Recent Daily Sketches

I am 59 days into my 75-day sketch challenge and I am finding myself growing a lot more comfortable with the sketching and painting process!  I really do feel freer with it, and I find myself loosening up about it.  And that is wonderful!  I no longer stress as much about being accurate or perfect, but try to have fun with it.  That is the main thing.  I still wonder each day what I am going to sketch, and find a little anxiety about that.  I try to keep it relevant to the day, but that is kinda hard when days get routine.  I do have a big stash of reference photos I can sketch from, though, as I did one recent day:

The reference photos are from one of my Pbase photo galleries, here and here.  I have been very much into nature photography from 2005 through current day, though in recent times my photography has been more for trips only.  And now that I want to incorporate travel sketching into my trips, I am not sure how much photography I'll be doing since I'll want to sketch too!

But I do try and sketch from life when I can, even mundane stuff like running shoes.

 This sketch was one that actually required maybe the most concentration of all I have done so far...all those twisting laces!

Sketching our little Christmas cactus was actually easier than I'd have thought, given all the little pad segments:

So now that I am growing more comfortable with both drawing and painting, I hope to incorporate into my "schema" the ability to use more artistic license in my use of color in my sketches.  It's been difficult to pin down and articulate what I want to grow into, but I have come to understand that it's about choosing personal color rather than local color.  There is a great thread on Wet Canvas started by Virgil Carter on this topic, and I think Virgil's work is a wonderful (if especially vibrant) example of the use of color I'd love to incorporate into my art.  I've seen it before, in the work of John Nieto, Sinclair Stratton, Patrice Federspiel, Jo Lynch, Harriet Peck Taylor, and many others...artists who are not enslaved by local or realistic color, but freely incorporate vibrant and wonderful colors into their work.  I'd love to do that!