fifty missed christmases
I'm a little late for yesterday's offering, but sharing this image of an infant's grave (still?)born 51 years ago today felt timely.
(Fifty missed Christmases as of today's date).
mamma
angelic youth
strapped in [grove park cemetery, grove park, london, england, 2022]
an angel in tinseltown
god is love
under her wing
angel in red
the angel weeps [new southgate cemetery, brunswick park, london, england, 2020]
Day seventy-four of The 100 Day Project for 2021.
I don't think I have a lot to say about what is now yesterday's sketch. I'm actually pretty happy with, despite various shortcomings (shading is questionable (as usual), proportions are a bit off, detail kept to relatively minimal).
If I let my eyes drift as though I'm looking at one of those magic eye pictures, her locks look more like a two-faced alien in profile. But I'm relatively happy with how I rendered her hair if I focus on the sketch.
I wavered about shading in her back as shown in the source image but decided I would probably be unhappy with the results and wish I hadn't. So I didn't.
Throwback to wandering around the Hong Kong Protestant Cemetery on a hot and humid day, getting bitten like crazy by mosquitoes and only registering the banners on the fences warning of the potential of them carrying Japanese encephalitis on the way out...
The initial sketch was drawn with a 4H pencil. Overdrawn with an HB and a 6B; shading with the 6B.
Day twenty-three of The 100 Day Project for 2021.
Another late posting, though the sketch was completed on the day.
This time inspired by a photograph of mine of Melbourne General Cemetery, taken in November 2005.
I took it on the first day I took my very first DSLR - a Nikon D50 - out for a trial run before taking it to New Zealand with me on holidays.
It was the first and last time I got locked in a cemetery after closing time. I have a LiveJournal post about it but it contains a bunch of information about other extraneous stuff happening at the time, so maybe I'll edit it and share it here another time if you've not already heard the tale and would like to.
Meanwhile, getting on to today's sketch: I used an HB pencil for the base and then a 6B for shading and going over the outline. In retrospect, it was probably a little heavy-handed on the outline but I notice that my hand erases/fades some of the lines as I draw. I should probably use a tissue or a small square of paper to lay on the page under my hand to avoid that (I think I recall friends in art class doing that).
Her upper body is a little foreshortened. I started drawing her plinth about 4cm from the bottom of an A4 page. About halfway up her wings, I was worried I would run out of space for the full height of her. I had about 2cm to spare at the top of the page at the end, so if I'd started lower it would have been fine, but alas, I did not.
I also drew the shadowed section of the front of the statue on the left too wide so it's out of proportion with the rest of the drawing.
Drawing the plinth, I thought I'd gone too wide on the right panel but I've definitely thinned it. And the left side is possibly a little wider than it should be. The width of the lower section of the angel seems proportionate though, so there's that...
I realised, as I was doing my quick edit for the web, that I was wearing my glasses while drawing. I'm not sure if that had a positive or negative effect.
I generally dislike editing photos while wearing my glasses because they make everything on my screen look smaller; not right. (Though they do wonders for my figure when looking in the mirror...) If I'm going to be editing photos I always put my contact lenses in.
For those who don't know, I have a prescription of about -3.5 in each eye. I'm myopic (short-sighted) to the point that, without special (more expensive) thinned lenses, my glasses would look like the free ones on the NHS Jarvis Cocker used to sing about. Okay, maybe not that thick. This is a good illustration if you look at the -4 prescription
My prescription got as bad as -3.75 for a while but apparently, people become more long-sighted as they get older so my sight's improving over time (yay!) The last optometrist I saw did manage my expectations though. She laughingly told me that with short-sightedness as pronounced as mine it will never get back to 20/20 through ageing. Apparently, if I have to have cataract surgery later in life (which she assured me almost everyone has to) I may have 20/20 vision then. Something to look forward to in my old age, eh?!
Sorry, another tangent!
So today was another example where it looked better once I photographed it and 'stepped away from it'. Still lots of flaws but I'm learning.
And it was relaxing to draw while I listened to my music collection on random varying from The Cure, Diamanda Galas, Ash, NoFX, Aerosmith, Julia Holter, Jefferson Airplane, U2, Barry White to Madness.
A positive end to a more positive day than the previous two. Even washing a horrendously large pile of dishes is less tedious when listening to old episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cage.
Hopefully tomorrow my sketch will appear online on the day of creation. But I make no promises. I'm just taking things one day at a time at the moment. I hope you understand x
And I'll leave you with a song that popped up randomly on shuffle in the last 48 hours that felt appropriate to my current project. Evident Utensil by Chairlift. Enjoy!
where angels fear to tread
Day thirty-six of The 100 Day Project.
Illustrations: