Garlic

Oil on gessobord, 6x6" NFS

Right now I'm taking a drawing class at a little school called The Atelier in Minneapolis. The style of drawing and painting is Classical Realism, and getting a likeness is not the goal. It has to be perfect. At the end of the 10 week class, I will be lucky if I complete one drawing. So the pace is a little frustrating to me, though I think it will be a very good learning experience and the work that people create is truly amazing. This painting ended up much looser than a lot of other paintings I have done. But I like the simplicity of it. Perhaps it's a reaction to the very precise drawing that I'm doing in class!

Nature Journaling

This winter, I took a class through the arboretum at the school where I work. The class was called Nature Journaling and it was about using drawing and painting to record notes about plants and critters that you find in nature. It was neat because we learned about the things we were drawing and painting, such as what the shape of a bird's beak tells you about what it eats. We worked from plants and taxidermized animals and used pencil, pen and ink, and watercolor. I am a few months overdue in posting these, but here are some images:

The acorn from a red oak. Pen and ink.


To practice simplifying flower shapes, we first drew a daisy made from a paper plate that we stuck onto a twig. I decided to include the push pin. Pencil.


This butterfly was from the day we focused on bugs. Pencil.


This beetle was probably 3 inches long and very shiny. Watercolor.


A taxidermized grosbeak. Pencil.


A blue jay. Watercolor.


For the final class, we went to the natural history "museum" in the biology department, where they had a ton of taxidermized animals, many of which had been processed by monks a hundred years ago. This eagle looked so noble sitting atop his perch I had to draw him. Pen and ink.


The bohemian waxwing was also in the natural history museum. Pen and ink.