Drawing Artists at my Open Studio

I am blessed to have co-founded an Open Studio group that has been meeting once a week for about five years now.  What a great place to practice sketching!

Every now and then I don't have a project to work on, so I scribble the people and things at the big table we all share.

Here are a few from the last few months:

One of the "rules"--sort of--of Open Studio is that if you come, consider bringing food to share.  So we often have delightful munchies.  This early season watermelon just looked and tasted so very good!  I had to sketch it.

Plus, I find plates, and all dishware, very hard to draw.  It was good for me to practice.  And I need to do more.

Of course, the table where we all work is piled high with art supplies.  I find I can never go wrong drawing art supplies!  The shapes and colors always make such a lively sketch.

This may sound silly, but I am particularly proud of the paper towel roll.  That was hard for me to SEE, much less translate to two dimensions.  It was a puzzle to me how complex a simple, white, cylindrical object could be!

And of course, the people around the table are terrifically interesting and easy to practice on.  They all work on their own projects, so they tend not to move very much! Perfect subjects for sketching.

Here a made a grid spread of people and more things on the table. 

Sometimes it's fun just to do a little comic of some of my fellow makers.

Looking at people, trying to move beyond a comics style to a little more of a scribbly portrait.  Lots of practice per page.

Here I did several blind contours of the same person as I worked up to the larger portrait.   Boy, mouths are really hard to draw.

For this next one, I drew everyone around the table (including myself) and had everyone sign their names. This is a cool practice I learned from the sketchbook artist lapin.  It captures the memory of the event, allows everyone to see the drawing, and invites everyone to add their own mark to the final version.

These pages contain so many of the things I LOVE about sketchbooks. 

Where else are you going to see fresh blueberry donuts and a glue stick depicted on the same page of art?