Flag Day

7" x 7", Prismacolor colored pencils 

on Canson Mi-Teintes pastel paper, Light Blue

(click to enlarge)

It's Flag Day today, so I'm re-posting this piece from last summer.  When I was growing up, everyone put their flags out on Flag Day but it doesn't seem to be widely celebrated today. I hang my flag out from Memorial Day until Labor Day—it just looks like Summer to me. 

(You can read last summer's post about this piece here.)

Blueberries for the first day of Spring

Prismacolor colored pencils on Stonehenge paper

approx. 6" x 8"

Blueberries rarely come in the wonderful old-fashioned balsa baskets any more. Occasionally I'll see them at a farmer's market, but the one that "modeled" with my blueberries here is part of a stack of them I bought at an estate sale.

Even on a simple drawing like this one, if the perspective of the container is off, the whole thing is a mess, so I worked on this sketch for a while until it looks right to me.

Here's how things started out:

I always love the look of  a drawing when just a few parts are completed. I think that's why I decided, right about this time, to keep the front face of the basket as the white of the paper.

When I'm not sure where I'm headed, I'll scan what I have and
play around by hand or in Photoshop to explore my options.

And there you have it...blueberries on the first day of Spring!

(If you're interested, I've got more blueberry drawings here.)

A Summer Still Life

7" x 7", Prismacolor colored pencils 

on Canson Mi-Teintes pastel paper, Light Blue

(click to enlarge)

The other day, I was looking at some fresh blueberries on an enamelware dish and thought they looked like an old-fashioned all-American summer day. So I started this little patriotic piece—you get the "flag" composition, right?—deciding to use this blue paper because it reminded me of sun-faded denim or chambray. As a result, the whole piece looks a little faded—I like that.  I have a thing about that paper with blueberries; I used it this very same week three years ago on this blueberry sketch!

I kept accidentally smearing the red pencil into the white areas, and had to redraw them once before just resigning myself to pinkish stripes. I was originally going to have a bowl of blueberries, but changed the bowl to a plate for a more casual arrangement of the berries.

One thing I'm still deciding: does it look better showing  a bit of the paper (below) or cropped as it is above? Feel free to leave me your opinion in the comments.

Happy almost-August!!

Some set-up and WIP pics:

(I had blueberries everywhere before I was done.)

Illustration Friday: Perennial

Blueberries...a perennial plant, and a perennial summer favorite. After doing that detailed drawing of the Royal Burgundy beans over the weekend, I decided to just do a quick sketch of these guys. (And yes, this is another in my unplanned summer preoccupation with drawings in blues and violets.  Maybe when the warm weather subsides, it will too.)

When I was scanning my sketch, and making my thumbnail for IF, it reminded me how much I love being able to crop artwork digitally. I never draw digitally, and when I scan, I try to keep the colors as close to my original as possible, good or bad. But cropping...that's one digital tool that I could play with for hours. When I start a drawing, it's nice to know that if I don't get the placement on the page just right, that cropping gives me a second chance. Even on a sketch this simple and small, cropping it differently can really change the look. What do you think...do you prefer one of these alternatives to the straightforward view above? Are you cropping-tool-crazy, too?

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