This weekend Angela and I celebrated three years since our first date. It really doesn't seem like that long, but here we are.

Part of my gift to Angela was a wooden percussion frog... I'm sure everyone has seen one of these, but just in case you haven't, it comes with a wooden stick that you run over the ridges on top to make a "croaking" sound.

The other day Chad asked me a question about drawing and proportion, and I realized it had been a while since I tried to draw anything. I needed a card to go with Angela's gift, so I took the opportunity to attempt to revive my long lost coloured pencil drawing skills.

I wasn't expecting this to become a "Picture Of The Week", so I just sat the frog amongst the junk on my desk and snapped a quick and dirty photo that I could use as a reference for my drawing. I wanted to draw a more elaborate jungle background, but I was running out of time so I just improvised some abstract grass.

Anyway, without further ado, I present my first partially hand-drawn Picture Of The Week, called "Frog In Grass"!

Technical details: The top photo was shot with my Rebel XT + kit lens at 46mm, ISO 1600, f/5.6 for 1/8th of a second. The bottom photo was shot with my Rebel XT + kit lens at 35mm, ISO 1600, f/4.5 for 1/60th of a second.

Comments

Good composition and impressive lighting techniques, your combination of
sfumato with the impressionistic background is truly captivating. Is this
percussion frog from a particular culture?

Thanks!  To my untrained eye it looks vaguely South American (Mayan or Aztec),
though I suspect it was made in Thailand.

Very well done!

Cute! 

Coincidence?  I sent my friend Linda the link to my picasa web album, which
links to yours as well, and we had the following email exchange:
Linda:
"...Your son, Mike, though, his photography is truly fantastic. He is talented
and artistic. He does math you say. Does he do art, also?"
Me:"...yes, he is
artistic.  I would say his current outlet for this is photography.  The last
art piece I remember him doing was a pencil sketch of the Math Building when he
was at university, done on graph paper.  I think I bought him a sketch book
after that.  It's been a while."
Then surprise, a nice frog drawing!..and a new
word from Sue, sfumato, thanks, I looked it up.