Saturday, May 12, 2012

Day 3 - Agios Nicolaos Crete

The challenge in this lesson was to do 3 20 minute sketches, one had to have people in it YIKES, and we were to spend 20 minutes TOTAL, sketch and paint. I always like to do the hard stuff first, so I did the people(Bob and Sue totally imaginary), I cheated a little and only did their backsides, it was fairly easy to paint this. I decided I REALLY wanted to attempt the harbor, and all those cool orange roofs, I trimmed this down to the barest bones, and figured I'd only do two sketches so I'd allow myself 40 minutes for this one. While I did go over the 20 min mark, I only went over 10 minutes, so I added the little map of Crete, that took 5 minutes. Wrote the fake journal stuff and I was done in the 1 hour time limit. About the journal text, people that view my daily journal pages, are used to my cursive text, some may have followed my sketchbooks long enough to know why I write in my journals this way, for everyone else I'll explain why (and maybe keep from getting dinged in class for my handwriting). A couple of years ago, my grandson Joseph informed me that he was not learning cursive writing in school, that they were learning to keyboard, and how to sign their name in cursive but that was all. Well his grandmother was appalled, and that Summer Joseph learned to write his cursive alphabet while he was with us. I informed my other grand children that if they wanted to be able to read their grand mother's journals, they better learn cursive writing, from that day, until now, almost all of the text on my journal pages is written in cursive. I must admit my handwriting has improved doing this, because I do try to write as clearly as I can. So that's what that is all about.

2 comments:

  1. Laure Ferlita said...
    Oh, this rocks, Capt Elaine! Just love the whole page! The map of the island is a wonderful addition. Really good job with Bob and Sue, but your tour de force here is that harbor! Awesomely done! Love the bright happy colors and the simplified lines. 

Something I often recommend is using color to harmonize very different sketches (which sometimes means departing from the photo ref). There are three different blues in all the sketches...adding obvious hints of the other blues into the each one will add a great deal of harmony. Using the red of the bathing suit in the harbor sketch or the orange from the roofs in the bathing suit would add harmony. Adding an orangey dot to show a city on the island would create what I call the trifecta of color and it's where you use one color like the reddish-orange to help move the viewer's eye around the page to all the sketches. It's a simple, but very effective use of color. 

This rocks, Captain! Super sketches!
    MAY 14, 2012 9:41 AM

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