Drawing streak – third week

For the third week I kept drawing something every day. Sometimes I waited until very late, but I am proud of not having missed a single day. Here is the mosaic of this week’s sketches:

And here are the links to Flickr pages with all download options:

Day 15 – Day 16 – Day 17 – Day 18 – Day 19 – Day 20 – Day 21

Day 15 represent four horses, one for each language I can speak – see the dedicated post that explains how I came to this picture.

Day 16 is a colour variant of a very nice horse picture I found on Flickr. I used watercolour pencils and a wide brush, so the result is a bit vague.

Day 17 represents a three-legged dog. He usually does everything he needs, so he doesn’t mind that much, but he has one less leg nevertheless.

Day 18 is a common subject of mine, I enjoyed imagining the shadows and lights of this horse.

Day 19 represents ideas and movements that locally aggregate in ordered structures, in an otherwise unordered space. In the end there will be more order than at the beginning, but the process could not be linear.

Day 20 was a simple colour experiment.

Day 21 is a part of an armour. The armour provides shape and strength, it can replace inner bones of the arm inside it. One should remember to take the armour off from time to time, to keep bones and muscles functional.

Now I get ready for the flight back home – I hope to see aurora lights over the Pole!

Drawing streak – second week

The sketch streak goes on! I had fun with colours and brushes again after ages, seriously, I don’t remember when I used watercolours for the last time!

Links to the Flickr pages of each photo, with bigger sizes available for download:

Day 8 – Day 9 – Day 10 – Day 11 – Day 12 – Day 13 – Day 14

Day 8 and 13 were done very late in the night and I chose themes and a technique that I could use fast. I painted the Minotaur of day 9 with a watercolour set and was genuinely surprised by the result! Day 11 is a sort of music score for drums, each dot is a eighth-note, and the colour indicates which hand to use. The source is a warm-up exercise on the snare drum. Day 14 was done with a new set of watercolour pencils, but without using the watercolour features, I think that it would remove the fur appearance.

Stay tuned for next week’s sketches! I’ll be travelling with the watercolour set, the watercolour pencils and the black pen that I used for the Lusitano horse of Day 12.

(Link to week 1)

About speaking many languages

m_5671ac41a88e7df327003b57 — source: poshmark.com

Inspired by an hilarious post from MadameZou, I have been thinking on what it means to me to be able to express myself in more than one human language. It is obviously a plus when I am in a big city or at a conference and I can talk to people in a language they feel more comfortable with. I did this juggling more than once and I am quite proud of that, at a technical level.

On a deeper level, there are people with whom I can use two or more languages, so we usually end up using one language for a set of topics and the other(s) for other sets. It happened with a Canadian friend of mine, with whom I speak French when we discuss private stuff, and English for work-related topics and when others are around. I absolutely melt when we switch to French in public for a couple sentences. It is a mark of closeness that is so innocent, yet so profound.

Now that becomes interesting. That lead me to think if I was equally fluent in each language in each topic, and I ended up realising that I am not – even when I am alone, when I write, when I dream, each language allows me a different range of expression, like clothes can allow a different range of motion. Some are closer to me and I feel I can move naturally, others are like a heavy coat or trousers quite too big, shoes that don’t fit my feet. I feel like I am made of four personalities who overlap only partially. English almost perfectly fits my French and Italian, while my German is so hesitant and inaccurate that it is almost a bad copy of myself. I almost fear learning a new language because I would feel so unbearably blocked in my expression.

If I count music and movement among the languages I know, then there are even more interesting observations. I speak music like someone who knew it well at some point, then didn’t practice for a long time. A bit like a old dog which knew a lot of tricks, and when asked, tries with some difficulty to find the movements again, but even when he fails you can notice how skilled he was. With movement it is an open path, I am on the way, hesitantly, but progressing.

Edit and drawing streak preview: my languages as horses – red is Italian, green is English, light blue is French, black is German. The first three are more similar, German is a growing foal.

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