This weeks lab assignment was to draw a flag. I chose to digitally create a collage of flags:

The flags featured all have special meaning to me.

Old Glory: Our country, sweet land of liberty…

Rising Sun: Country of my birth

Croatian Flag: Country of DH’s birth

Lone Star State Flag : Birth State of my boys

Aussie Flag: Country of my daughter’s birth

Dutch Flag: Where DH & I met

Golden State Flag: Our home sweet home State

And I added the “Big Hat Lady” for fun 🙂

Credits:

All flags: Google images

Big Hat Lady: Rian Design

Overlay: Lindsay Jane Designs

(Apparently, the blog hop was cancelled due to lack of participation, but I did it any way…  so, “A Big Welcome To My One Woman Show!!!” :-))

Welcome!  It’s time again for the Drawing Lab Art Show Blog Hop.   I selected a few of my favorite work from the last three months.  This on-line class with Jeannie Dukic has been a lot of fun.

It seems the more I get into digital graphics/scrapbooking, the more I want to frame and embellish everything:

Of all the work presented, I found the portrait to be the most difficult, and the art journal to be the most fun.  I will have to challenge myself with portraits on upcoming artist’s choice weeks.

I used a scrapbook kit called “Let Them Eat Cake” – a Marie Antoinette theme.

This week’s assignment was to do a life drawing.  Our instructor suggested we look for a life drawing class locally to sit in on.  I really did not get a chance to look, and without readily available volunteers :-), I opted for this:

A life drawing of a baby :-).

This week was another student’s choice.  I did assignment #2 that I missed – drawing a bird:

I chose a common house sparrow (hmm… looking at it now, it looks more like a zebra finch).  When I was in college, I took a trip to the old country.  Since I was in travel mode, I wore the same clothes a lot.  My relatives started calling me a “kitakiri suzume” which translates to “a sparrow wearing the same clothes every day”.  I don’t mind, I like sparrows, they are cute :-).

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. – Gilbert K. Chesterton

This week, we were given incomplete line drawings to complete:

I was not sure to what extent we were to detail our drawings.  I just drew the first things I saw in the lines:

Left to right, top to bottom: snowman in top hat and suit, perfume bottle, choir boy, angel, and miner.

This week was another student’s choice lab.  My fellow lab student Melinda was kind enough to e-mail me the first two assignments I missed at the beginning of the year.  One of these was to draw cats.  Here are my two favorite ones.  The first is a drawing of a vintage/kitschy cat salt & pepper shaker that I remember from childhood:

I’m going to have to find one of these for myself one day.  The second drawing is based on cats I saw a drawing of some time ago by artist Rosina Wachtmeister.  She draws wonderful cats that have slightly human like expressions, and sleek elongated bodies. After drawing them in pencil/colored pencil, I extracted the cats and used some digital graphics and quote to make a layout:

This weeks lab was to build on last weeks drawing of a face.  We were to draw a fantasy creature.  I thought about all kinds of creatures, but I didn’t want to creep people out. So, I stayed within reason and drew a mermaid:

I’m really enjoying drawing, and doing these labs.

I was not too excited about drawing a face this week.  It just seemed a bit difficult to draw a persons likeness.  I decided to use my maternal grandfather as my subject:

The photo showed my grandfather with very short hair, and since it was such an old photo, there were less shadows to contend with 🙂

This weeks assignment was artists choice.  We were to work on a missed assignment, or one that presented a challenge for us.  Well, I was the recipient of April’s drawing lab  prize; a very nice set of colored pencils, eraser, and handmade journal from Jeannie.  So, I decided to do an assignment where I could use my new pencils:

This time, I used the letters from my last name.  I think the zentangle weekly challenge helped me on this one :-).

This weeks assignment was kind of fun.  We were asked to draw a bunch of scribbles, look at them from different angles, and then find something in them:

It’s a dog! 🙂

When I got this assignment, I was really excited. We were to come up with an art journal using watercolors, stamping, collaging, drawing, embellishing, etc. It started off ok, then I was just trying to salvage it:

I was trying to use paper dolls that I drew as my theme.  I made the background too colorful, and the dolls didn’t show up, so I drew black around them (too much).  Then I had to try to pull it all together with the black… well, it was fun doing it.

For this lab, we were asked to choose a subject and draw it at least 20 times during one sitting ( I drew 24).  I have a Betty Boop doll that sits on my work table and keeps me company.  My daughter won it for me from a claw machine when she was very young.  She used to run around the ice rinks waiting for her brothers to get off the ice.  This was before she started playing ice hockey herself.  And here she is:

The next day, we were to spread the cards out on a table, take some time to review them, and pick our favorites, and answer two questions.  Why do I like them? I like the first one because it’s cute, I like the latter ones because I improved in my detailing. What do they have in common? Aside from the first one, the ones I chose look better and they are more detailed. 

I think the ones in the middle were the worst since  I was trying different things, and frankly I was getting bored.  I picked up some speed toward the end and started concentrating and paying more attention to what I was drawing, knowing I was almost finished.