Weaving Rainbow: This & That

this and that

Been doing some needlework over the last couple of days & that will either be my N or O... N for needlework or O for Owl. It's a blackwork project & a lot of fun.

Still have to do all the other catching up & I'll do 2 or 3 a day this week until I am caught up! Didn't mean to get this far behind. Hope I can come up with another art challenge for May... will make one up if I don't find one already online. Don't think I'm ready for the 30 day fill a sketchbook challenge, besides, May has 31 days... may try for that one in June.

We had an AWESOME day on Saturday! First we (Gary & I & Micah & Harrison & Reuven) went to Richardson to my sister Rica's friend Dawn's house & had lunch there & then went to Spinfest, which was nearby. Rica & Lyn (my birthmom) also went to Spinfest to watch & they enjoyed watching & I got to talk to them a bit as well. Dawn went for a while also.

Micah participated in the Poi lesson & did pretty well with it. We need to come up with a pair of poi for him & hopefully he'll be able to coach me through some of the areas I had problems with. It was a basic lesson. I have problems with the turning/moving parts but I figure if I take it 1 or 2 steps at a time, I'll eventually get it! I also have trouble with the moving around parts of hoop dancing... I hooped a little bit, but not as much as last time because I knew we had plans for the evening & did not want to get worn out.

In the evening, we went to see The Reverend Horton Heat & it was AWESOME. Reuven loved it & said that they're so much better live. Jimbo gave Harrison a bandana & gave Reuven & Micah a wristband & the Rev gave them guitar picks which he signed later. Scott did his usual drum solo near the end & it was like watching fireworks, that's the best way I can think of to describe it. The Rev & Jimbo did the routine where Jim stands on Jimbo's standing bass twice & they exchanged instruments once & did the back to back once. No one really moshed this time (not sure how possible that would have been: it was even more packed than the April 12th show was... sardines, we were!)

I'm up to "L" and today we're supposed to post "T"... hope I can do it! Want to get them all done this month!

Craziness

Things got a little crazy over the last few days... who said it was a simple thing to have a healthy momma cat & her 3 week old babies in the house? Would have been simple if we had not had a sudden flea explosion, thanks to all the rain. I will say this: we did need the rain (and more probably won't hurt) but we lost one kitten... the other 3 are on some medicine from the vet & hopefully will start becoming more active over the next day or two... I'm mostly worried about Spike (the remaining boy) and also concerned that momma may become engorged, but they did seem to nurse somewhat vigorously last night... she still feels lumpy.

Hopefully I will get caught up on my drawing over the next couple of days.

Does anyone know of something that behaves a little like a grapite pencil, doesn't have to be sharpened every 2 seconds (like a mechanical pencil), yet is VERY dark like a black colored pencil? That said, maybe I should just suck it up and sharpen pencils constantly... or use ink... may play with that later....

Okay, so we're up to P and I need to do L, M, N & O as well...probably will do 2 each day rather than try to catch up all at once... hope to be back on track after the weekend!

L: coming soon!

I should have "L" late late tonite or tomorrow... it's the weekend, stuff to do, trouble to get into! :)

J: Jim (Reverend Horton Heat) & Jimbo

The reason I switched J & K was because on April 12th, we had tickets to go see the Reverend Horton Heat & Missile play in Denton, TX. It was an AWESOME show, part of The Rev's 25th anniversary tour of the DFW area.

I did a quick gesture drawing of the Rev & Jimbo playing back to back... I did the initial drawing when they were playing back to back and then added some details when they were in similar positions afterwards...

As an added bonus, I got their autographs on the drawings!

We got to hang out with Missile & P-Town Skanks after wards, and also got to talk to the Rev & Jimbo afterwards.

Overall, a VERY fun night!

Maybe a few zzzz's... (no, I'm not skipping ahead to z... just going to get some sleep!)

K iKittens

I'm late posting, sorry about that! I decided to switch K and J and will explain why when I do the J post after this one! :)

Meanwhile: on the day we were supposed to post "J", I drew our 2 week old kittens. People who know me know that I'm not a fan of intentionally bringing animals into the world, but we had problems getting the momma cat spayed: back in November, we had an appointment to take her. The night before, we had her in our room, food taken up after 10pm (or midnight, whatever time it was they wanted us to start the fast)... and she snuck out of our room and no one noticed it. Didn't see her until the next night. At least we got our dog, Emma spayed that day. We will try a LOT harder to get our girl-cat spayed 2 weeks after she weans this litter.

Anyway, she had 4 kittens & it's quite a trip... fun. They're all talkers & one of them is quite the blabbermouth... the drawing I did of them was while they were nursing... a sort of contour drawing:

Apologies for the crappy photo!

Blogs I like that I've come across recently

On the A-to-Z journal page, I came across some blogs that I'm enjoying & hope to follow after it's over.

Here are a few:

Shan Jeniah is the writer who shared this A-Z challenge with me. THANKS!!

paint under my nails
WATERCOLORS BY Mimi Torchia Boothby
Oak Lawn Images - Photo Greeting Cards & Prints
Hilary and Ted
Liz Czukas
Forgiveness

Will post again later... need to go work on J, the letter for today! Any guesses what that might be?? :)
http://quietforgiveness.blogspot.com/

I: Indy

Indy is the dog we found on the side of the road on July 4th 2010... he was all skin and bones & I later found out he had a bad case of hookworms. If you go back to the blog archives for July 2010, you can read more about it... he's 2 years old now!

Drawing animals from real life is a challenge. I don't really like to work from photos: to me, it doesn't feel authentic to me. I had Reuven & Gary sit & skritch him (which keeps him still most of the time!! Haha) but we still couldn't get him to stay in the same position for very long... but after erasing one or two attempts, I decided "ookay, let's just take a picture!" I did get one picture without the help of a photo:

Here's the picture I drew partly from real life & partly from a photo:

To embiggen, click the photo!

Both were done with a graphite pencil. I believe 4B. I need to either sharpen it more often (need to dig up the electric sharpener, the handheld one I have breaks leads!) or get one or 2 mechanical pencils... does anyone have favorite pencils?

I found a tutorial (for drawing hair) on Elfwood and found it a little helpful... there are several tutorials on this page

Since I'm having some trouble getting my sidebar (on the left) to stay put the way I want it, I'm posting another link to the A-Z challenge here:

H

My 14 year old son, Harrison, is the model for today's drawing.
I would like to find a hair tutorial. Since tomorrow's drawing may be one of our dogs, this may be a good time to find one! i have a booklet about painting animals & I'll see if that is any help. There should be plenty online, though!

I also would like to find a way to make the portrait drawings look a bit more creative... and still look like the person. I'm thinking of Picasso's Jacqueline, which I did an ATC of a couple of years ago when some folks from the Imagination Tribe (a Yahoo group) got together to do a famous arts trade...

Can't find the photos of the ATCs that I did, so this will have to suffice:

and is from this site

Photos Finally! (F & G)

Finally got the photos taken & will do a separate entry for "H" after I get this one posted.

F: Feet

I find that focusing on something for a page or few can help improve that part... I don't think these feet really have that demolished look that other feet that I've done in a full drawing of a model! We'll see how I do next time we have drawing group! One of the feet is an attempt to do hatching for values. I'm not happy with it, makes it look more like a hairy leg!

I may focus on Noses when I get to the letter N... unless I find something that I'm more interested in by then... and then, one of our cats is named Napkin... but we'll talk about N aNother time! :)

G: Gary

Gary & I have been together quite a long time: we've had our ups & downs, had our share of rough times & fun times, some that we've helped each other through things.

About this drawing: it's done in graphite (pencil) and ink... this is not how his hair was when I did the drawing, but since he's been talking about doing his hair in Rockabilly style, I thought I'd try doing his hair that way so we could get an idea how it might look. This was fun to do! I also did the pillow in sort of zentangle fashion.. that was fun!

He was reading, trying to get sleepy...

F is for Feet

Did a page full of feet yesterday & will post them sometime over the weekend. It's good practice to draw hands & feet on occasion so that when you're drawing people, they don't come out looking odd or deformed or something! Yesterday was good for that.

Today I will draw Gary & will post it when I post the feet. Haven't decided if I'll do his portrait in ink or pencil or what... Gary & I have been together for over 21 years and living together for almost that.. sans a couple of short periods.

Weather is weird... have a cold or something, bringing up interesting looking icky stuff... we went to the 2nd Monday flea market in Bowie today & I probably should have just stayed home, but I'm glad I went because I got some beads that we may make some "candy" bracelets with...

Updated D is for Dancing photo

E is for Evan

This is my 17 year old son, Evan.. he was on the computer when I drew this profile picture of him on mixed media paper with a Sakura Pigma pen...learning how to vary lines with this pen & also use hatching to show the different values. stay tuned for the rest of us!

D is for Dancing-pic

From my phone's camera, so the quality sucks... wanted to get this online and get to work on "E"... will take a photo with my regular camera when I take the photo of "E".

Even though I'm sure I could dig through my artwork & find something to represent "E", I don't want to do it that way. MY challenge to myself is to make something new for each letter during the month of April... the reason I'm doing it this way because I want to jump start my art..

There's a printout of a photo on the left; it was taken at the March SpinFest: I had a video of one of the women dancing & I froze the frame & did a screen capture.. then I did the drawing from the photo. It's on 140 lb Canson XL Cold Press Watercolor paper... I used ink and a wash to get this effect.

I went to the library this morning to see about using the scanner, but they had it out of the public computer area because they had to fix it or get it fixed. I guess I'll have to come up with my own scanner to get some decent quailty photos/scans/whatever they're called of the pictures I do...

D is for Dancing

I must have Passover on the brain.. when I was about to type in my password for my blog, I thought I saw Passover instead of Password... hahaha!

I'm planning a picture of someone Dancing... I downloaded and printed a couple of pictures I'm going to work from. I would have preferred to work from real life but dancing is something that happens too fast...

I haven't started it yet, but I'll probably post it tomorrow or Friday... I like to dance.. didn't get to do it very often. I used to be okay at it & always found it fun! Recently I discovered that i love hula hooping.. found a heavier one at a thrift store for $1 and plan to make myself another even heavier, larger hoop soon...

I had a bunch of errands to do today and will be sending some yarn orders out tomorrow...and a couple other errands.

Tired because of a cold.. so going to keep this short...

Bluebonnet in a Can

B is for Bluebonnet & C is for Can... to catch up, I thought I'd put these two together. Had a rather busy day but was still able to do this watercolor/inktense/acrylic metallic marker piece in a watercolor sketchbook with handmade paper:

I had a little trouble with the can holder.. it did NOT look like the kind of cup holder you'd find in a car, so I was puzzling about what to do about it... the lower section of the can on the right was in the cup holder and short of cutting both cans out of the picture and taping it onto another page, I wasn't sure what else to do... I was thinking about doing some collage around the indeterminable cup holder, but that wasn't working... I finally decided to make it look a little like one of those hanging plant baskets or something like that... I'm still thinking about modifying the picture & I have some ideas...

The reason I couldn't cut the picture out was because on the OTHER side of the page was another picture that I want to keep in the book:

A is for Abstract!

Hopefully I will be all caught up by tomorrow or Wednesday. I did an abstract color piece (is it a drawing? painting? what?) in my Canson Mixed Media 7"x10" sketchbook using an ink pen to draw the lines & write a few words; watercolor/ink brush "pens" (Elmer's, these are cool!), oil pastel, and acrylic metallic paint pens. Once completed, acrylic gloss varnish medium was applied over it.

One of these days I may do an abstract each day of the month... not this one, although while I was working on my abstract, I was tempted to switch gears, but I think the A-Z challenge is my best bet for jump starting my art! Different media, different styles...

Two years ago, I wrote the following about Abstracts:

"Some definitions:

Abstract:
1. adj. considered apart from any concrete object, idealized/theoretical.
2. n. a summary//a short version of a piece of writing
3. v.t. to take out, remove.

Abstraction:
a. abstracting//formation of an idea apart from concrete things, situations, etc.

Theoretical: see theory.

Theory:
an organized body of ideas as to the truth of something//a general body of
assumptions and principles of a conjecture.

Conjecture:
n-guesswork, opinion or theory based on presumption of insufficient evidence.

This is a metamorphosis of a definition!"

Without Further Ado, here is the picture; 4 views, click to embiggen:

I'm not crazy about my camera's photos... I'll probably head over to the library every few days to get a good scanned photo of each & will post them then.. perhaps weekly! But this gets the job done!

Onto B&C...

A-to-Z challenge for April

If you click on the above link, it will take you to the website that will explain the challenge.

I'm going to do the above challenge... for the 26 days except Sunday (except this one to make 26), I will post something related to the letter for that day in any media, drawing, markers, paint, whatever I can come up with that is visual art.

Today's letter is A and I will post a photo later of an abstract piece that I did. Some days I may do more than one piece, with more than one word related to the letter of the day...

When I first decided to do this, I wasn't going to sign up, was just going to do some artwork to represent each letter of the alphabet & post a bunch at a time rather than trying to blog daily. I may still do that if it is allowed, but for now I'm planning to put up a post each day even if it's just the words & the artwork.

Hopefully it'll jump start my art so that I'll do it more regularly. If this month goes well, then perhaps in May I'll move on to filling up a sketchbook in a month...as described here... not a 24 page book but an 80-100 page book sized around 8x10 or 9x12, have not picked the book... maybe both sides, not sure about that...

BUT for this month I will focus on the alphabet challenge... I've got a book that has over 26 pages left in it, a multi-media 7x10 or 8x10 book with thick 95lb pages with a nice tooth.. does well with all media...

Hopefully my future writing won't be this stilted. I'm hot & recovering from a headache.. not at ALLLLL prepared for this early start to summer-like weather & spring just began a few short days ago... actually this winter was pretty spring-like most of the time...