From sketch book to art book

I call these sketch book drawings. Some people say that they are not sketch books, but art books. I have some sketch books that contain drawings that are very different from these figure studies. In my other sketch books I put drawings of anything: leaves, notes, concepts, etc. In the sketches I am showing on this blog, I only put figure studies. So since they have a theme, some artists call them art books instead. That is a fine distinction, but its OK. I really zeroed in on the face on these drawings. Finally reducing the drawing to just one eye, the nose and part of the lips. The face is so fascinating with all its proportions, yet not in exact proportion. For this book I turned it sideways. Each drawing crosses over the gutter or seam of the book.

Figure Sketch Books

"I'm not in the mood to draw!" My students say this to me a lot; I even say it to myself. You never know when inspiration is going to strike. Many times I get to my studio and I do not feel like doing anything, much less painting. So at times like that, I draw in my sketch book. I draw a lot of different things, but I draw figures most often. Some are made up out of my mind, many are just copied from magazines. The drawings above are from my figure sketch books. These are all in Moleskine books. I bought my first Moleskine book in Chicago on a trip in the 1990s. I had never seen one before. Then, for a few years, I had to order them from Chicago or New York. Now you can buy them any and everywhere. These are bound bristol like paper with a slight yellow tint. I use red prisma color pencils or conte pencils to draw with.

Paintings At Redsky Gallery in Epicenter

In a change from the usual theme of this blog, I wanted to let you know about some of my architectural paintings. This painting and one other are on display in downtown Charlotte. They are in a gallery called Redsky in the Epicenter complex. The painting above, titled " Water Tower at Night", is an oil painting 24 x 18 inches in size. When I paint in oil, I use many techniques that I use in my drawings, for example, this painting was painted light to dark. So, I painted the sky first and then gradually added the darker parts until arriving at black. This is the water tower on Camden Road in Charlotte's South End Historic District. This painting was awarded a second place prize by Joie Lassiter in an urban landscape show in 2008.