A pleasant morning of artistic pursuits...

I've had the house to myself for a couple of hours this morning and I'm taking advantage of the solitude to do a little drawing. I've also been looking through some of the wonderful children's books I purchased lately, looking for drawings to copy for practice. I'm posting this in a hurry because I have to leave for work shortly, so I may come back and revise it later.

These are the two little A.A. Milne books I got at the library sale. They are full of wonderful drawings by E.H. Shepard.
I certainly need to work on drawing children and people in general, so pictures such as these will provide some copying practice.

I'm going to try to begin doing things in a more "sketchbooky" sort of way buy putting many small drawings together, fitting as much as I can on each page. I think I try to draw things too big and then get discouraged because it takes so much time. I also want to write more in my sketchbook. This really gets me excited thinking about just doing little drawings that I enjoy and seeing where it leads!
I recently discovered Alisa Burke's blog. What a talented artist! One thing that really encouraged me was comparing her drawings to the model she's drawing from. The two are very different and the colors are even very different. You can see that she makes her own interpretation of the object. This is a very freeing thought; that my drawing doesn't have to replicate the reality. I love that she has lots of little "peek inside my sketchbook" links on each page. Gorgeous stuff!


I think it's really cool the way she writes all over the pages. Quite an inspiring blog! I highly recommend it! You can see more here.