Sketches



This was done by a pencil
with a peace sign on it!

 



 I have a number of ideas for my blog, but they are all taking more time to get together than I seem to have at this point in my life.  So, in this blog, I thought I’d try to get away from music, videos , poetry, educational reflections and writing and do some old fashioned art work.  I’m not nearly the artist my daughter is or that my friend Melanie is, for that matter, but I thought I’d get back into my art work for a while. 

I’m working a bit more with shading and highlights.  I think, soon, I want to work more on eyes.   A good eye is hard to get and to line two of them up in correct proportions and have both eyes fixed on a specific point is tough for me.  Then I also need to get the highlights right on the glossy surface, and then there are those little shadows made by the lids that have to be done right for the sake of dimension and/or depth.

It reads:
"the pencil is mightier than the sword."

I like fingers—though I still have far to go to get them right.  I like them because they are crooked.  I like the look of the hands of really old people.  Their hands have stories to them through years of things those hands have done

I’m in a draw phase. I don’t know why I go in cycles like this.  Sometimes I will spend my time reading, which I like to do, but then I get away from reading and write.  Then I can’t write so I make music, and then I can’t do music so I draw and so forth.  I end up being a jack of all creative trades but master of none. 



A lot of things I create I end up posting on this blog.  I do so because I am human, and it is in our human nature to share what we do.  Even though I post my stuff here, I know that not too many people see it—perhaps only about fifty or so people, even though  I average between two to three hundred “views” a month, but really, I suspect that actual views are mostly from friends and relatives.  Sometimes there are more views, sometimes less.  I know this from the stats page and from hits on my YouTube videos which are embedded here.



It's a really cool pencil.



  It doesn’t matter to me that not too many people see what I make--I left the fantasy of achieving money and fame from creative endeavors long ago. It is some other motivation that keeps me going—a kind of a compulsion—I have to be creative.  Creativity is one of the few things that help me to stay sane.  So I keep this blog as my scrapbook.  I measure my growth, here; and sometimes even my lack of growth.  Nothing I do is quite perfect, my flaws are obvious.  One of the worst drawings I’ve ever posted here is of Molly Malone.  One of my best is of the Hood Hood, I think, from the illustrations I did for the story of “Solomon and the Hood Hood.”  I like the illustrations I did of the Arabs for Mimi’s “Hassan” concept for our ESL work out at the base.  Someone has been making use of them, and that posting, I suspect, is being used by someone to learn about the parts of clothing that the Arabs wear, and that thought makes me happy.