This woman is a worship leader at our church. She sings on stage but when not singing she sits on side row with her family. Today her son was intensely interested in a stretchy rope that he brought with him and spent a while sitting in front of her playing with it. She did a great job parenting him, using a nice combination of letting him do his thing with reminders to behave and pay attention. She didn’t enforce, just reminded.
Natalie in Church
I found myself in church sitting next to Natalie and her family from my community group. I usually don’t sit right next to people and if I do I certainly don’t usually draw them. But I know Natalie and I know that her whole family are church doodlers so I felt comfortable drawing her. When I painted the drawing later I didn’t remember the exact color scheme except she was in light clothes and there was pink here and there. So, that is what i imagined and I chose the colors.
Eight Angry Saints
When I am sitting in church, cafe and waiting room and have finished a drawing I often will not start a new one from observation. I will just start making something up and draw that. I will often just start with a long line and then let that tell me where to go. The woman’s hair in the front was the first long line. I did that one then just started repeating the shape of the face and the hair, adding in variations just to see what expressions and looks I could come up with. I added halos and all of a sudden they were saints.
Scene in a Museum
Sometimes I see someone’s face and something stands out that I am attracted to. In this case I just happened to glimpse a woman with a very distinct nose. I wasn’t able to see much more of her so instead of trying to draw her from life I just started with the curve of her nose as I remembered it and made up most the rest. I also remembered her hair style and incorporated an stylized version of that as well. When I draw from memory and with no exact reference I will often turn the person into a museum piece of some sort. In this case she became a sculptural bust. But she was on the right side face left and that left a big blank space on the right. So I thought it would be fun to draw her looking at a painting of the rest of herself.
Preacherman
We had a guest preacher a few weeks back. He was a snappy dresser so I started to draw him. However, I didn’t really like his message, it was too preachy, formulaic and simplistic for my taste.
Mindscapes
This woman was in front of me at church. Once I finished drawing her profile I lost interest in drawing the rest of the church scene so I started making up a story about her using images instead of words. What she thought, what she said, what she actually was living and how different they were.
I was scanning a sketchbook from 2020 recently and noticed a pattern in a number of drawings. There were a number of nudes with arms raised in joy, ranging from the simplest of stick figures to full nudes in a domestic setting. I thought they all looked happy so I am gathering them together and showing them to you.
Part of the reason for showing them is because I saw the pattern. But another is that happy nudes are a rarity. Most of the time when a nude is presented in art, they are meant to be seen as serious or sensual or sexual or erotic or romantic or beautiful. Not many are created to be seen as happy. But happy is just as legitimate an emotion for someone who is nude as any other emotion or feeling.
