Category: EDM Challenges

Here is a little ink and watercolor pair of imagikoi.  I wanted to do something along the lines of the fish on crumpled masa paper in Art Escapes by Dory Kanter.  I found what I thought was a sheet of masa in my study, drew the fish, crumpled, and painted.  I'm not so sure the paper was masa, now.  It felt very soft and limp, almost like cloth, after I crumpled it and didn't really keep the creases.  I'd like to try this again on 'crisper' paper, that way the background might turn out with more veining and texture.  Still, it was fun and fast.  A nice little paste-in for my new journal.  Thought I'd never fill the old Handbook journal. I'm thinking on posting some of the entries that I'd done in it pre-blog, just to celebrate finishing it.

Here is a sketch of a sign of spring, or is it?  Around here spring is such an iffy, fickle season.  We keep having late cold snaps and even snow well into what should  be spring.  They had even forecasted snow for this weekend!!  Thankfully that didn't happen, but it was still cold.

I just finished hacking and slashing at the jumbled honeysuckle vine and clematis tangle in my little garden.  The vines were growing through our wooden privacy fence in places and I'd started to worry about eventual damage to the fence.  So, I lopped off the bits growing through the fence and my Dear Hubby helped put three sections of latticework in front of the fence.  I think the honeysuckle will survive the surgery, but I can't tell if the clematis vine even made it through the winter.  It is tangled up so much with the other vines that the only way to tell where it grows is to wait for it to bloom.  Still it is a lovely effect, the blue blooms among the white and gold honeysuckle.  It was even nicer when the roses, placed in pots in front of the jumble, were alive.  Tempting to go buy some more David Austin roses, so old-fashioned and fragrant!!

EDM#163, originally uploaded by ffyrebird.

EDM Challenge #163 Draw a deck of cards. Finding the prop was a bit of a challenge. I had to search the house top to bottom but I was able to dig up a real deck of cards for the challenge. Having a house full of kids means I easily found four different types of Uno sets, scads of baseball cards, and role-playing card games but the real cards were buried deep in a closet. Go figure….

EDM#162, originally uploaded by ffyrebird.

EDM challenge #162, draw your breakfast.
Sorry, but I was hungry so this is just a fast and loose pencil sketch of my usual omelet in a pita. Nuke and eat….

EDM#4, originally uploaded by ffyrebird.

For EDM#4 I drew my chunky, primitive Knitter’s mug. I love this mug- the nice solid heft to it, the glossy, blobby, black sheep shapes, the slick forest green glaze, and the rough unglazed exterior with the tool lines going round and round that are a reminder that it was made by a real human and not by a mindless machine. The older I get, the more I appreciate handmade items. They seem to have more soul in them.

EDM#3, originally uploaded by ffyrebird.

This is my bag for the EDM# 3 challenge. Inside the bag is my little Hitchhiker spinning wheel. If you are familiar with the Hitchhiker wheels, you will notice that mine doesn’t have the hitchhiking hand/thumb cutout carry handle. I wanted it to be even more portable and got the version with the cut down top. That shaved several inches off so the wheel could fit in the frontseat floorboard area of a car. I’ve yet to try spinning in the car, however. The wheel does have the treadle in the shape of a huge barefoot. That is why this tote with sandals on it is so perfect for the wheel in my mind, besides the fact that I looove and collect anything from Life is Good!

EDM#161 smells wonderful
Originally uploaded by ffyrebird

This week the challenge was to draw something that smells wonderful. I chose the honeysuckle vines I planted along my fence. I remembered the smell from childhood and wanted some vines at my home. I also wanted the vines to attract birds to the yard. The birds seem to love the odd vine with reddish, purple, orange flowers on it. (I’m partial to the old fashioned white and yellow ones.) They also like to play in the copper feeder in the middle that I keep having to train the vine around. Obviously, the honeysuckle isn’t blooming now so I filled in the blanks with some help from a gardening catalog. The bare bones of the vine and a few leaves are still there, giving me a skeleton to hang the drawing on and the birds a place to hide out.
This drawing was also the first time I used masking fluid in a painting. Talk about something that does NOT smell wonderful. Ammonia, yuckkkkk!!! I used it to save the white for the flower clusters. They should have looked white and yellow, but I think the yellow tried to win out. Still, I swear in real life the drawing doesn’t look thaaaat yellow<cringe>, at least not as yellow as the scan seems to me.

My first EveryDay Matters drawing challenge. Just a quick sketch of one of my old sandals.  And here is the source for the sketch, my poor old beat up, beloved, black birks.