to hold my sketches.  I 'blew them up' and printed out each one so they will be more easy to replicate when I want to use them for a Zazzle project.

Frankie begins to thumb through the printed images.  Silence fill the office.  I wait...."I didn't know you could draw."

Whew...I'm off and running folks...off and running.

By the way the name of the book is "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards.  Published by The Putman Publishing Group. Copyright 1989 by Betty Edwards