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!

Stream Drawing

Have you ever tried stream of conscious writing?  That's when you sit down and write, write, write anything that comes to your mind.  You don't stop to think a thought through. You don't stop to edit any of your words. You don't stop to correct grammer. You just keep writing.  Set your timer for ten minutes, thiry minutes or one hour.  The choice is yours.  When you are done, you look back to see what came out.

This is what I call stream of conscious drawing.  It's not a pure stream drawing since I was watching t.v. while doing it.  I had no timer going.  This came out over the course of an hour and a half.  The next morning I added the blue for some color pop.  My favorite bits are all the little people.  For some reason I love drawing little people!  Could it be because some of my favorite childhood books were titles like The Borrowers and Stuart Little?

This is such fun to do anywhere, anytime.  I've done this in airports, restaurants, bus trips, car trips, at my art table, visiting family, while talking on the phone, sitting at meetings doodling all over the agenda paper!  They are not always full pictures like the one above.  If I really like the pictures I've drawn on small pieces of paper, I save them to paste in my sketchbook.  Sometimes when I look back at the stream drawings, it inspires me for something new.

Give stream drawing a try.  You never know what might pop out!

In My Sketchbook

Christmas is coming....

First Day

In one of my Sketchbook Skool klasses we were given the prompt "first day of school".  I tried drawing in the style of the instructor Mattias Adolfsson who, by the way, is quite an incredible artist. 

The first day I went to school started in kindergarten when I was 5 years old.  It's incredible how fresh the memories are for a day I haven't thought about in years!

Here are the logistics of the classroom placement in the school 'cause it had such an impact on my first day:

The kindergarten entrance was at the back of the school while all the other children from grade one to grade eight went through doors at the front. I assume it was a method to not overwhelm the youngest scholars in their first year. There were three wings to the school, one each to the right and left, and a third poking out the back.  My classroom was at the end of the back wing right beside the back entrance door.  Two other classes lived in this wing - the grade seven and the grade eight classrooms. The result?  The oldest and youngest students were grouped in the same hallway.

I remember:

• walking through the back door into a long, long hallway filled at the far end with the "big kids"; they were loud, noisy and very,very big!
• stepping through the doorway of the kindergarten class into another world - a world I had never imagined.
• big, tall, brown shelves, reaching to the ceiling, filled with all sorts of toys and books, like a toy store!
• encountering a pile of craziness in the form of lots and lots of children - there were 20 in the class and I still know all their names.
• my heart pounding with excitement and fear until I saw this beautiful lady with black hair and a blue dress smiling directly at me, then only the excitement remained.

Her name, I found out, was Miss La Blue. I loved her immediately and wanted with all my heart to make her happy.

                                                                        Can you spot me? 

It's funny though, I can't remember who brought me to school that day.  I know there was a comforting, familiar body behind me but the face  - I just can't picture it.  Maybe it was my mom or one of my big sisters. I don't know.  Perhaps this is because I was facing the future, taking the first big step towards the rest of my life, and I wasn't looking back.  Or maybe my memory is not quite what it used to be and I just forget!

Oh yes --  I am in the second row wearing a white turtleneck with flowers on it.

Cheers!

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

Sludge and Joe Bastianich

Sometimes my brain is sparking.  Ideas are coming fast.  Bam! Bam! Bam!  Everything is working like a dream. Paintings are flowing off my paint brush.  My pen is inking out like crazy.  The connection between head, hands and heart is working at 110% capacity.  Nothing seems impossible. I am an artist! I rock!

Other days the brain is a pile of sludge - a thick, dull, heavy grey mass of lifeless void.  No matter what comes out of it, flatness reigns. Of course, this is also the time when I burn the green beans, the dog wants to go outside 50 million times in one hour, and I accidently delete NCIS New Orleans from the PVR then find out Husband was not finished watching it.  *sigh*

So I've been having quite a few of those days lately, the sludgy ones.  I don't know if anything will come of the work I've tried last week.  It's sitting in a corner of the back bedroom, away from the seeing eye.  I still know it's there.  It taunts me with its clashing colors and pedestrian design.  I ventured out into the unknown and the unknown did not give back to me kindly this time.  I'd had such a good run of happy art lately that last week was a particularily hard blow to my fledgling confidence.

Then the universe spoke in the voice of Joe Bastianich.  Yes, one of the judges from Masterchef spoke directly to me.  This week.  From the television.

Masterchef is a cooking competition where home cooks go through intense pressure-filled elimination rounds creating gourmet restaurant quality dishes in order to please the highly critical evaluations of three extremely talented, experienced and wildly successful judges in the quest to be crowned the best home cook in the entire world.   The judges? Crème de la crème of the cooking world - Gordon Ramsey, Joe Bastianich and Graham Elliot.

This week I watched an episode of Masterchef Junior, the competition for nine to thirteen year olds. Yes, young children competing in a gourmet cooking show.  I can't even pronouce much less cook some of the dishes they are making and they don't have recipes in front of them!

This is a hard competition for adults, so it is harder still to watch these kids deal with the results of mistakes, sudden problems and sub-par dishes.  Every episode has a winner and a loser and every loser has to leave the show. There is disappointment and tears.

One little nine year old girl Oona, who had been doing impressively well over the first two episodes, had a bad week.  She put out the worst dishes since she started and she knew it.  I felt so bad for her. Then Joe handed her a napkin (this is where the universe spoke to me) and told her to wipe up her tears. He wondered if she thought she was going to do everything perfect all of the time 'cause no one was perfect.  She was going to make mistakes and mess up many times. Failures, especially the big ones, are often the catalysts that brings you to the next level.  They move you to improve you.

Oona was disappointed, but no longer devastated.  She was ready to accept her fate if she needed to leave the show, but I could tell she would leave with her head held high and undaunted in her cooking capabilities.

Good advice for me too.  When I run into mistakes, sudden problems and sub-par work, I will grab a napkin and wipe my tears.  I am not perfect and neither will my work be perfect all the time.  I will own the obstacles and embrace my mistakes.  I will allow my failures to move me to improve me.  I will go to the back bedroom, look at my mediocre work, and figure out a way to go forward from there, head held high and undaunted in my artistic capabilities.

Thank you Universe and Joe for the advice, just when I needed it.  I will turn my sludge into something beautiful.

By the way, Oona survived the elimination round to cook another day



 

Honking Winged Creatures

Winter is officially here.  Snow is on the ground and it is not going anywhere again until next spring. When I let Maxie out yesterday morning about 5 am, I could hear the geese honking.  I love that sound, especially in the crisp, cold, night air.  There is something magical about it.

Honking winged creatures crossing greycast clouds, 

soaring above gleaned fields.  

Steady onward, formed in flights of primordial instinct.

A shift from here to there.

Gazing at soft underbellies shaded in silvered slate,

trembling at dizzy heights attained.

Reaching upward, following, seeking, chancing.

Where are they going? 

I will go too.

                                  Leah Boulet

Speaking of geese, there's a fabulous artist I love who I also happen to know.  She is amazingly creative and an awesome teacher.  In the last few years she's spent time sharing her knowledge and love of art in the schools.  Her lastest project is crazy good.  Geese are involved along with feathers, flight, thoughts, hopes and dreams.  I just have to share the You Tube video she posted last month. Here is Roberta Laliberté and her video Future Flight Path.

The last of these soulful flyers are winging their way south.  Next time the songs of the geese fill the air above my head, spring will be around the corner.  

In My Sketchbook

Love drawing people.......