Monday grid

This was too much fun.
Over at Nina Johansson's blog, I saw a lovely grid (look at her Sept. 23rd post) and her notes about how she was inspired by Patty's blog to do a drawing grid. Teri at Painted Daisies also took up the challenge, and it seemed silly to resist the call.

My original thought - to do a thumbnail every hour for 8 or 9 hours straight - was too ambitious and unworkable given the way time gets away from me at work, and I can't really be spending 10 or 15 minutes on drawing in the middle of a meeting. What I ended up with was a grid that contains images from my Monday. My first drawing was at 6 a.m., as soon as I got up, and I did part of the coffee pot. I don't blame you if you couldn't tell what it was - that's the first image, on the left above the honey bear bottle. Gimme a break, it was 6 a.m.

You'll also find the steering wheel I was looking at while Katy and I waited for the doctor's office to open; a little swatch of skyline near work; tables at the company cafeteria; my relatively new cell phone, a pink Razor, which my kids pressured me into buying because it's "so cool"; the cup from my after-dinner tea; the dog, begging for food she did not get; and Lylah doing massive amounts of homework, which is what we did instead of going to my friend George's poetry reading tonight. At the top are the spotlights mounted on beams in our family room.

What went right with this exercise was that I created the rectangles last night, before I could give too much thought to what I would draw in them. I went for a variety of sizes and shapes to make the page interesting. Had I tried to create the "frames" depending on what I wanted to draw, it wouldn't have worked.

I'd still like to try an 8-hour grid, with one image representing every hour, but that would have to be on a weekend.
What was good about this is that even thought the sketches in themselves are no great shakes, it put me back in touch with the possibility that anything can make an interesting picture if you compose it well.

The other lesson, of course, is that a dog improves any composition. And that the presence of a girl - even a girl doing homework - makes the act of drawing more fun.