March 2025 Sketching

In March I continued with daily-ish sketching: Mostly pencil sketches of something right in front of me, and a few from photos, including a few done with colored pencil. I'll just proceed to showcase the sketches, with commentary on the process where I'm so inspired.

Colored Pencil Sketches

I was inspired to pull out the colored pencils by some colorful birds that I photographed on a visit to the Albuquerque Biopark Zoo. These first two (Sun Conures and a reclining Flamingo) I did with watercolor pencil. I'm also including here a photo of the Sun Conures so you can see just how sweet they were, possibly the happiest creatures in the zoo because they had each other. 

 

Next, I tried my Caran d'Ache colored pencils on the flamingos, mostly because I like the range of pinks that I have with them better than the watercolor pencil choices. I consider this mostly a background fail: I started with some failed dark tree silhouettes in the background and everything seemed to go bad to worse as I tried to save it (there's no getting rid of the dark markings once they are there). In the end, I do kind of like it, but miss how the flamingos looked with a light background. I thought I might do them over, but that so far hasn't happened.

Graphite Pencil Sketches

Here are a few of my favorites from my (almost daily) drawings. I continued to eschew seeking out a great subject in favor of just drawing something in front of me. This led to to a few assemblages of objects in whatever room I was in. 

Perhaps my favorite is of this curio cabinet at my friend Astri's house:  

Then there is my cat, Lolly, always a ready subject, if not so good about sitting still. 

And more than once I used my coffee break time to draw, with several resulting sketches of coffee house interiors.  This is my favorite of that "genre."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'll finish off with a few from a great outdoors.  I chose the car as a subject precisely because if was a subject I wouldn't tend to gravitate towards. When I realized the driver was in the car, it challenged me to lay down the lines quickly before she drove off. Fortunately, she lingered awhile. Subjects from top to bottom: Tingley Open Space parking lot, Tree in Los Poblanos Open Space Pollinator Garden, and exterior of the Albuquerque Museum

.

Hope you enjoyed this little exhibit. (Sorry for the wonky layout--I don't seem to know how to control how it shows on the page). I'll be back shortly with bird stories and photos from the past month.