Christmas Photo Sketched Out

I love getting Christmas photos. I even have an album dedicated just for them.  It's fun to see the changes in people from year to year.  That being said, I am totally not good at sending out either Christmas cards or Christmas photos.  Sorry family and friends! Maybe one year I will get it in gear. In the meantime, I was inspired by a Christmas photo I received from my good friend Suzanne a couple of years back.  I love the photo.  For some reason it made me smile whenever I looked at it, so I left it on my fridge for months and months and months until I decided to use it as a model for my next art project.

I used a uniball pen to draw the family on watercolor paper even though I decided not to add any color.  There's a bit of a 3-D effect going on as Mom, Dad and the girls are done on three separate pieces, cut out with an x-acto knife and layered together with a matte medium. The background is a photo I took near my home, copied onto cream colored cardstock.

This is by no means a photograph copy of the photograph.  My lines are wonky in places, waggly in others and I took artistic license with a few of the shapes.  What I hope it shows is the love and happiness threading through the circle of this family.

Next time, maybe I will try color!

A Different Take on Blues

When my daughter was in grade seven, I volunteered in her English class.  One of the poems she studied is below.  It has stuck with me all these years.  I love the idea of seeing the blue between, of seeing what is not obvious, of seeing from a different perspective.

If, like in life, there are periods of dark and stormy clouds, then the blue is the good that happens between those difficult times.   This is a good thought to carry when your life is grey, overcast and turbulant.

The Blue Between

Everyone watches clouds,

naming creatures they've seen.

I see the sky differently,

I see the blue between--

The blue woman tugging

her stubborn cloud across the sky.

The blue giraffe stretching

to nibble a cloud floating by.

A pod of dancing dolphins,

cloud oceans, cargo ships,

a boy twirling his cloud

around a thin blue fingertip.

In those smooth wide places,

I see a different scene

In those cloudless spaces,

I see the blue between.

--Kristine O'Connell George