Lemonade Chronicles Life; Gently Squeezed

Author Archives: Rick

The Reluctant Smile

12 March 2018 8:07 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

In this week’s pencil drawing I take a different approach. Instead of someone famous I attempt to draw an awesome picture of a grandmother. This grandmother was fondly remembered by their grandchild in a Reddit post. The person who posted the picture indicated that their grandmother didn’t really like smiling in photographs, but they were able to capture a smile in a candid photograph. I was moved by the picture and offered to draw it for them.

I feel that I fell short in appropriately representing the grandmother’s smile – I felt the drawing was, while technically good from lighting and shading, a bit dark.

Here’s the process.

First, please enjoy the wonderful picture of the grandmother.

The wonderful candid capture of the smile

Here’s the start of each Read More

Posted in: Art, Drawing, Life and Family ⋅ Tagged:

Practically Perfect in Every Way – Drawing Mary Poppins

3 March 2018 10:17 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

One of the most iconic female movie characters is Mary Poppins. In 1964 Julie Andrews played this no-nonsense nanny who swoops into a troubled family and helps the dad recognize the importance of his fatherly role. Here is the process I used for drawing this 1964 version of Mary Poppins. I wonder how well Emily Blunt in “Mary Poppins Returns” will be able to portray the Mary Poppins we all know and love from the original movie.

As always, I start with a 1″ x 1″ grid on both the photograph and my drawing paper. For this drawing I mainly used a 2B mechanical graphite pencil and I used an 8B and 6B wooden pencil for the hat/shadow area and the background filler.

Starting with a grid

 

As I went along I noticed that the nose was a bit too wide and that the right nostril was too high.  Read More

Posted in: Drawing, movies ⋅ Tagged: ,

Drawing a Gospel Warrior – Rev Billy Graham

27 February 2018 11:21 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

The Christian community lost one of its most prolific evangelists this year. Reverend Billy Graham introduced the Gospel and Jesus to many, many people helping them understand that Jesus defined love by dying on the cross for everyone. This is my tribute to Billy Graham.

This is the process I took to draw a picture of Billy Graham I found online. I normally start by drawing 1″ x 1″ grids on both the photo and the paper where I’ll draw the picture.

1″ x 1″ grid pattern

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Posted in: Drawing, God's Country, Jesus, signs of God ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

Drawing a Single Cylinder Custom Motorcycle

18 February 2018 7:05 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

I ride a motorcycle daily – commuting 100 miles to and from work. Motorcycles are my drug of choice so I wanted to try my hand at drawing a realistic motorcycle using pencil. Here is the process I took.

I started with a photo of a motorcycle I wanted to draw and added a 1″ x 1″ grid. I then made a 1″ x 1″ grid on the drawing paper. The next steps are trying to replicate the motorcycle on the drawing paper and then add the lighting and shading effects to give it the realistic look.

Here is the series of pictures.

Getting started

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Posted in: Drawing, Motorcycles ⋅ Tagged: , ,

Drawing the Shawshank Redemption Movie Poster

18 February 2018 1:55 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

I really liked the Shawshank Redemption movie. A story of a really honest man who finds himself exploited by a faulty legal and prison system only to arrive at the other end victorious. One of my all time favorite movies!

I liked the movie poster showing Andy (Tim Robbins) and Red (Morgan Freeman) beside each other so I wanted to try to draw it. This is the process I took, the mistakes I made, the changes I felt were necessary and the final drawing. I still felt like there were problems with the drawing – especially in Andy’s character, but decided to go ahead and consider it completed. Please follow along with the process by viewing the photos below.

The start – creating the grids.

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Posted in: Drawing, movies ⋅ Tagged:

Drawing Dolores O’Riordan

18 February 2018 12:04 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

When the world sadly found out that Dolores O’Riordan passed away on 15 January 2018 it was a shock to Cranberries fans around the world. I wanted to draw a picture of Dolores and found this one from one of the Cranberries’ performances.

This was my process to draw Dolores from a screen capture of when the Cranberries performed “Zombie” on Late Show with David Letterman – in November 1994. I normally create a 1″ x 1″ grid on the picture then on the paper where I’ll draw the picture. Here are a series of pictures of that process.

Here’s the screen capture of the YouTube video from which I decided to draw the picture.

Screen Capture

Screen Capture – Dolores O’Riordan

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Posted in: Drawing ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Define: Love

2 July 2015 11:50 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

When we do wrong (and we all do wrong) God calls it sin and it separates us from Him. God has provided a way for everyone to gain and maintain their relationship with Him.

God's Love through Jesus - that we all need.

God’s Love through Jesus – that we all need.

Posted in: God's Country, Jesus, Life and Family, signs of God ⋅ Tagged: , ,

Making Lemonade (Skateboard Style) out of Lemons!

16 December 2014 9:27 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

One sees an abandoned, dilapidated hotel; another sees skateboard paradise:

Posted in: entertainment, God's Country, Lemonade from Lemons, movies, Nonfiction ⋅ Tagged: , ,

God is good…

12 October 2014 9:01 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

God is good...

Posted in: God's Country, Jesus, Kid's Stuff, Life and Family, Nonfiction, signs of God

A “Fishy” Story?

8 October 2014 8:54 am ⋅

You know why Christians use the fish symbol on the back of their cars, right?

Well let’s test just how well you know the history of the fish symbol. The Christian "Fish"With all that is going in in northern Iraq with ISIS killing Christians and others who won’t convert to Islam it might be very applicable today.

When we were kids – well at least when I was a kid – we had special ways of communicating with our friends. We might wave a certain wave or we might all wear the same hat or we might all have a special word that only our closest friends knew the meaning of. We did this out of friendship, but sometimes if we were playing “Cowboys and Indians” or “Cops and Robbers” we might have a special way to communicate so we knew who we could trust.

Click here to continue reading this story to see how Christians needed a special way to communicate.

 

Posted in: God's Country, Jesus, signs of God