Pencil Sketch "Perrrrfect"

Perrrrfect

I am trying to draw daily, sometimes I do well and others......life just has other ideas!  I usually take some time each morning, when my household is still quite, grab my cup of coffee and get out my pencils.  I am working on people, they are the most intimidating to me, so that is the area I want to practice the most.  This image was done with pencils and a few lines of charcoal.  I had fun with the hair and her pose made me think of a cat, thus the name Perrrrfect.  

Charcoal and Pencil Sketch Midnight Escape

Midnight Escape

 I got my first charcoal sticks and decided to give it a try.  I have loved the loose drawing other artists have done and thought that is what I would end up with.   As you can see, the finished product did not turn out very loose.  The nice thing about the sticks is that you can get a very dark value and they smear nicely. I did also use some pencil as it is hard to get any fine detail with just charcoal sticks. The woman in the image I imagine fleeing into the night under the cover of darkness.  She is alert and has a frightened look in her eyes.  What is she running from?  That is up to you, imagination is a wonderful thing.  I will try these again and see if I can come up with a looser image.

Circle Quilt

Now and then I get a desire to work with fabric.  My grandmother used to quilt (one of her artistic endeavors) and I have one of those quilts that have pieces of fabric from grandpa's shirts and grandma's dresses.  My grandmother had to care for her family  during the depression and saved every usable scrap of material. She would even cut buttons off of shirts and unwind the threads holding those buttons, then carefully wrap the thread around a small piece of cardboard.  Today, in our disposable society we are so spoiled.  It never occurs to most of us to use items we already have to make a quilt.  Like most people, I go to the fabric store and buy the fabrics I need.  This quilt I decided to do a little differently.  I had a child's dress in pink, orange and gold and used that color pallet to create my quilt.  I cut out as many circles as I could, using different sized bowls and bottle caps as my pattern.  I then went to a second hand store to find a nice big piece of fabric or sheet to use as the backing.  I found a pink striped fabric that worked perfectly and saved me money.  I used a plain muslin for the front backing and did buy some small pieces of coordinating fabrics for the additional circles.  After I cut out the circles I used an iron on fused backing to adhere the circles to the muslin then did a tight zig zag around each circle.  Once the quilt top was finished I used a batting in the middle and used a random stitch pattern to put it all together.  Running my wavy lines down the quilt vertically so that I could fit up to 1/2 the bulk into the space beside the needle and the machine. Overall, it is a fun quilt and a bit out of the box from the traditional quilt patterns.