It’s fun to draw people but in situ they move around too much which frustrates my perfectionism. I tried a quick drawing of a friend recently trying to get the gestures rather than ask them to pose for a moment. Sort of worked, but not really – though it’s a good exercise  for honing your observation skills and for just drawing in the moment, forgetting about making it “perfect”.

My preference naturally is a willing model or a photo reference for figure drawing. Here’s some quick sketches of a couple of individuals caught in The Vaccination Line, and one of a health care worker from last fall.

Working with light and shadow is difficult (for me). Using ink and wash I did some small drawings looking at light and trying not to get too carried away (as usual) with detail.

Small drawings still, in an effort to keep doing something every day without it becoming an onerous task.  I’m working on enhancing the daily drawing practice with more studies, exploring different ways of looking at a subject. With that in mind, I played around with an intriguing image of the remnants of an old tree:

Some evenings I wander about looking for something to draw. Silly, right? There’s stuff everywhere! A thing has to strike some interest though. Like this:

(What exactly made it more interesting? I really don’t know…)

Stymied one evening while lurking on TwitchTV in EricAllenLive, wondering what I should draw, it suddenly became obvious:

And, yes, we’re related. In a pandemic, lurking is considered a visit.

Not sure where September went. Life is weird. For most of us, I think, it’s less active, a little dispirited, tinged with a bit of melancholy and not without an undertone of apprehension.  OK, maybe that’s just me.

I find keeping little routines going is helpful and even though a lot of the time I REALLY don’t feel like doing my daily drawing practice, I manage to draw Something every day*.  One of the ways to mitigate my laziness is to do tiny drawings. The first two are on 3.5 x 5 inch paper. The third and fourth are in my 5.5 x 8.5 drawing pad (just as they are – all photos taken on my phone):

*OK, coming clean – I missed a couple of days but only because I was under the weather. Not with the-virus-that-should-not-be-named, just an ordinary thing.