Month: November 2010

Shoe week!! I drew a pair of Birkies I bought to wear with socks that I knit from my handspun yarns. Handspun makes toasty warm socks that feel like a cloud. The only problem is mine are a tad thicker than store bought socks and make shoes fit a bit snug. And why do all that Fair Isle knitting just to hide it in a shoe? The answer to those problems– Birkies!!

While doing lesson four, I learned a very inportant lesson– if you are going to draw and paint while holding your subject, have everything ready before you start. To get the flower at the angle I wanted for the drawing I had to hold it in my left hand. I forgot to get my paints out so I had to put the flower down to get them. When I picked up the flower again to paint it, everthing was wonky! I turned it round and round and never really captured the same view so I just improvised.

I recently joined a wonderful class at Joggles led by Jane LaFazio called Sketchbook and Watercolor: Journal Style. I joined up around week two of the six week class and have rushed to catch up. The class is so much fun and Instructive. I highly recommend it to everyone!!!!

There is a public Flickr group for this class, so I think it is ok to post my work from the class here on my blog also. I’ll just put up the finished results and not go into the lesson part—ya gotta take the class to get the goodies.

Lesson 1

Lesson 2

Lesson 3

I was always seeing refences to the Portfolio water-soluble oil pastels and how much folks like them so I thought I’d give them a go. I scribbled some colors down as a backround and smeared them a bit. Pretty, me likey. Now can I use ink over them? I drew a quicky of Da Bear with a pentel ink brush. Went on like a charm, no smearing or problems going over the pastels.

This is Da Bear. He sits on a rubber stamp cube on my desk. R2 has fun constantly providing him with props to hold or wear- waterbrushes, Dr. Who sonic screwdrivers, axes, baseball caps etc.

Tried to work in a little face practice here and there….

Pandas count, don’t they??

I can’t stand the paper in my Reflexions Journal so I don’t feel bad just playing around in it. It is only fit for dry media so most of my ballpark doodles are in it. I also was toying with a little manga-type monkey character. I filled up tons of pages in that journal working on him. It was fun getting the kidddos input in creating him.

Working on faces, one of a zillion pages…

A few of our prototype monkeys…..

R4 was sitting doing his homework with his book resting on his feet, he looked like a little monkey!!

This is the version of the monkey that I’ve finally settled on. (Ithink)

Vacations took up a lot of our time this year even though we really started preparing for them last year. We decided we wanted a travel trailer so we could go camping. Next thing ya know we are proud owners of a Trailmanor Trailer. It’s a really cool trailer that folds down flat like a popup then does this origami transformation to become a nice hard-sided full-sized trailer. We even bought a nifty Expedition to tow it with. Unfortunately, we found out that once you get six bodies, our gear, and the trailers hitch weight loaded up we were going to overload the SUV’s weight limit, ACKKK!! Lots of research later we decide on a Ford f-250 Superduty. The only problem was last years model didn’t have a shoulder belt or headrest for the kiddo sitting up front in the middle. Those are pretty important in a crash so we decided to wait for the new models which would have it. Long story short, we got the truck less than a week before our first trip.

Lots of stress leading up to the trip with a new vehicle and never having towed a trailer (read about our comedy of errors in the Murphy’s law pic below) before but I snuck in some time to bind a spiral journal for the trip. The zutter binding tools are awesome!!

My journal, Stonehenge paper with some colored pastel, charcoal sheets in the back. The cover is a sheet of scrapbooking paper over Daveys board.

Some pages out of the journal……..

I don’t usually paste photos into my journals but I had used a copic marker onthe otherside and it bled through so I put two pics by R2 up on the left side. I love the jellyfish, he has an eye for photos.

My youngest, R4, helped with that one while we waited on the rest of the family to ride a coaster. He helped me draw the squirrel from memory then he painted it!!

Our next trip with the Trailmanor, to Rocky Mountain National Park, went much smoother. I’ll post a few peaks of it as soon as I finish it off. I was too busy hiking (and gasping for breath) to do much drawing so I wanted to go back and do a few drawings from photos we took.

I’ve been away from the blog and not posting for most of the summer. There were two main reasons for that – the kiddos ball season and our vacations.

We were pretty busy running the kiddos around and watching games, but that’s not the real reason I didn’t post anything during ball season. You see, I got this ‘great’ idea to use my time sitting at the games to draw people since it’s an area I need to work on. Unfortunately, when you try to learn something new sometime your initial efforts stink. Mine did, definitely not fit for public viewing. I should have realized, kids playing ball move–a lot. I was reduced to doing composites of players, blah. Then I tried doing gesture drawings. I love looking at gesture drawings in books, the lovely flowing lines, rhythm. Mine looked like preschool scribbles. Still, I struggled on and here are some of the ones that are ‘public viewable’. One small problem with them is that they are all graphite and my scanner hates that and barely shows the image. I tweaked them to show up on the screen but I prefer the softer look of the originals.

The first is of R1 umpiring a game, ’bout time I put it up since my sketch of R2 umping has been up for months.