Water Totem

I am finally posting something! I have been on a long trip... that's my excuse! This piece, Water Totem was accepted into the Colored Pencil Society of America's International Show. I am president of our local chapter this year, so will be attending the show in San Jose.

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.

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!