6/19/08

Romancing the Stone

Hate to reapeat a post and all, but this isn't a true repeat. In an effort to keep the wee portrait of my husband from getting squished, I baked the Fimo relief in the oven yesterday. This morning I got a chance to fool around with painting some sort of patina on it to bring out the shadows. It was totally experimental. I started with sepia-toned watercolors and while it took time to work out, it was a failure. There is a suble undertone to liquid watercolors (which are the only kind I keep on hand) that separates as it dries. Kept turning too yellow or green depending on the color used. The upside was that it washed off the Fimo with absolutely zero staining.

So I switched over to gouache....black gouache, in fact, in an effort to cut to the chase. Anyhoo, it worked well, but I learned pretty late that it stains, lightly. I also figured out that I needed to be sort of particular about where I painted it on more heavily and where not to put it at all. In the end, it turned out OK. Now I just need to mount it somehow in a shadow box or something.

The Glower..er

Like drawing but without the paper...and the pencil...and the drawing part. I don't play with clay much, but when my husband emailed a picture from work, I just felt a deep need to do something with his profile. So this is my very modest effort at relief sculpture, in Fimo. It's still a work in progress, but it's fun. With the Fimo, I figure I can just bake it when I get tired of trying to finesse his likeness from the soft clay and come back with carving tools and sand paper for the finish. Or rebake new layers of Fimo on top. In any case, I'm learning a lot about how to make shadows work to your advantage. Now, if I could make it so that my husband didn't have laser beams shooting from his eyeballs, I'd be a happy camper.

Vision Quest

If I had to precisely guesstimate my time spent as a stay-at-home mom, I'd say it's been about 10 or 11 years, give or take my odd job as a silversmith. But that was at least two kids back and had next to nothing to do with drawing, illustration or 2-D art, in any general way. I loved it though. We fabricated, by hand, Rebecca Collins' pieces. Mostly earrings and bracelets and necklaces. The best part was.......playing with fire. Seriously. All that potential for big trouble and, yet, so much precision at the tip of a flame, from a torch, attached to a tank of gas!!! Never mind the grinders, the blades that could cut through sheets of metal, lapidary saws, metal snips, molten solder.....argh, argh, argh! Loved. It.

Mask. colored pencil, graphite, ink.

But more children happened and life went on and I was afforded the opportunity to stay home and I took it. The one thing I wasn't doing that I felt like I oughta' be doing, for money maybe, was drawing. Somehow, in the back of my head is there is a nagging voice in my head that says, "Go forth and create a portfolio...of something. Anything. Scribble scratch'll do at this point. For the love of God, woman, do it for children...." It's a very Charles Heston-like voice. Anyway, it had a point. Money hasn't really been the object of my desire, so much as not wanting to let loose the drive to try. To do what I don't know I can do....yet.

Sorry about the bad photos.

So this year, with only one child left to chase out of the peanut butter jar only a daily basis, I've decided to buckle down and "do". "Do" draw, "do" paint, "do" muddle through till I find a style that suits, with consistency. Just "do". And, in this vein, I took the figure drawing class and I've accompanied my husband to the Art Walk and I've started what I hope becomes a series of drawings and/or watercolors. Too much the personal pep-talk? Yeah, well....I'm pretty sure every quest started with some crazy dude trying to appease the voices in his head. Or is that serial crime? Hmm...

Last Session

Kind of a sad week. Not only was it the last class, but the model had stage 4 cancer of unknown origin and a single mom to boot. She knows it's going devastate her physical self before it's all over, so she thought she'd brave a session as a model instead of a student. Well.....it made me cry, which made me feel foolish, so I did my best to choke it and left with wet snot spots on the front of my shirt. Long story short, there's an extensive family history behind those wet spots. Grief is just sneaky like that, I guess.

Anyway, some of us went for pizza and beer after. Where I locked my keys in my car and had to wait for my knight in the shiny blue mini-van to unlock the horse that I rode home in. 'Twas an eventful night by my standards.

Twenty Minutes

I hate the end of class. I never feel done.

Exhaustion

Was tired walking in. Was tired walking out. And it shows.

So Goes It

Flip, 25 min. drawing.

Flop, 25 min. drawing.

Had a rough time trying to focus this session. It didn't help to be told that I needed to work on arm definition. After that, all I could see were arms. With exception to these two poses. I hate that she has chub hands in the bottom pic. She was so graceful and cheery. Oh well.

Where To Begin

**Warning: Last picture may be NotSafeForWork....Sorry!**

Well, first, I oughta' say that there are times when it's just plain better to live your life than to wonder when and how you were next gonna post about it . Having said that, no major life dramas have unfolded since I left the blog to collect spiderwebs and dust bunnies, well, I did wonder if my very elderly lawn guy was dead for a coupla' (ahem...six) weeks. Turns out, he's not. Phew. Secondly, I really must admit that I got so thoroughly hooked on Bloglines to keep me invested in the private lives of others that slacking got easier every day that I didn't post a little somethin' somethin'. That's all. Mystery of my universe solved. Voyeuristic slacker mom keeps secret life as real person secret. Hmm.

Bianca's Jacket, Interweave Knits. In KnitPicks, Main Line, Butter Pecan.
.

Anyhoo, I have been knitting. A lot. Well, a lot, for me. I'm slow and am covered with children like an oak green with lichen. Slow is my standard operating speed. I knit a sweater (my first!), two and one quarter pairs of socks, a rocket, a mini-rocket, a few rows of the really lovely blanket, and started a skirt for my daughter. I even, hold on to your seats, typed up a whole...half of a pattern. The mini-rocket. I started to feel poorly about the effort however. I suddenly got the feeling that if I were to write a pattern for everyone, I oughta' make it a good one....not a mini-one. You know what I mean? So, I'm putting it back on the shelf for now. *

From "Favorite Socks", in KnitPicks, Gloss; Monkey Socks, in Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock, Golden Hills; and another from "Favorite Socks", in Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock, Baltic Seas.

Okay, here's the bit I'm really excited about. I...signed...up...for...a...FIGURE DRAWING CLASS!! Yay! Short story...approximately eleven years ago I was living in New Orleans, working on my degree in illustration, madly in love for the first time and enormously pregnant with my first child. I was at a fork in the path, juggling all the great possibilities of life at once. Career, love, family. I happily skipped along the path as it took an obvious turn toward staying at home with the kids. Heck, I still got to be madly in love and to finish the degree I was already working on and to get pregnant again...and again...and again...and again. It has been a good path. However, I never shook my fondness for drawing...people...who stand still for extended periods of time. (I once considered medical illustration as the thing for me, if that gives a clue to my tendencies.)

Hip in Hemp skirt, in Elann.com Esprit.

Over the years, I have tried off and on to draw my kids. But as luck would have it, I can't even get a sleeping baby to stay still. And well, later, knitting happened. So this year, after a mini-emotional meltdown (not to worry, I have them all the time), it finally dawned on me that for the first time in years I was not gravid with child, nursing, or without available baby-sitters. Cha-ching! Put myself in the figure-drawing class through the continuing education dept. of our local university and I LOVE IT!

Best of the bunch, I think.

It's been two (shortish) sessions, but I'm finding my zen again. My goal is to become more natural with proportions, quickly, so that I can get on to doing completed drawings, with decent composition and backgrounds and all that jazz. It's taking some serious concentration on my part, but time has a way of working these things out. In the meantime, watch out for more "Naked People" posting. Woo hoo!

*P.S. Does anyone have any advice on PDF files? I could really use it.

Go Together Like Peas and Carrot

Illustration Friday: Glamour

"I only kid you, dah'link."

Illustration Friday: Cat

Reviving a Passion

Before the breeding began, I was an illustration student. I even managed to eek out a degree in visual communications/illustration between my first two kids, but after that achievement, the inspiration to continue seemed too many diaper changes away and, in fact, was. It was a passion, interuppted. But the course of my life has shifted ever so slightly towards the creative again since I'd decided to hang up the gestational apron for a life less physically demanding. Now if I choose to pick up a 25 lb. ball and lug it up a flight of stairs periodically throughout the day, it'll be for remembering the good times when a baby kicked gently from the inside out and not in the shin because it didn't get a soda from the Quicky Mart. Oh, good times, good times. (All kidding aside, I've never actually been kicked in the shin..... at least not by one of mine)

So longish story short, after a ten year hiatus, I've decided that this is the year that I take my doodlings from years past and present and devote some free time to creating a slightly less haphazard portfolio. I've scrapped the longing to study medical illustration and decided to concentrate on what I'm most familiar with, children. So here's to striking that first blow: a couple of sketches too late for Illo. Fri. and one (the mermaid*) too "sketchy" for the originally intended embroidery project**.

*In progress.

** I fully recognize that I am probably committing all kinds of embroidery faux pas', but it's hard to suppress the guerilla tactics of woman, distracted.

YARR..d art

Finally finished the skull decoration for the front yard and just in time for Halloween. Think I might get one those plant light stakes you stick in potted plants and put a black light bulb in the socket to put underneath. Might make for a spooky effect. I'll update.

Illustration Friday: Float

Well, it's just a quickie, but it'll have to do for now. I've had New Orleans on the brain so much lately, this was the first thing that came to mind. It's my "Good Fortune" float.