Mary Richmond Design

Drawing Nature with Children and Families

Once a week I teach a Nature Drawing class for families and it's one of my favorite parts of the week.

Kids come with their moms or dads, grandmothers or uncles and everyone goes out to sketch. If I have a small group we take a guided walk and stop to sketch what we see along the way.

With large groups, like the one I had today (20) I send them off with an assignment to find and draw a bird, a mammal, a reptile, an amphibian, an insect, a flower and something of their choice and then I wander between groups to give encouragement and maybe a bit of advice to help them along.

These kids have spied a frog under the bush and are getting settled to draw it.

The adults stepped back on this one but at least one dad was trying to sneak a sketch over the kids' shoulders.

I love this activity for families because it gives kids and grown ups a different way to relate. For an hour and a half they have each other's undivided attention. The adults are usually a little nervous about the drawing but when I remind them that kids really love it when adults are a bit vulnerable about something they usually relax and have a blast comparing drawings and sightings with the kids.

I love this picture of this girl because she was so intent and serious. She came with her older sister and her dad and they were all concentrating very hard every time I saw them. They did nice drawings, too!

For the last 10 minutes we gather and share our drawings and it's wonderful to see the little bit of pride on everyone's faces as they share their work. Everyone seems to go home happy.

I know I sure do!

Sketchbook Collection

My sketchbooks are to me what photo albums or scrapbooks are to many others. They chart the many paths I've wandered, the ones I started down and turned back from, the ones I meandered down a bit farther and the strong central path that has become my own sure road.

Over the years I've preferred different kinds of sketchbooks. When I was in high school we were encouraged to use 9 x 12" ring bound books and you can see two of mine here--the fourth and fifth in from the left. In college the hardbound sketchbooks were the way to go and all of us skulked around campus with our obligatory black books listening to Crosby, Stills and Nash, James Taylor, Carly Simon, The Who and Patti Smith. We were profound and misunderstood and we had the black books to prove it, replete with the scrambled drawings of our disorganized if sometimes philosophically ariticulate artistic minds.

For at least the last 25 years I have preferred a smaller book to carry around and when I can find them I buy the 6 x 9" aquarelle sketchbooks in bulk.

I like the aquarelle books because I can watercolor in them. I know that Moleskines are all the rage but they are also very expensive when you do as much drawing and sketching as I do. The books shown here are only a fraction of what I have....

And yes, I do have several Moleskines that were given to me as gifts. I also have books full of rice paper, colored paper, leaf paper and well, whatever people think I should have.

For me the perfect sketchbook has to be light, rugged and easy to use. It must lie flat and preferably the front can be folded under and out of my way.

My sketchbooks are old fashioned workbooks. I sketch ideas, write notes, do partial studies and sometimes small color studies. Sometimes I take them out for a day of painting. They are not planned or contrived. They are not trip journals, with the exception of one done in Paris years ago with a workshop I was in. Trips may be included in them but mostly they are just a record of my far ranging thought process and that is far from tidy.

What kind of sketchbook do you like? What do you do with yours?

When a Doodle Grows Up or When a Doodle isn't a Doodle Any More.....

One of the things that came out of my doodle or drawing question in yesterday's post is that most of us consider a doodle something we do almost unconsciously. We are often doing something else. We are listening on the phone, waiting somewhere for someone or something, we are in some way distracted. The doodling is something fun to do but not too engaging. It doesn't really have much intent other than as a time filler or a bit of entertainment.

For me, a sketch lies in between a doodle and a drawing. It has some intent so it's more than a doodle but it is not intended to be finished in our best professional way. It is usually used to gather information on the spot, such as vacation travel sketches or to work out a composition or technical problems for another piece we are either working on or intend to be working on. These sketches often become more and more intense and often are worked into drawings as the artist becomes more sure of their intent.

And so we come to a drawing. For me, a drawing is something we sit down or stand up to draw with intent from the very first mark. We are prepared to make a statement, to be responsible for our marks, to be putting our best marks forward. For me a drawing is a more finished piece even before I begin it.

Having said all this, I consider these last ink sketches to be sketches. They are quick, they are more for problem solving and they do not engage the whole compositional plane. They are juicy little tidbits but I do not consider them real drawings in the sense of something finished.

So now what are your thoughts? Please feel free to add links to your own blogs, websites, etc. to share your own work as well as your thoughts.

Is it a Doodle or a Drawing?

As I wrote responses to the last few day's worth of comments I found myself wondering about the differences between a doodle, a sketch and a drawing.....

I have my own thoughts which I will write about later but what are your thoughts on this?

Doodling

Do you doodle? Sounds funny to say it like that but you know what I mean....

Are you one of us? Do you draw little critters or faces or designs or whatever's on your mind while you're on the phone, in class, waiting in an office or wherever?

I doodle all the time, everywhere. Mostly it's on napkins and scraps of old paper, on envelope backs, the bottoms of lists, along magazine or newspaper columns. Sometimes it's actually in a notebook or sketchbook that I've taken somewhere to take notes.

These are two of my most recent doodles, done while listening to people talk at the conference I attended last weekend. They are a little more elaborate than most of my doodles but each took about ten minutes.

I've often thought it would be fun to fill a sketchbook with doodles but I never seem to get farther than a few pages. I never seem to have the sketchbook with me when I feel the need to doodle so most of them end up lost in space somewhere.

There are a lot of fun little drawings and sketchbooks being shared around the internet. You can see one of my very favorites here and another here. Check out this blog for daily 'giggles' which are sort of like doodles. If you are a fellow doodler, please share your link in the comments!

A Portrait of Old Work....

One of the fun things that has come out of all this sorting and cleaning and throwing away has been the chance to be reacquainted with my young artist self. When I was in high school I thought I'd be a great artist. Little did I know that life would get in the way and that my art would stay pretty much as it was when I was young--that I would spend most of my time being a wife, mom, daughter, sister and friend; being a volunteer and creating an art related business rather than living the free floating artist life I imagined as an art struck teenager.

This drawing is of my best friend in high school who I thought was so beautiful she should be a model. I drew it from life in our art class and it won an award at the Boston Globe Art Awards oh so many years ago. Today's young artists are so much more sophisticated this drawing probably wouldn't even get an honorable mention, at least from what I see published in the paper each year.

I was very excited to find this sketchbook. It was my first hard bound sketchbook and is from my first semester sophomore year when I was 19. I was taking my first life drawing class and had tons of drawing homework every night so it didn't take me long to fill it up with portraits of my roommate, friends, family, pets, nudes and endless drawings of my hands and feet.

I don't remember why I started to introduce watercolor into my drawings. These are all pencil drawings and I just remember that I had a kid's set of watercolors and a terrible brush and I just started to play with the color. My drawing professor, the wonderful Walter Kamys, urged me to take a watercolor class with a Chinese brush and calligraphy professor, Mr. Wang, which I did the next semester.

This little drawing is of one of the children I babysat every afternoon for about two years while I was in college. It's how I made extra money but it was also a way to be out of the dorm and with a family. I adored these children but lost touch with them years ago. By now their own children are probably in high school. Sigh.

Anyway, this young lady was a delight and I'm sure she became a lovely young woman. I wonder what she ended up doing. She was intrigued that I had to do drawing and painting for homework and used to sit and draw with me every day.

This is a self portrait and you can see I took all this very seriously. I was so determined to really understand what art was about.

I still wonder what art is about. What is it in us that drives us to create? To express? To filter the world through our own experience?

Finding all these old drawings and sketchbooks has been a very wistful, lovely experience. It brings me face to face with who I was and what I longed to be, what I longed to understand.

The truth is I don't feel like that has changed much. There's been a lot of water under the bridge as they say and I wouldn't trade a minute of the life I've had so far, even the parts that haven't seemed so nice. They all make me who I am.

One of the best things about art is that it is in us, no matter how often or how hard we may try to walk away from it sometimes, it is patient if not kind, and in the end it will have its way with us.....

New Drawings

These are three new drawings I did yesterday. They are very simple, almost doodle like. These faces keep showing up so I keep letting them out on paper. They don't seem like something I want to spend serious energy on but they remind me of Peter Max drawings. Remember him? I feel like "Strawberry Fields Forever" should be playing in the background whenever you say his name.

Anyway, these drawings are for sale over here.

They are on 8 1/2 x 11" card stock and are done in black ink.

Please remember all my work is copyright protected.

Drawing.....finally

I bought a new HP fancy printer and scanner several months ago but have only now hooked it up to my computer. I have to say it took forever. This thing is so fancy it is a computer in itself and I feel like I'm on a whole new learning curve.

I did this drawing in my moleskine tonight and scanned it and here it is. I thought I had edited it but it is showing up here raw and unedited, including the gray of the scanner bed I thought I had obliterated....hmmm....lots more to learn.

The most important part of this post may be that it is my first drawing in.....months. That's sort of embarassing but there it is. Hopefully I'm back in the saddle, as they say.....

Pretending It's Spring

The rain and wind of the nor'easter is back today and has made for a miserable day if you've had to be outdoors. Fortunately my two hour outdoor walk was canceled due to the weather. I could have done it but I have to admit I was pretty happy it was canceled.

It sure doesn't feel like spring around here.

Yesterday morning after the first part of the storm had passed and the sky lightened a bit the robins began to sing. First one, then another and another. They have such a lighthearted song, it's hard not to smile when you hear it.

These two ink drawings are illustrations I did this week for my two weekly columns. This is a three column week since my monthly column was also due.

I am looking for ways to bring in more income with my writing. I do a lot of writing but don't make very much money from it. I know there are ways of self syndicating small columns like mine and am hoping to look into that soon with one of my columns.

Anyone out there have any ideas about how to go about that?