Stringland

I finally finished another in my music series. This one will go with Bluegrass Jam and Summer Songs. This one was fun and I enjoyed making changes all the way through.

Vampires and Giants

I haven't drawn at all this week because I've been over at Olympic National Park with my husband and a good friend. I cannot believe this place is in my state of Washington; it's so spectacular.

I got a total kick out of the new activity in the small town of Forks. It is the center of the "Twilight" series - both the books and the movie. The movie was not filmed here, but it is the base of the books. The town now has traffic jams and people spending money. There were moms with teenagers roaming the streets equiped with a map of the hot locations in town. The Park ranger told us they regularly get questions like, "is it okay to camp here with all the vampire activity in the woods?" I loved the population sign in one store window. There is an official store that is very dark and vampire-like outfitted in black and red.

About 8 miles from town, out on the Pacific Ocean, is one of my favorite places, Rialto Beach. It is one of the beaches along this stretch of ocean that is the depository for mammoth logs from the nearby old grown forests. These trees fall in the forest and then travel down the several area rivers in winter storms, are tossed around in the ocean, and wash up on the beaches. Their huge size is astounding. I am standing in front of a root mass from one of these trees. I thought its circular pattern would be appropriate for this blog!

Summer Songs

Continuing on with my music series, I thought of creating a partner piece to Bluegrass Jam. One great thing about summer is the plethora of outdoor music events. It was fun to explore this avenue.

My goal is to create 12 pieces in all. I seem to have 4 different directions going, so am going to attempt to create a partner piece for each of them before moving on to the next set. We have several trips coming up so my drawing time will be a little low for the next couple months. The brain can keep working however, and I plan to sketch out some possible ideas on those trips.

Buchanan's Pipes

I have a bit it Scottish blood in my ancestry. I thought it might be fun to make a bagpipe circle featuring the Buchanan tartan. I impressed the lines of the thistles. When I have these pieces professionally photographed, those impressions will show up more clearly.

Windpower

This drawing used a complementary color scheme and features several varieties of "straight" horns.

Music in the family

It's been great fun to draw these instruments in all their beauty. I've had music in my life forever; my dad was a drummer, my mom played recorder, my grandmother was a classical vocalist and pianist. I used to write songs, sing, and play piano, guitar and banjo. My son Ken started playing piano and guitar at a very early age, and when he was young, we were in bands together - it was so much fun. Now it's a total kick to watch what he's doing and learn how the music world works. I also love today's technology. People attend concerts - especially ones by him and Paul Dateh, and immediately post videos of the performance on YouTube. A couple times we've been up in Seattle watching a performance somewhere else in real time. This video is from a recent gig he and Paul did at UC Riverside. We were at this concert and this video was posted by someone in the audience. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qSchU0rMx4.

More links can be found at http://www.kenbelcher.com/ . Happy listening!

Quintessence

My son is a guitarist in LA. He plays many styles of music, one of which is jazz. He has a jazz trio, cleverly called The Jazz Three-O which consists of guitar, bass and vocal. Periodically they play with drums, sax and piano. This gave me the idea to do a jazz quintet. I tried to execute it with loose pencil strokes and be adventurous with the shapes as jazz is very much that way. Jazz musicians seem to like to be right on the edge of their boundaries, hence I took the images right to the edge as well. I originally was going to also add an alto sax, but there are just too many buttons on that instrument; simplyfing it was not an easy task for me.

Bluegrass Jam

This is the first of the music series based on a drawing I did many years ago. I used the color wheel as the color scheme. Since bluegrass music is a very crisp style of playing, I tried to make the lines tight and controlled. There's a lot of musical interaction in bluegrass as well, so the instruments are all tied up with each other!

Instruments Series

A few months ago I started an instument series in the round. I'm hoping to do 12 pieces all together. I don't have an overall plan; I just pick a new set of instruments when I'm halfway through the previous drawing. It's been fun and a little warped too.