A Week of Drawings, Mostly Cats

Hello friend, and welcome to the first of what I hope will be many “What I’ve made this week” missives. These end-of-week letters are, I hope, going to be a nice blend of me sharing (or re-sharing) images of the sketches and paintings I’ve been working on this week as well as a few things I’ve been pondering - probably in relation to drawing and painting as that is generally what I’m thinking about - and maybe some other random bits and bobs that I’ve found interesting and decided to subject you to as well. I’m hoping that the weekly format of these longer letters, as well as the slightly longer time frame, will allow me to see a bit more of a pattern across my work than the daily posts on my personal website do. My hope is that I’ll be able to use them to see not the whole sweater that is my full body of work, nor the stitches of individual sketches and paintings, but the yarn that runs through all of it. With clumsy metaphor out of the way, let’s get into it.

The first thing I’m seeing looking over this week’s body of work is cats. This week I ended up relying fairly heavily on some photos I took of our friend’s cats, as well as a really cute one of our cat, Alva. It was a pretty busy week in which I knew that I wasn’t going to get much painting done, and would be scrounging for time to get much creative work done. Next week is finals for the University, and the week after that is finals at the Academy, so I figured it might be time to get the gradebooks in order and make sure students were aware of the things they needed to be finishing over the next few weeks. All that boring admin stuff ate up a lot of time that otherwise would’ve gone towards painting. So sketching was the name of the game this week. Quicker to set up and clean up after than paint. And I could work from the couch after dinner while we watched something. I’m also starting to notice how challenging it is drawing cats. Well, drawing portraits of cats. It’s not so hard to make a drawing that looks like a cat, but it’s substantially harder to make a drawing that looks like a PARTICULAR cat. I’ve noticed this particularly with our cat, Alva. Trying to get the drawing to look like him specifically - his unique characteristics - is tough. I’ve gotten so used to sketching portraits of people that the specific problems of capturing their uniqueness have grown less novel. This is not to say that I create a likeness every time, just that the problems inherent in rendering humans are generally familiar to me now. So getting to re-discover these novel problems, similar as they are to other somewhat daily problems, has been fun. I do love a good visual challenge.

I also spent a bit of time on some landscapes this week. Early in the week, and in my only painting session this week, I worked on the second pass of a painting of my grandfather’s house. This painting session seemed largely to be one of more fully fleshing out the lighting effects in the painting, as the most visible changes in the painting came from adding the lit windows to the house itself. But refining the silhouettes of trees and the light post, and plopping in the warmer sunlight to the left of the house also really furthered the painting. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the paint to dry over the next few weeks before I get to experiment with some glazing. My plan right now is to glaze a darker, more muted tone over the bottom half of the painting - all the grasses and foliage in the foreground. The second landscape was largely an exercise in trying to draw attention to a specific thing - in this case the zig-zag of the snow in the corn rows across the rolling fields. Cornfields always have such a beautiful linear quality to them once the corn has been harvested. I think it worked? It’s always such an interesting balancing act providing the context of the scene and trying to emphasize the thing in particular you were drawn to in the scene.

The other drawing from this week was a portrait of one of our friends done over a few minutes while we were playing a board game (Fliptoons, I think). As I wrote on Tuesday, the nice thing about drawing board gamers is that they usually cycle through a few specific poses, depending on what they’re doing in-game. So I can sketch while it’s not my turn, take my turn, and be reasonably certain to catch my sitter in a similar pose as when I left off several minutes prior.
Finally, I spent a few minutes today working on another winter snow scene. I find winter scenes are often a good chance to practice value composition. I’m still exploring potential winter paintings to paint this winter, and a good tree-lined path is always a landscape winner. Perhaps if I can find the time next week to be a bit more prolific with the painting, I may give this one a proper try.
I think that wraps up this first issue of my weekly newsletter. Thanks so much for suffering through it. I hope you enjoyed the paintings, or the thoughts about painting or something.

-ZR