Sunday 26 August 2012

Acorn and Oak Leaves in chalk pastel

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is tall.

Before anyone thinks that I've just pulled some random drawing and am going to stretch to make it work, I promise I did this specifically for the topic last night. No, really. I was thinking Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. Tall has to start somewhere, right?

I've been too much hung up on details lately, which is one reason why I haven't been posting on this blog. When I'm dealing with detail work I'm that much more likely to be unhappy with it, so I've been throwing out an awful lot of stuff. It's a habit I thought I'd worked myself up out of, but apparently not. Time to try to fix that. Sooo...

Yesterday, armed with the whole mighty oak thing in mind, I clipped a piece from one of the two oak trees at work (oaks don't grow in my part of the world, by the way. Not naturally, anyway. So of course they included two oak trees in the landscaping around the NATURE CENTRE where I work. Sigh) and took it home with me. And last night I spent a couple of hours making a mess. Multiple doodles of the leaves and acorn you see above. All broad stroke media. No pens allowed.

Ok, well, I did use a sharpie at one point, but it wasn't one of those fine ones.

This is the only part of the exercise you're going to see, by the way. For the most part it's crap. That's all right, though. The whole idea was to get myself out of a self-created box, after all.

And did it work?

Oh, I guess we'll see. Watch this space, as they say.

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Just as an aside -- I'm probably in the minority here, but I'm finding that the Illustration Friday redesign makes me less interested in participating. It's not because my blog visits have gone down; that's to be expected when a person doesn't have to visit the blog to see the picture. It's more because I'm finding that I don't visit the blogs anymore. It's faster just to look at the one page. Of course it is. But that, I think, is where the whole thing starts to lose something for me. By seeing all the works on one page, I'm missing the thoughts behind them. I'm missing the processes. Oh, I know it's still easy enough to click through and see the original page, but I'm much less likely to do so now.

Yeah, I'm basically lazy.

But still. It's a bit sad to think that my laziness is causing me to miss some good art blogs that I might be following now if I'd actually had to look at them to see the art.

As I said, though, I doubt that it's a majority opinion.

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