Clay pots at the DBG

 I photographed a few large clay pots that are displayed at the Desert Botanical Garden.  I used the photos to sketch from, for the 75 Day Sketch Challenge...

A Smattering

A smattering of my ink only sketches for the 75 Day Sketch Challenge... which I SHOULD be done with, but am not.  Alas, it has not been as successful as I'd hoped in a couple of ways, yet it has been valuable and instructive.  It did NOT jump start my art and reinvigorate my desire to sketch... over time, quite the opposite.  It's become a bit of a drudgery, what is GOOD about that is I have learned that sketching in ink is not my preferred method.  I prefer pencil (not because I can erase, but because I can get more subtlety, texture, mood and details with pencil...and more quickly!)  This has been good for me to realize.  It did improve my ink sketching though, I think, and help me to not fear jumping right in with ink and no way to 'erase'... although that wasn't a huge hurdle for me anyway.  It helped me learn new ways to get ink to be more versatile (colored inks, trying new styles etc.).  But it is not as inspiring and easy for me to turn to as pencils or watercolor.  So it won't become a media tool I use 'alone' as often as pencils or paints.  I hope to crank out the last few sketches so I can at least say I completed the challenge and receive my 'artisitic license' from the artist who thought the challenge up.  It's a valuable challenge, and I recommend it... but you might be surprised at what you learn from it, like myself, the things I learned were not exactly the things I had set out to learn or hoped to achieve, but even that showed me some things!  So here are a few sketches from here and there. 

With this sketch of a Gaillardia or blanket flower, I was SICK of mono-color inks, so I used my Stabilo 88 fine water soluble COLOR pens (kinda like fine point markers) to sketch the flower then added water washes to make the sketch more of a painting. 

This day I fished a drowned grasshopper from the pool, and sketched it with 3 different colored inks on grey paper.  It made a rather 3d effect which was fun. 

Golden Brown ink in a Noodlers Flex pen of a little mushroom I discovered growing out of the dead and weathered remains of a fallen saguaro.  Very rare to find mushrooms growing in the Sonoran desert!  It was the result of a few days of monsoon rains creating the right conditions.  

This sketch of 'The Old Red House' was drawn loosely based on a picture in an Oregon travel magazine I brought back from Portland.  I used a rust colored Pitt or Zig pen.  Though I don't usually enjoy drawing buildings because of the need to get your perspective correct, or have a very wonky structure, I did enjoy this Victorian house... if you could see the actual photo, you'd see how off it is from reality!  ;)