Spirit Of Paint By Numbers

The Detroit Artists Market is having an auction to benefit the gallery and the artists participating. The artists were given a numbered blank imprinted with an image of the Marshall Fredericks sculpture, The Spirit Of Detroit. This was designed by the creator of paint by numbers, Dan Robbins. The artists were encouraged to do whatever they wanted with the blanks; paint, collage, cut up, defaced deconstruct, reconstruct, whatever.

I chose to do a fairly straight up version done in colored pencils, but I intentionally left the numbers visible, as I wanted them to be a part of the final look. i also did one in charcoal and rubbed out the highlights.

The Exhibition and auction start tonight at 6:00 and runs through July 12th at the Detroit Artists Market, 4719 Woodward Ave. There's a lot of fun stuff down there, as I saw some of the finished works when I dropped mine off last week, so come on down and have some cheap wine and cheese. And the Detroit Festival Of Arts starts tonight, too, so there's plenty of fun stuff to do.


Version 1
18x24
charcoal on printed numbered blank


Version 2
18x24
colored pencil on numbered blank

Here is how the original numbered blank looked like as seen on the DAM postcard.

Figure Drawings

Here are a few charcoal drawings that were done last month in my figure drawing class. I really enjoyed doing this erase out technique as it was similar to sculpting in some ways by taking away and forming the shapes instead of adding line. Plus, in creating the image in this way gives off a smoky or hazy atmosphere. 

I'll definitely have to explore this technique some more.