Sunday, June 10, 2007
Craptastic
Although it isn't legally summer yet, yesterday was one of those perfect summer days - good for motorcycling, sitting outside drawing, bonfiring and tenting. Sunny, warm (70-80 degrees Fahrenheit), some puffy clouds, which almost seemed to threaten rain in the morning, but decided against it.
While the kids were occupied with friends (sleepovers have been the thing to do now that school's out), Husband and I went for a motorcycle ride around a nearby lake. Gorgeous, although Husband took a bug to the ear at one point.
When we returned, Eldest Son and Husband sat down to watch a little TV. SciFi channel was playing the movie "Lake Placid II." Eldest said that it was craptastic movie day on SciFi. Isn't craptastic a great word? Eldest was referring to movies with plots so predictable that you know what's going to happen before the movie even starts. All you have to do is insert your favorite mutant animal and you've got the storyline. The Lake Placid movies are about giant, killer crocs. After "Lake Placid II," the movie "Ice Spiders" was in cue. It was so craptastic that the guys didn't even bother to watch it.
Meanwhile, I sat on the back step listening to music and doing some of the drawing exercises out of "Keys to Drawing with Imagination," the book I mentioned in yesterday's post. I filled about three pages in a drawing pad; some of the results are above. The first image is of the exercise "Take a Line on a Walk." In this exercise, you draw a quick doodle first, a line that hooks up to itself. Don't think about this too hard - it's a doodle. The next step, what Bert Dodson calls noodling, is to fill in the doodle using various techniques. The first one I did is the large shaded one at the top, followed by the one just below it with the spiralling lines.
The second image above is a portion of a page on which I continued more exercises from Dodson's book. I didn't care for how much of the page turned out, but I did like the rabbit, cat, and flowers I came up with. The cat is the outline of Rotten Spotty, who kept sneaking out and dashing off every time the back door opened yesterday. Little bugger.
The third image is from the "Building Blocks" exercise in the book. Drawing bricks or stones (or stubbling, dotting, or stippling), you're supposed to stack them up until you have another image. This is one of my favorite exercises because I've always loved mosaics. I've drawn these sorts of trees before, but I particularly like the stone one here.
As for the bonfiring and tenting I mentioned in my opening paragraph, last night Young Son Number Two had a friend over. We started a fire in the fire pit. It wasn't really a bonfire, although the kids like to call it that. It was a campfire. It took some doing to get going because we didn't have enough small kindling to keep the fire alight after the paper burned up. When we finally had a decent fire going, we had the requisite s'mores, although we prefer to eat them disassembled. Afterwards, Young Son and his friend slept out in the tent. Ahh, summer. It's anything but craptastic.
Labels: bert dodson, craptastic, doodling, drawing, fire, husband, minnesota, motorcycle, movie, music, rotten spotty, scifi, sons, summer, weather
