EDM Gloves, Doodles, Sketches, & a Blue Hound

I seem to have had a temporary block with being creative for the last few weeks and have fallen out of the habit of drawing every day. At least, I hope it's temporary. I have managed to do a few doodles and sketches despite not being able to really focus on what I was doing.

The Butterfly Effect, above, is sort of a zen doodle with red and black markers that I did while just sort of letting my mind wander. It started with the shape of butterfly wings and went crazy. It reminds me that everything affects everything else in this world, like a ripple, for better or worse.

Just a little still life set up with the porcelin rabbit, doll ballet shoes, and a perfume bottle. I love the shapes of the rabbit and the bottle. You probably noticed that I've sketched them a few times. Ordinarily, I sketch something once and I'm done with it. Once in a while I fall in love with an object and honor it more than once with an attempted sketch or painting.

Blue Hound is a doodle sketch and completed another Moleskine sketchbook for me. For some reason he speaks to me and I like him. :)

EDM Gloves challenge-I got these warm soft gloves for Christmas. They are actually a pearl gray color and have a hat and scarf to match. They are one of the last gifts my sister-in-law gave me. I drew them with pencil, used watercolor pencils, then outlined them and made the spirals with a black sharpie.

The sketch below is also of the same gloves with the hat sketched in pencil. Not the best of sketches, but I thought I'd share them anyway.


Hopefully, I'll be back on a more regular basis soon. Meanwhile I hope at least one of these made you smile. :)

Christmas Moose, Meece, or Mooses....

Thought I'd share some sketches of a Christmas moose that I did a few days ago. I bought him for a gift last year and decided to keep him. He's the only Christmas decoration we had up this year, and he's been standing on the table for over a year. I didn't feel like finding anything to sketch and he was handy, so he was my model for three days. He was a very good model. He didn't moo or move once. :)

This kind of fits in with the Creative Every Day theme for this year, which is Body. He does have an unusual and colorful body. I just love his striped tights! :)


Sketch one is a line drawing with a pencil in the Moleskine. Some of the lines aren't strong enough to show up in the scan. I had so much trouble getting these scanned that I didn't darken the lines digitally, but maybe you can see.

Sketch 2 is a shaded drawing, which I didn't darken either. It is also pencil.

Sketch 3 is a Zig permanant marker. Yep, I'm still having trouble with the feet running off the page! I actually had to shorten his legs to get this much of his feet on. LOL

Now I'm wishing I had done one in color before I posted! He's very cute with his long burgundy & camel colored striped legs! Hope he made you smile! :)

Happy New Year and some Misc. Sketches

I have been MIA for several days, but I hope you all had a great Christmas and I want to wish you all a very happy New Year. I have missed you all.

The past 3 weeks have held good, bad, ugly, blessings, and trauma for us. They have been busy and bittersweet, but God is helping us to go on. On December 16 my husband's only sibling, Kay, who was the same age I am, died suddenly and without warning. We are a very close family and the loss has been almost unbearable. She was also an organ donor, which was not easy for us either. My father-in-law was sick already and the shock of losing his baby girl was almost too much for him. Kay loved Christmas so much, and already had her gifts wrapped and tagged, that her kids and grandkids wanted to go ahead with Christmas, which we did. It was hard. Kay was so full of life and always doing everything for everybody that she will be greatly missed by many people, besides her family. She left a big hole in our lives, but with God's help, we will all carry on. She would have wanted that.

I have tried to continue sketching every day, although there were some days when I just couldn't. I am sharing some of my attempts with you in this post. I scanned them as BW documents, and I don't know whether that was a good idea or not, but the pencil sketches just don't show up enough.

The first one is an attempt at a Zentangle that I call "Hiding in Plain Sight." One has a bluejay feather with a perfume bottle, which I'm sure you recognize if you've seen previous sketches, and a resin pear. One is a wild turkey feather, which is mostly fuzz held by a doll hand that fell off while I was sketching the doll in the doll challenge. Then there is a page of one white porcelin rabbit ornament jumping all over the page. He wouldn't be still. :) The last one is for Kay. It's a stone angel that I kept from her mother's funeral almost six years ago.

I hope I didn't depress anyone. I just felt like sharing today. :) I also got hung up on a Christmas Moose and sketched him 3x. What can I say? He was fun and he took my mind off things for a little while. Look for pictures soon! :)

Happy New Year All! I pray that it's healthy, happy, and creative for all of us.

PS- If the paragraphs don't seperate when I publish this time, I give up, for now. It's getting on my nerves. Will try to fix it later! Sorry!

Holiday Wishes...

I just wanted to thank you all for all of you visits and comments, and to wish you a MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY NEW YEAR. May we all be healthy, happy, and prosperous in the new year.

EDM-Turnips, Key, Pencil, Christmas Ornament, Oh My!

Mama brought us four little turnips and some greens a few days ago to cook, and the turnips were so pretty I had to try a colored sketch. I left the overhead flourescent light on, so there were 2-3 light sources, which was not the best idea, but I tried anyway, It's kind of a study in purples and yellows, which went slightly awry. Those were white paper towels that the turnips were sitting on. The reddish blob under the front turnip is actually a blob of dried acrylic paint left on the masonite board . I didn't notice it until I started drawing, then the quote, "blood from a turnip," crossed my mind and my paper. One of the biggest lessons learned here is that charcoal pencils don't work that well on smooth Moleskine paper, at least not for me. I don't know which EDM challenge this would fit, but I think it must fit one of them. :)

EDM 37-Keys-This is a brass doorbell key. It has four sides and a round tip that fits through the door into a bell on the inside. When a visitor turns the key, the bell rings. It was given to me by my mother-in-law for Christmas years ago, and I've only seen one other one like it. I love it a lot.

EDM-240-A Favorite Pencil-This pencil is one of the handful remaining from two boxes of a gross each that a salesman gave to daddy on his job in the early sixties. He brought them home to me for school, and I still have a few in my hope chest. All of the pencils had a lumber company ad on them. I have been using this particular one for a long time. The green eraser is so old that it's too hard and slick to erase anything, but it looks good. The pencil has been getting tons of use since I started sketching every day, and is getting shorter by the minute. I think of my dad every time I use it. :) Both were sketched with a black sharpie and slightly colored with wc pencils.

EDM 46-Holiday Themed-This quilted ornament was given to me for this Christmas (2009) a few days ago. My aunt hand made them in a cathedral quilt design and gave mama and me one each when we visited her last Friday. It's special, because she made it for me, but it's made even more special because the red center is made from my uncle's bandana. He passed away at the end of January this year, and he is dearly missed. She says they also make good pin cushions, but mine will remain a hanging ornament, whether I put up a tree or not. I have sketched it 2-3 times, and I printed off a Christmas card, which I'm going to send my aunt in a few days. I think she will be surprised. I love it! :) WC pencil in Moleskine WC book.

Hope something on here made you smile! Thanks for looking! :)

EDM #179 & 249-Coffee Pots & Onions

EDM #179-Draw an onion-I sketched 2 yellow onions. The front one still has the dull outside skin on it. I've gone from "I can't believe I drew these!" :) to "I can't believe I drew these." :/ I can see all sorts of stuff to make better on them since I posted them, but that's how I learn. I'll do better next time! In the meantime, I kind of like these, and I used a carbon pencil in my Moleskine with buff color pages and posted them as is. No darkening with the pc this time!

EDM #249-Draw a coffee pot-I sketched my ceramic coffee pot bank twice. It was given to me by my best friend around 1974, not long after we moved into our new house. She brought it when she came to see us. It originally looked like the colored version (I used wc & charcoal pencils). It has set on my kitchen window sill, over the sink, for all these years. The pot on the left is how it looks now, after many washings to get cooking grease/smoke off. The paint finally got so ragged that I scraped it all off and now have a lovely shiny white pot setting on the window sill.

Our lives have taken many twists and turns over the years, but we have remained close friends, and we have coffee and laughs together on a regular basis. :)

EDM 251-Perfume

Avon & Este Lauder...who knew? :)

Yay! I'm back to sketching in my Moleskine book! The pages are so smooth after doing all that doll sketching in the Canson sketchbook. Much better! :)

The Every Day Matters challenge this week is to draw perfume, so I set these two up with a spotlight and sketched away. All the doll sketching paid off. I was more sure of myself when sketching these. The perfume bottle behind is frosted, and has a fuschia and black cap, and a black tassel and a gold band around the top. The egg-shaped bottle is new (got it for my BD) and is clear glass tinted at the top with fuschia gradated through purple at the bottom. It has a silver band below the cap.

This sketch is with my workhorse pencil on the M. buff colored paper. I wanted so badly to shade/color these bottles, but I have let so much other stuff slide while I did the AEDM challenge that I need to play catch up with the house and our clothes. I may go back and do a shaded/colored one though later. There's a whole world of shapes and colors in a bottle of perfume with a spotlight on it. The shadows also had color and fascinating shapes in them. Anyway, I scanned this one as is, pencil on paper.

The scanner scanned the paper as white. I darkened the pencil sketch with my photo program in this sketch. When I scanned the sketch in my photo program and darkened it, the lines came out blueish. What's up with that?

This is the first EDM challenge I've done in a while. It feels good to be back! :)