ffyrebird

Scary Lady

Eeek!  Maybe I should rethink using vintage photos to draw from.  They look so stern and harsh to begin with and my ink drawings only make these poor souls even scarier loking....

New Year, New Beginning

It seems like it has been forever since the last time I made a drawing or posted on here, I feel so rusty!!!  I have been itching to draw again and learned so much from my attempt to draw everyday, that I decided why not go for it and try for another go at drawing daily for a year.  Time for me right now is very limited as I spend most of every day with R2 at rehab working on his recovery from the wreck.  I decided to keep my drawings very simple for now- just a quick pen sketch from photos.  I grabbed a bunch of royalty free photos from the Library of Congress Flickr stream etc. and put them on my IPad so I wouldn't have to waste time trying to figure out what to draw.  I want to work on drawing people and straight to ink drawings really seam to be (for me) quick, honest and a great learning tool- so for a while that's what I'll be playing with.  Here is the first, a very dapper man in Noodler's Beaver on Stonehenge paper.  the ink sat on the surface a bit and I found I could smear it with my finger for a touch of tone....

A Return to Art

Well we returned home, but I didn't return to trying my hand at making art for what seems like ages.  Once I got out of the habit of daily drawings during the trip it was murder starting up again.  To be fair, life has been a little more insane than usual around here.  We returned from our vacation only to find our upstairs AC was dead, in the middle of a heat wave!  Cut to a string of folks coming out to give us estimates then us deciding to replace both units since we basically killed the downstairs unit running it alone in triple digit temps while they came over.  Finally, over a month since we left on vacation we got to sleep in our own beds again.  During this whole fiasco I couldn't find the time, energy, or even desire to make art.  I'm just rebooting now with assignments from Laure Ferlita's Imaginary Trip to Italy class........

Back from Vacation

Well, I'm back from our family vacation!!  Despite my best intentions to keep up with my daily drawings on the trip, that didn't happen.  Packing a family of six, stuffing the travel trailer and then driving straight through the night in a joucy, bouncy truck didn't exactly lend itself to making a drawing, so I missed my first drawing of the year on the first night of the trip, bummer....  That did make it a little easier to skip drawing a few nights later when my oldest asked if I'd play card games with them or was I going to go hang out by myself in the back of the trailer drawing.  R1 is eighteen and there won't be many more trips with him, so I put away my sketchbook for the trip and just enjoyed the time with the kiddos and DH.  I did take over a thousand pictures (really!!!), so I'll have plenty of future drawing material.

This moose is from our trip last year to Rocky Mountain National Park.  We climbed all the way up to Bierstadt Lake the hard way instead of coming down from Bear Lake on the trail.  We were tuckered out at the top but it was worth it when we saw this moose come up to the lake while we were having our lunch. 

Final shuttle Launch

The kiddos and I took time out today to watch the final shuttle launch.  It's sad to see the shuttle program ending.

Experimenting in a New Journal

I wanted to get a feel for my new journal from Useful Books on Etsy, so I did a little experimenting on the last page.  I love the way the journal is constructed, but I've never used the Magnani Velata paper that it is made of and I'll need to get used to it.  I've been using sized Fabriano Venezia books or Aquabee's for so long going back to unsized paper is odd.  It stood up well to watercolor without buckling and there was just the faintest ghosting on the reverse with the really heavy black marker.  Even though it felt like I was really roughing up the paper when I erased, it didn't seem to cause any problem when I went back in with watercolor in those spots. The mad scientist rates this experiment a success!!!

 

I had fun printing a drawing I'd made of our travel  trailer being pulled by our 'Shark' of a truck and putting it into the cutout in the journal's cover...

Celebrate!!

DH has coached the boys in baseball for years and this year he signed up to coach R4's team.  To his suprise he was asked to coach R3's softball team as well.  He said yes and had a blast!!!   The girls and their parents were great, positive and supporting.  They made this a really fun year, of course, it didn't hurt that the girls won first in our city division and first in the four-city league they played in.  To celebrate the end of the season the team dunked DH with the water cooler.  Ice water- brrrrr!!!!!

Softball Windup

I love the fancy footwork and hops that go into some of the girls'  windups!

ID4 for July 4th

Toady. we stayed inside to avoid all the smoke from the neighbor's fireworks since it aggravates half the family's asthma.  Usually we go park a long ways off from the city park and watch the display, but they did it Friday while we were busy so we missed it.  To celebrate the Fourth we broke out a DVD of ID4, our traditional movie for the holiday.

R3 at Bat

Well,  I posted a drawing of R4 paying baseball so it only seemed fair to make a drawing of R3 playing softball....