All of last week was Mushroom Week. The first sketch was from life, while canoeing in Voyageur National Park. The rest were from photos I took while hiking there. They’re all either edible painted suillus mushrooms or hallucinogenic amanita muscaria—and a good thing we didn’t need to rely on my identifications, as the grouping in the second sketch is undeniably the edible painted suillus, although I mis-IDed them at the time as amanitas.
Mushrooms are fun to sketch, sort of halfway between people and architecture: they have more gesture than buildings, but more structure than people, with less nit-picky line detail overall. Sort of like sketching a medium-chill, politely attentive cottage, or a fortress tower waiting for its carry-out to be ready.
You’ll note times on these. Something that came out of the no-post weeks of working on gesture drawings and faces was a greater attention to how much time I’m spending, and right sizing that effort, so I can confidently jump into a sketch even when I have a limited block of time to work, knowing I’ll be able to get something satisfactory down. All of these took 10 to 20 minutes.
