I’m sitting here listening to a David Bowie record (yes, an actual record, complete with the sound of the needle scratching against it!) on the new record player I got for Christmas.  I finally set it up over the weekend and we’ve been listening to records ever since.  We have a small but cool selection, all collected from thrift stores, estate sales, and flea markets, and it’s been a fun way to work for the past few days.

But you are not here to listen to me drone on about our awesome music!  You’re here to listen to me drone on about my Doodles…

Week 2 of 2016 is obviously well over, considering that today is the 20th, but I am here today to share the second installment of seven (well…this week will contain only six, but I’ll tell you why later) original drawings and paintings by yours truly!

 

 

I sketched this flamingo in the car on the way to Kentucky for a baby shower today.  I was afraid to pull out the pen in the car, fearing that we’d hit a bump and the pen would go flying across the paper, so I didn’t actually complete the thing until later tonight (I mostly followed this video, but I strayed and did my own thing on the legs).

I figured I might not have a chance to Doodle much tomorrow, so I went ahead and did a second drawing after I finished my flamingo.  It’s my attempt to draw an old-fashioned baby carriage without actually looking at one.  I personally think it looks like a blue cast-iron bathtub on wheels…nothing at all like the cute little one that was on a card received by the special lady at the baby shower this afternoon.  Oh well, they can’t all turn out the way they look in my head!

It was at this sitting that I also painted January 7th’s Doodle of a spool, which I shared last week.

  
Today’s Doodle was a bit of a cheat.  I did it back in December when I somehow thought I’d have time to quickly whip up a calendar to give to friends and family as a Christmas gift…even though I didn’t start painting any of the images until after it should have gone to print.  So I abandoned it after a few days, but during that time, I did this watercolor of a sunset over Tillman Hall at Clemson.  My family’s tailgating spot has a view of Tillman Hall and the field in front of it, and in the evening that view includes an amazing Clemson sunset of orange and purple.

I shared this piece today in honor of the Tigers playing in the National Championship.  It didn’t help them win, but man was that an exciting game!

  
Sitting at the kitchen table at my in-laws’ house in our hometown while my husband was in a meeting nearby, I painted this scene we saw on the way to Atlanta for a weekend trip back in October.  Whenever possible, we take back roads for our trips, and on this particular evening we were trying to avoid Friday night traffic through Augusta.  For our efforts, we were rewarded with this view:

I love red barns, white fences, and sunsets, and it was just awesome seeing them all at once!  I couldn’t stop staring out the window as we passed by.  Then, at the last possible moment, I remembered my phone and snapped a picture just before it went out of view.  I decided it would be a perfect image to paint for today’s Doodle.  I think my cows look a little flat, so I’ve added to my list of goals to learn how to make them look a little more real.

 

  
After dinner tonight, I grabbed a cherry tomato out of the leftover salad and used it as my visual reference for tonight’s Doodle.  I didn’t copy it exactly, but used it instead to see how the light fell on it, and I painted each of the three tomatoes using a slightly different method.

Today’s Doodle is a colored pencil drawing of a pair of  scissors.  As I did this drawing, I counted them up, and I realized that there are at least 9 pairs in this room!  Eleven if you count the little ones for snipping thread.  That’s a lot of scissors.  

Doodle summary  
And that brings us to a total of six Doodles!  I’m saving number seven since it fits in with next week’s post better. 

This week’s Doodle total: 6 (technically 5, since the one on the 11th was from December…) 
Yearly Doodle total: 13

As I mentioned last week, the first weeks of this year have been crazy busy, so I missed a few days and wound up four days behind.  But in week 3, you’ll see that I’m trying to catch up by practicing a few techniques I’ll need to have decent command of in order to paint a watercolor of a photo I took on our trip to NYC in August. 

I’ll share them with you next week!  In the meantime, I must go flip my Billy Joel record to side 2!  

Thanks for reading,

Laura