While the folks back home are dealing with frigid temperatures, school closings, and stubborn furnaces, I'm safely residing in Arizona this January, doing art and walking and eating well. Today's work has been all about the final assignment for the pen and ink class.
I'm caught up in line art. I sketched a huge agave plant that I found in the courtyard outside the Baldwin Education Building at the Desert Museum yesterday. It took me an hour to get the sketch into a form where I could use it. Then I spent another hour and a half working on shading and laying down washes with a brush.
The assignment is to do five things in one piece of art: draw with pencil from a life sitting; turn the drawing into line art; using ink wash, find the lights, mediums, darks; add cross hatching; then highlight and shade with stippling. The result will be a real revelation for me as I have come to like the strong definition of line art, and then I find that the subtlety of adding wash to the clear cut lines also suits my temperament and my eye.
My soul is warming in the sunshine of pen and ink, wash and brush. It has been a good month to be sheltered from the cold.
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