When you don't have enough time for creative pursuits...

[wyld_dandelyon]

You try to make time do double duty.  For instance, I spent some of my time at panels at Duckon drawing musical instruments for the next Torn World contest. Pencil sketches, then pen and ink.

And this week, My Angel and I went to Summerfest, where we wandered more than we planned, then headed to the stage the Moody Blues would be playing on. We'd planned to get to that stage much sooner than we did, so I brought a sketchbook. Still, I did get a couple of sketches in before it got too dark.

The first person I picked, because I liked her smile, turned out to be an out-of-town friend of a friend. 

The second one was talking with My Angel.  Interestingly, the second one looks better, but also looks a lot less like the person I was sketching than the other.  Both are flawed, of course; I need practice drawing people, which was the point of the exercise.

The music was good and pretty much exactly as expected.  Louder than I wanted, but that's nearly always true of anything that could be even remotely called rock.

The food was...an adventure.  The lemonade is made with real sugar, thank goodness.  But the Thai place that had a booth, after calling their manager over, assured me that the Satay sauce has wheat in it--and so does the fried rice! 

During the concert, one of the drummers came forward to say he just had a birthday--his 69th.  Which means he's lived through the 60s twice.  Then he held his hand up and said this gesture meant peace the first time--and viagra the second time.  So things haven't really changed after all, it's still all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll.  Which inevitably led to a song.

Sadly, we didn't get close enough for me to watch their fingers.

The next day I went back for lunch with some of the other ladies at my current job.  The food adventure thing again; most of what's there is sandwiches of one sort or another, and the fresh roasted corn is just as bad for me as the wheat, *sigh*.  Standing in line to get food, I lost them, and they stayed lost (or, perhaps, I did) until it was almost time to head back.  I got to hear a very nice cover of Dark Side of the Moon while the noonday sun was burning my skin, which was followed by one of the band members playing Didgeridoo quite well.  I'll have to find out who that band was!

And if we go back tomorrow, I'd better use sun block and take a hat! 

As well as my sketchbook.

Comments

[red-trillium.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a great idea, multitasking creativity. Enjoy it if you go back!

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[flutterbychild.livejournal.com]

I always have my sketchbook on me when I leave the house. It sometimes leads to drawings of mundane shit like bottles of water and rolls of paper towel, but any drawing is practice, yes?

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Yes!

Hey--welcome, if I didn't say so before.

And doing the mundane things, the "easy" things, wrong in a drawing will bug people more than getting something hard wrong.

I'm very frustrated with the first sketch's mouth. The slightly crooked smile was what attracted me to draw her in the first place, but I couldn't get it right. And drawing from real life is...interesting. People keep on talking and moving and stuff. :-D

[flutterbychild.livejournal.com]

They do. To me, it's equal parts annoying and frustrating...but always a challenge.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

And yet, you can see their personality when they're there, which you don't get (or don't get much of) from a picture.

I think that's part of why the second picture is more successful, as a picture. It shows the friendly and vivacious nature of the woman I was sketching, even though it missed on some of her features, and missed totally on her age.