San Francisco Victorian House

I have been looking a blog called Different Strokes for Different Folks. The site host puts up a photo and invites others to draw or paint it. She then places all the results on her blog. The variety of media and compositions are astonishing. Last month the photo was of this San Francisco Victorian house. It's quite beautiful and fell right in line with my year's intention to learn to draw buildings. I'm having difficulty with this intention, but I really want to learn to do it. I'm actually pleased with the way this drawing turned out. I learned a lot about following the lines and the way one line relates to the next one. The best piece of advice I got was to pick one vertical line and draw it with a ruler. Then place all other lines in relation to that original one. That works! Now if I could just speed up a bit. If I had been drawing this on site, I would have needed to pack a cooler and pitch a tent! I'm sure that those who draw swiftly and surely while standing on a street corner have been doing it for many years. I'm sure that they are so familiar with the structure of buildings and the rules of perspective that they don't need to consciously think about every line. Hopefully, with practice and patience, I can reach that goal. While I worked hard at getting the lines down correctly, I really had fun doing this and especially coloring in the windows.

This is micron pen and Pentel brush pens in the Moleskine journal.

EDM 165 - Draw the front of your house

This is the front of my townhouse condo. It looks pretty sad, with an empty window box and dead perennials in the garden. There are some tulips poking up through the ground, and yesterday I saw a fluorescent orange nubbin of the rhubarb coming up. We have lived in this house for 16 years, and we have filled it with love and laughter, friends and family, tabby cats and books. It's been a good place to live, and I wish I could have done a better job portraying it.

I succumbed to the hype and bought a Moleskine sketchbook. I have the watercolor sketchbook which I like a lot. But this new one I'm not so sure about. The paper is very slick and smooth, the pen seemed to slip and dance across it. It's also quite yellow. It absorbed the paint quickly so it was difficult to get a smooth patch of color. I think it worked much better with the water color pencils and no water. The whole experience threw me off a little, I felt very hesitant and unsure how to lay the lines and paint down. (And aren't there a lot lines! )