I”ll post something tomorrow from my current painting.  For tonight I’m posting my drawing efforts for this week — continuing with my self-imposed assignment of doing 2 drawings of one hour each each week.  Posting helps make me accountable (to myself). So one of the drawings is of a little decorative bird house we keep in our living room. I realized, belatedly, that i should have posed the bird house at an angle, in order to give viewer a better idea of the depth.   Another time! The other drawing is part of a photo i took of my sister, Mimi, walking in front of me on a beach.  That drawing actually took me more than an hour, because i spent the first half hour trying my hand at drawing in my sister.  No go.  So she got erased out, and i worked on putting together the other parts of the scene.

My “calm water” painting is coming along.  Teacher returned this week after over a month away, and (of course) he had some suggestions about areas for improvement. The two main ones i worked on in class were: (1) water flowing over rocks in the lower waterfall part of the painting.  He (teacher) thought I’d painted that area to look like the water was rushing, and that’s not how it was in real life (or, in the photo).  So i attempted to fix that.  (2) top part of the painting.  This is hard for viewer to see, i think, but the idea is that i need to address the issue of depth, as in, the big evergreens are closer than the lighter part in the middle.  I didn’t get to finish this part, either, but you can see, perhaps, where I’m going.

I decided a few weeks ago that i wanted to improve my (rudimentary) drawing skills.  So i made a commitment to myself to do two one-hour drawing sessions a week.  the three  drawings I’m posting here represent my beginning efforts.  The first two were done in charcoal.  I had forgotten how messy that can be, so for last week’s efforts i switched to graphite pencils and then added a bit of color.  I had to keep within the one-hour self-assigned time frame, so obviously there could be quite a number of improvements made, had i taken more time.  Nevertheless, i am pleased that i am learning as i go.  References for the first two drawings were photos from various sources.,  For the third  i was outdoors at a local state park for a plein air art day.

Note:  I have a 4th drawing — actually the first — but forgot to photograph it for this post.  Another time.

Since i last posted i was out of town again for over  a week.  Now back and back to working on this painting.  I’ve worked on several different areas, making various mistakes and doing several re-do’s.  So — i worked on the waterfall, changing some of the shapes of the falling water.  Also tried to refine a few of the rocks.  Also worked on the water in the stream, in the lower part of the painting.  Here i was trying to get the colors right and also get the rocks to look like they are under water, which they are supposed to be.  In the photo, the water is incredibly clear in this section.  When i tried to duplicate that effect, it didn’t work; so decided in the painting the water would be a little blurred so that i could blur the rocks — artistic license? The area in the lower left hand corner of the painting is supposed to be land (bare shore-line( strewn with pine (or some other evergreen ) needles.  This was tricky, and i redid it 3 times.  (Haven’t had class for over a month, so what I’ve done here has been on my own.  That, in itself, has been interesting: in the past, when I’ve been stumped after trying to get some effect, i might end up saying oh well, I’ll just wait till teacher sees it and points out how i can fix it. Couldn’t do that this time, as teacher has been out of the country for a month.

Having been away for several weeks (and now away again), i haven’t had opportunities to work on my “calm water” painting, or anything else.  I did think, fancifully, as it turned out, that i might spend a few hours practicing my drawing skills while in Iceland.  However, seems like we kept ourselves on the go so much that no drawing was even begun.   I had planned also to post lots of photos and write several blogs while we were overseas.  But our internet connections all over the Westfjords was so spotty that no sooner would i log on than i would lose the connection.

I did get to spend a couple of hours while home the past week on my painting.  I’ve been pretty much focussed on the lower half of the project, mostly playing with trying to get the colors and textures for the water.  Once I’m satisfied with that, I’ll work on figuring out how to do the ripples.  As you can see, (if you can remember that far back!) I’ve also repainted the top center area of the painting.  At this point i can tell that I’ll need to do some more muting of the trees in the distance.

On another note, I have dropped what I’ve been calling my “tracing” class.  There was getting to be too much confusion in my head from different priorities of each of my two excellent teachers.  I think, on balance, I’m better off with my original class, so that’s what I’m doing.

Here are a few photos from bird cliffs and Red Sand Beach—-

• it is Tuesday afternoon, August 1st and I am writing this on my iPhone, so it will be briefer than it would be if I were working on iPad. We are on a 3- hour ferry ride from stykkisholmer to Hnjotour, with a brief stop at Flatey island in between. Weather is perfect again, so very lucky to be able to enjoy the amazing scenery . This morning we had a boat ride to see some of the local sea bird population. Tons of puffins, kittiwakes, cormorants, arctic terns occupy and nest in the basalt cliffs of the islands – an incredible sight to view so many of these very interesting birds so up close and personal. Captain could get the boat within just a few feet of land.

Friday night we took a tour offered by a local company which offers a three-hour evening tour in the bay of Reykjavik.  The boat goes pretty far out — almost an hour from port — but not quite into the open North Atlantic Ocean.  The company makes no guarantee that you will see anything; but clearly the draw is the possibility of seeing whales and porpoises.  We didn’t.  We did see lots of sea birds, including large ganets, small puffins, and several different kinds of gulls — all busily going after their dinner.  By summer Iceland standards it was a warm night, but it still gets pretty cold out on the water.  We were all wearing several layers, including waterproof outer layers; winter gloves and hats.  And so we got cold, but not too cold.  There was always the option of being inside, but would’ve meant missing whomever showed up near the boat.  Boat left at 8:30p and didn’t return till midnight.  On the way back we were “serenaded” by a local singer/guitarist who would have done well to sing Icelandic songs.  Instead he chose everything from John Denver to Neil Diamond

to Bob Dylan.  Bad!!  But we got a good laugh out of it.

Norma and i, along with our friends Pattie and Sherry, are on vacation in Iceland.  Norma and i arrived 4 days ago (Wednesday, July 26th).  We have been staying in the capital city, Reykjavik, but will be leaving here tomorrow by car for the Westfjords.  While here we have had several outings, some in the city, and one a bus tour of the south coast of the island.  We took Gray Line Tours, which offers an all-day tour of the coast east of the city.  We would go to see three famous and towering waterfalls and spend time on two black sand beaches.  If that sounds leisurely, which is what we expected, including, of course having someone else drive us, it was not.  What we didn’t realize is (a) the distances we would cover were more extensive than we’d thought, so much time was spent driving; (b) crowds were everywhere we stopped.  This meant that the lines for bathrooms were intimidating.  In one place where we stopped (where we were also supposed to buy lunch), there was a line of about 30 for the women’s room.  There were, for reasons unclear to us, 4 sinks, but only one stall.  Needless to say, it was that or lunch.  Lines for lunch also more impressive than I’d have liked.

At one of the waterfalls the guide said, well, we have 20 minutes here and then must leave.  So, if you walk really really fast and don’t go to the bathroom and don’t try to buy coffee, you might get halfway up the path to the waterfall.

At a famous and beautiful black sand beach, with also boasted pretty spectacular basalt cliffs, we were told we had 1/2 hour available.  So we rushed to the beach, then back to the bus which, meanwhile, had gotten stranded in the black sand mud just outside the parking area.  We were delayed there for an hour waiting for bus rescue.  At that point we were 1 1/2 hours out of Reykjavik, with farmlands and waterfalls between us and the city.  The driver tried to prevail upon another Gray Line tour bus driver to pull us out.  He declined.  Eventually a local farmer came by with a vehicle that could do the trick, and did.  We couldn’t go back to the beach while awaiting bus rescue, because we never knew when we’d have to be back on the bus.  So we stood around and watched the proceedings.  It was all kind of funny, except it was also kind of frustrating.

We stopped at another spectacular waterfall on the way back to the city.  This one had a path which went behind the waterfall, and we climbed up to do that.  Pretty fun though of course also pretty wet!

 

 

This past week i worked a bit at home on the shapes of the rocks in the small waterfalls.  Also repainted and tried to fix the big rocks.  Definitely a work in progress!  Today in class i wanted to play with the colors of the water at the bottom of the painting — the area that will be the focal point.  Teacher (Ed) suggested i just try working from the perimeter inward, starting with darks, moving to mid-tones and then having the bright spot in the center.  I spent most of the class on this assignment and feel like I’ve made some progress, but still need to do quite a bit to get it to “work” like i want it to.

In other news, i have dropped out of the “tracing” class.  I’ll give details maybe in my next post — but bottom line is that i realized from something that happened in my “regular” (Thursday) class a few weeks ago that there were probably irreconcilable differences between the two teachers’ approaches, and that i would be better off staying with my original class.

Anyhow, here’s photo of my work from the “calm water” painting.