Thursday, August 5, 2010

Cats in bed

I recently received Carla Sonheims lovely book "Drawing Lab". It's labeled as a drawing exercise book for mixed media artists. I don't draw much, except for girls. I have not shown many (or any?) on this blog so far, but if you go to my flickr you will find plenty of girls there. I have always drawn girls ever since I was a child, so I suppose it's in my genes. ;-)

I thought it might be interesting to see a book where drawing was not looked upon so...what's the word...precisely (?). I am not really looking for rules and regulations. I have a great admiration for people who can draw things meticulously, but I don't want to be one of them. Drawing, like all art, should just be fun.

So when Carla's first 'lab' asked me to draw 30 cats in bed I just couldn't resist!


Yes, I actually took a sketchbook to bed and drew cats! Really really bad and really really silly cats. It was a blast and it was also harder than I thought, because trying to think up 30 different cats in your head is not as easy as you might assume.


Believe me, I know they are not great drawings at all, but that's so not the point. The point is that these weird looking cats were fun to do and I am thinking about turning one of them into a little painting just for the heck of it. We'll see. Also, one bad drawing is just that: a bad drawing, but a whole collection of them is quite funny to look at.

Another thing I am working is the following piece. Again on paper:


It's not finished yet, but I thought I'd show it to you anyway, 'cause I like the colors so much. As you can see it is still taped to my drawing board. A lot of people seem to be into spray painting these days and looking at all that stuff made me want to bring out some stencils again and also get some new ones. Now, no spray paint was used here. It's mostly regular acrylics and one color of glimmer mist (I don't see it glimmer by the way, did I not shake it well enough?). The base of the piece is neocolor mixed with gesso. It is fun to layer all those things on top of each other. I have already some papers picked out to put over this and I think I will add some ephemera and/or writing as well. I'll show it to you when it's ready.