Sketching, day two

And here's my sketch for today. Copying from Raphael's drawing, trying to manage the proportions and angles and lengths of the different body parts felt like piecing together a puzzle. Planning to post it made me nervous and self conscious at first, but as I settled in there wasn't room in me for anything but trying to put it all together, which was both peaceful and stimulating.

My next Madonna and child is drawn out on nice paper, ready for color. I think my Mary looks a few years older, maybe fifteen?

Sketching

Yesterday my friend gave me some fresh milk from her goats. As I drank, I felt blissfully nourished, suddenly infused with a sense of well-being. I wondered if there is something in the milk of healthy contented mothers that passes their sense of well-being to whomever drinks their milk. The idea seems more than plausible to me. In honor of real milk and my friend's sweet goats I did a little sketch of a goat mama and baby, not from live models but based on various pictures from around the internet. I tried to learn from all the pictures to make my own design and not rip off any particular photo.



I also did a little sketch from an Ingres drawing. I made both drawings with a burnt umber Verithin Prismacolor pencil, a hard colored pencil that makes a line weight I like and is easy to shade with. This is a good pencil for me to sketch with, because it doesn't erase well and, after a certain point, I can't be persnickety,

And here is Ingre's drawing, from The Museum Syndicate.

Last winter and spring, before my summer art hiatus, I made sketches like this every day, but I rarely shared them, because I felt that expecting to share would distract me from self-education. And, I am embarrassed to say, I didn't want to post my drawings by the master drawings because my drawings are not as good. But I'm over that. Maybe I'll even post everyday for awhile. Maybe some of you, my readers, will also sketch the master drawings I share, and we can grow together.

A Madonna and Child attempt

Instead of Illustration Friday, I decided to do a Madonna and Child last week. My Mary unfortunately turned out more like a sweet big sister than a young mother.  I want to make something more or less print-worthy, so I'm going to draw another one next week with a similar design and concept but a more grownup looking Mary. I usually like to make Mary look Jewish, but I thought that she needed light hair to stand out against the dark sky. Since her hair is mostly surrounded by a halo, and the sky is not as dark as I originally intended, I don't know if that was necessary. Maybe I'll give her dark hair next time.  Or maybe I'll make the sky darker. We shall see.

 The drawing was inspired by the last stanza of "A Christmas Carol" by G.K. Chesterton, and had I been happy with the Mary, I would have put some lines from it in the blank ribbons. Here's the whole poem:

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap, 

His hair was like a light.

(O weary, weary were the world,

But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast,

His hair was like a star.

(O stern and cunning are the kings,

But here the true hearts are.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart,

His hair was like a fire.

(O weary, weary is the world,

 But here the world's desire.)

The Christ-child stood at Mary's knee,

His hair was like a Crown,

And all the flowers looked up at Him,

And all the stars looked down. 

Illustration Friday: Spider

Loula is a bluebird with refined, somewhat extravagant tastes, and she loves the custom
spider-spun lace curtains Mme. Arachne has almost finished for her.

Splendor in the grass

It's been raining a lot. The grass is vividly green, soft and cool to the touch, growing fast. Our freely roaming hens are laying lots of eggs with the deep yellow-orange yolks that come when they eat spring grass and weeds. The milk we buy from a local farmer is sweeter when the cows are on spring grass, and the rich cream on top is a delicate yellow. The first fresh greens we eat in the spring are mediated to us by animals eating the grass.

My littles are enjoying our new batch of Buff Orpington chickens, "kid chickens," they call them, because they are older than chicks but they are half the size of a full grown chicken. Buff Orpingtons are an old-fashioned dual-purpose breed. That is, they can be kept for both eggs and meat. They are lighter than modern meat chickens and lay less than modern egg-laying breeds, but they are hardier, calmer, and more self-sufficient. And they're pretty. I love their soft golden color.

Me with my snuggly littles. 

And finally, a fascinating, even amazing, video by Zimbabwean ecologist Allan Savory about how animals and grass together in the right combination can restore regions that are turning into desert. His discoveries have far reaching implications and this twenty-minute video is worth the watch.

Pictures by Jean Adrien Mercier

I recently discovered the delightful French illustrator Jean Adrien Mercier. Besides his dates (1899-1995) I haven't learned much about him. Any info online is probably in French, which I can't read, more's the pity.

I especially like these illustrations of fanciful transportation. I love the fresh, candy colors, and the cheery froth of bows, streamers, flowers, feathers, cherubs, stripes, and hearts.

And a bouquet of flowers--just so pretty.

I found all these images on Pinterest. I didn't pursue them back to their origins, because I wasn't familiar with the sites, and I had a paroxysm of anxiety about visiting unknown places online.

I'm bummed about not having anything of my own to share for awhile. I've been carving some, but there's nothing interesting to show, yet. Mostly I've been gardening, trying to get organized and trying to get a decent amount of sleep. Last spring and summer, I did no art at all. That's not my plan this time, but there will probably be less than I did in the winter.

Jessie Wilcox Smith illustrations for a beautiful fairy tale

I must have been seven or eight when I came upon a chapter of George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin in an anthology. Princess Irene's discovery of the mysterious, holy, magical great-great-grandmother spinning her silver thread at the top of the house touched me with a feeling of goodness, beauty and longing that I had never yet encountered in a story. I didn't know how to find the whole book. I never thought to ask a librarian or anyone about it, and maybe it was better just to cherish the lovely fragment for a time. It fits the story. Princess Irene can't always find her grandmother, just for the looking, either.

Many years later, I bought my own facsimile edition with illustrations by Jessie Wilcox Smith. I don't have that book anymore, but there's always the Internet to look at.

 My younger two children and I have been listening to the The Princess and the Goblin on Librivox.org, a site with free, public domain audiobooks read by volunteers. (The quality of reading on the site is varied, but Andy Minter, the reader on the above link, is quite good.)

Also through the magic of the Internet I have unearthed some words by G.K.Chesterton about this wonderful tale. I hope you will humor me as I share a long, insightful quote. (It's from his introduction to George MacDonald and His Wife, by Greville MacDonald.)

"Of all the stories I have read....it remains the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase, the most like life. When I say it is like life, what I mean is this. It describes a little princess living in a castle in the mountains which is perpetually undermined, so to speak, by subterranean demons,who sometimes come up through the cellars. She climbs up the castle stairway to the nursery or other rooms, but now and again the stairs do not lead to the usual landings but to a new room she has never seen before and generally cannot find again. Here a good great-grandmother who is a sort of fairy godmother is perpetually spinning and speaking words of encouragement and understanding. When I read it as a child, I felt that the whole thing was happening inside a real human house not essentially unlike the house I was living in, which also had staircases and rooms and cellars. This is where the fairy tale differed from many other fairy tales. Above all, this is where the philosophy differed from many other philosophies. I have always felt a certain insufficiency about the ideal of progress....It hardly suggests how near both the best and worst things are to us from the first, even perhaps especially at the first. And though like every other sane person I value and revere the ordinary fairy tale of the miller's third son who sets out to seek his fortune, the very suggestion of setting off travelling to a far off fairy land prevents it from achieving this particular purpose of making all the ordinary staircases and doors and windows into magical things."