A super quick little sketch.  It is the year of the water dragon, I’ve read.  Happiness and health to all!

Hi folks!  My friend Lisa and I are doing the 12 Days of Christmas over on our sketchblog My Gecko is Sick.  Alternating posts daily, with Lisa having started.  Come check it out!

My good friend Lisa and I decided to get together and start a sketchblog!

http://mygeckoissick.tumblr.com/

As she prefaced in her own blog: “We decided to make it a little area for sketching improv, where we would each contribute a sketch on the same theme, with each sketch and concept completed in an hour.

Since we both have a fondness for awkward situations and non sequiturs, we decided to embrace that in the name of the blog and our first sketch topic “At the wrong party.” “

Last Saturday night I made it out to a figure drawing event put on by Dr. Sketchy’s where the models dress up in all kinds of outrageously fun costumes.  This evening we had a sexy burlesque clown, and she was a fantastic and tasteful model. I was joined by my lovely artist friends, Lisa and Julia, and Julia’s über-talented boyfriend, Jamie Baker.

Here are a couple 20 minute poses and a 40 minute pose. Having taken Alex Woo’s gesture class, I wanted to try to push the poses in certain instances.  I also wanted to play around with my new Pentel pocket brush pen!

I’ve been taking a gesture drawing workshop with Alex Woo, Pixar story-artist extraordinaire.  What’s really fantastic about this class, and also super challenging, is that Alex is teaching how to capture the gesture and not get caught up in the anatomy, or classicism, or realism.  What is the model “doing?”  How can you communicate the gesture quickly and effectively?  Simplify.  Exaggerate.

It may seem easy to simplify but it’s actually really challenging to switch off that classically trained part of the brain and get to the essence of the pose.  It’s a whole new way of approaching drawing for me, and most importantly it’s FUN!

Alex asked us to draw with our non-dominant hands for last night’s session.  Oddly enough, it helped us remove the crutches we tend to rely on and made for better gesture capturing.  Some of these work better than others, but I thought I’d share some of my efforts, goofiness and all.

Springtime in Yosemite is a quite a sight.  The massive snowstorms of this past season has led to a snowpack trembling under it’s own weight, melting into a raging mass of water that tumbles over the edges of cliffs like geysers shooting sideways.

So most of my weekend in Yosemite was spent hiking up slippery granite steps and trails to experience the gushing falls in all their springtime glory.  (And get thoroughly soaked in the process.)

I did, however, manage to sit myself down for a couple sketches later on in the week.  Here is Bridal Veil Falls.

And a fallen tree and some branches along the ground.

Got to make it out to Enrico’s and Ronnie’s Sketchcrawl this past Saturday. I hadn’t attended a Sketchcrawl since number 2! Wow, long overdue for me, but it was great to be out there.

This crawl took place in Portsmouth Square in Chinatown of San Francisco, and it was a fantastic spot for characters and architecture. Check out the Sketchcrawl forums to see more work from artists all over the world who were all out sketching on the same day! It’s incredibly inspiring to see other people’s work, and knowing you’re part of a world-wide community of artists! Thanks to Enrico and Ronnie for organizing such a great phenomenon. Join us next time, wherever you are! They take place about every two months or so.

I managed to get out to the SF Zoo last Saturday. I woke up to have sun streaming through my window and decided on a whim to get myself and my sketchbook out there. It was a rather chilly first day of December, despite the sun. Here are some of my drawings, arranged on a couples pages.

Solveig is a wonderful model who we work with occassionaly at Expression College for Digital Arts. I’ve been spending time at the college instructing drawing labs. Feels good teaching the importance of a solid foundation of drawing skills to the students. Plus a chance for me to keep up the figure drawing and try to get better. There is always room for improvement. How those skills secretly slip away if you don’t keep up on a regular basis. Like doing scales for a musical instrument, drawing from life is imperative to keep your mind and eye sharp as to understading form, weight, light and composition.