EDM 81 - Draw a street light

I have been somewhat neglectful of this blog, mostly because I am taking an online art class that is using up most of my art time and computer time. But the other day I saw something that inspired me to do this challenge (and I admit I do enjoy these challenges). As the streetlights in our neighborhood wear out, the old round lights are being replaced by these newer ones. Not only are they more energy efficient, they contribute less to light pollution. There is something futuristic about the shape of them, every time I look at them, I am reminded of the Terminator movies. They look vaguely menacing. Their flat tops, though, are a perfect perch for two of the most enormous crows I have ever seen. This one landed and settled looking exactly like a monarch surveying his domain.

This is watercolor paint and Pentel Brush pen in my Aquabee sketchbook.

EDM 155 - Draw your favorite sandwich

Here's a hot dog. It's not my favorite sandwich, although I do enjoy a good hot dog every now and then. And this hot dog I really did enjoy. We drove out to Lake Louise for the annual Ice Magic competition. This is an ice sculpture competition that includes professional teams from around the world who compete over a three day period to create huge sculptures on a theme. The theme this year was "Fairies and Fairy Tales". At the townsite, we loaded into a bus to drive up the slippery mountain road to the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise who was hosting the competition on their beautiful grounds right on the shore of the lake. It was a lovely day, and we arrived around 1:00, just in time for lunch. After wandering around, we found a kiosk where they were serving hotdogs and hot chocolate. Perfect! Handheld food that you could eat while watching watching the chain saw wielding sculptors carve away at 300 pound blocks of ice. This handy little lunch set us back $7.95 each! For a hot dog with ketchup and mustard, and a cup of hot chocolate! Seriously! But it was a lovely day, and we had fun, so who cares?

This is water color in the Aquabee sketchbook. Can you imagine how many tries it took to get that color for the hot dog? It's a combination of burnt sienna and permanent rose.

EDM 155 - Draw some stairs

I freely confess that I procrastinated on this challenge. Given my difficulties with getting perspective and lines drawn correctly, I thought this would be a very difficult, frustrating challenge. And so I dithered a bit about what stairs to draw, how to approach it, what angle to use. In the end, it turned out to be not as difficult as I had thought. I have been paying a lot of attention to lines and angles and vanishing points (I feel a bit silly holding my pencil up and squinting like I was a "real artist" or something, but that trick really does work!) Be assured that this is not my first draft of these stairs, it is my third. But the first one was not as far off the mark as it usually is, and it took less correction to get it to look acceptable. Some improvement is happening, and I'm even starting to feel less frustration and more confidence when it comes to this kind of drawing. It's all in the practice (and maybe some in that pencil trick). I think the angle of the steps is still a bit too steep, it looks like they slope down toward the right, but not nearly to the extent that some previous efforts have shown. So I'm happy with this mostly because I learned a lot from it.

EDM 154 - Draw a lemon

I love lemons. I even love the thought of lemons. When I was little, growing up in a northern country, there were no lemons to be had in the stores. We had apples, and bananas and oranges that were imported, but there was no real "tropical" fruit in the stores in the winters (and often not in the summers either). We ate a lot of canned fruit and we often had preserved fruit that we canned ourselves during the summers when we could get pears and peaches and apricots. But our lemon juice came in a greeen bottle. Today when I went to the neighborhood grocery store, there were mangos, pineapples, cherries, cantalopes. The world has become much smaller it seems and our fridge is stocked with key limes and lemons all year round. They are no longer luxuries for us, and we expect to get anything we want in the store at any time of the year. But I will try from now on not to take lemons for granted, and to give them the respect they deserve. After all, they travelled a long way to get to my house. This is done with Caran d'Ache water color pencils in the Aquabee sketch book.