My office window

This is a line art drawing of my office window that I drew today:

I like the way it came out. I took me about twenty minutes to do, which is good to remember when you are procrastinating your drawing for the day – it really is not a huge time commitment.

Doing this reminded me a lot of a drawing exercise I did a few days ago where you practice different types of marks – as in Matisse-like marks (which are curly) or Ben Shaun marks (which are almost like pointillism they are so uncertain and shaky. I am not sure where my marks fall on the spectrum, but this does seem to be in line with my drawing “style” these days.

I’m really happy with what I learned about leaves from this. When you look closely at them, how leaves really look, NONE of them are leaf shaped, at least in terms of the eye-shaped leaf that we all think of, and usually draw. Real leaves are at angles, so they look like everything from a thin line to a weird dented square.

Usually I would have tried to draw the leaves as big masses, but because this is a line drawing, and because I had the tree and the hills behind the leaves, I decided to skip that.

The folds of fabric on the couch, and the folded up blanket that’s on the windowsill where also hard. I am intimidated by drawing fabric and folds, but I am learning to just draw what I see and hope for the best, and, actually, it typically comes out ok. Sometimes when I am looking at just one isolated line that I am matching to how it looks (not how I want it to look), the line looks awful, but when I pull back my view and see the line in context of all the other lines, all of a sudden it works pretty well. This drawing what you see and not what you know can be a real mind-bender sometimes.

I got the perspective of my printer off. It was difficult, because my printer is not exactly square – it slopes in at the front a lot, which makes it look a bit futuristic, which is nice sometimes, but can be hard when I’m drawing it at an angle.

The block thing to the right of the blanket on the windowsill is a really big crystal. I got that down okay, but I doubt anyone would be able to guess what it is.

The thing to the right of the blanket is a radiometer, which is one of the coolest toys ever. Its a light bulb, but instead of a fuse in the bulb, there’s a little pinwheel that has panels that are black on one side and white on the other side. If you put it in sunlight, the photons of light bounce off the white side, but get sucked in on the black side. The difference in force is enough to actually MOVE the panels. It sunlight, the little panels spin around like crazy. It reminds me to have faith in things that are invisible, and seem inconsequential.