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Sketchbook Saturday

Sketchbook Saturday

This is a charcoal sketch I did in 1992. I still love working with charcoal because I like to smudge it for a smooth texture. I used to do my hair like this a lot so it may actually be a self portrait (kind of).  It was also how Janet Jackson did her hair in the Pleasure Principle video so maybe I was trying to draw her. Not sure now!

Sketchbook Saturday

This week is a four-in-one! I don't know exactly when these are from since they are just labled 1990s in the file.  I had kept my hair shoulder length or longer when I was in my teens but was considering chopping it all off into some cute short cut. The drawings below are of some ideas I had of what I wanted to maybe do.  The first two I think were what I thought one cut would look either curly or hot ironed. Notice the rat tail on the third one! I changed my mind and kept it long because I just loved my hair too much!

National Poetry Month 2015 - The Harlem Renaissance - William Stanley Braithwaite

Poet, William Stanley Braithwaite 

(image source:  http://www.hellenicaworld.com/USA/Literature/BenjaminBrawley/en/TheNegroInLiteratureAndArt.html#Page_56)




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From Wikipedia:

William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite (December 6, 1878 – June 8, 1962) was an American writer, poet and literary critic.

Braithwaite was born in Boston, Massachusetts. At the age of 12, upon the death of his father, Braithwaite was forced to quit school to support his family. When he was aged 15 he was apprenticed to a typesetter for the Boston publisher, Ginn & Co., where he discovered an affinity for lyric poetry and began to write his own poems.

From 1906 to 1931 he contributed to The Boston Evening Transcript, eventually becoming its literary editor. He also wrote articles, reviews and poetry for many other periodicals and journals, including the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, and the The New Republic.

In 1918 he was awarded the Spingarn Medal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

In 1935, Braithwaite assumed a professorship of creative literature at Atlanta University. He retired from Atlanta University in 1945.

In 1946, he and his wife Emma Kelly, along with their seven children, moved to Sugar Hill—a neighborhood in Harlem, New York—where Braithwaite continued to write and publish poetry, essays and anthologies. He died at his 409 Edgecombe Avenue home in Harlem after a brief illness on 8 June 1962.

Braithwaite published three volumes of his own poetry:

Lyrics of Life and Love (1904)
The House of Falling Leaves (1908)
Selected Poems (1948)

Braithwaite edited numerous poetry anthologies over the course of his career. The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia holds forty boxes of manuscripts, correspondence, and other related materials related mainly to this editorial work, in three separate Braithwaite collections.

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BLAH

Sketchbook Saturday

Since I am going in chronological order through my scanned images, this one is another from 1989.  One thing about me since I am biracial and raised by my white mother and stepfather, I had a tendency to want to draw things that were particularly "ethnic" and this is one of those.  It is my attempt to be very clear that the girl I am drawing from my imagination is Black without making her face super dark.  I liked the challenge of being specific with the features while trying not to go overboard in any stereotype.

Sketchbook Saturday

I drew this from a photo of myself that my mom took back in 1989.  It was a snap shot that I submitted to an international model search contest.  I made it to the regional semi finals. I think the region was Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas but I only remember one person from Texas and the rest were from Tucson (where I lived at the time).  There may have been some girls from New Mexico and other parts of Arizona but it seemed like most of them were local.