Medium Experiments

Today I sat at Starbucks and did the work BEHIND the art.  Always lots of exploring and tests to do with materials, and some happily surprising results, after other disappointments.  Trying to find some good pens that won't move when I lay them down on YUPO.  If anyone has suggestions, let me know, please!

Piratey Pair

Here's a colorful pair.  Well, the parrot, perched on his friend's shoulder, was colorful, so I decided to make his friend colorful, too.  Just seemed right.

I'm not an erasing kind of girl; I just sat down (in front of Starbucks con caliente cafe) in the morning sunshine and lightly drew it out with a 005 Micron pen.  They're light enough that I can correct as I go.  Then when I'm done laying out the entire thing, by the time I start putting down heavier and darker pens, those light lines are pretty much obliterated.  I think the drawing took me about an hour and a half of laid-back, feet-up enjoyment.

Anyway, it was pretty fun doing a parrot as I've never done one before, and I particularly like the guy's blue/green expression.  And the gold earring.  Looks piratey.  By the way, when I ride my bike each day, I wear one gold hoop, too.  Makes ME feel piratey!

Market Street Artists

Last night Market Street had a special evening, 'Fashion's Night Out.'  They had models everywhere, free giveaways, food and drink samples, and also asked artists to station themselves at particular points to paint.  It was a really fun evening.  Here are a couple pics.

 Admittedly, I was a little skeptical about all this.  Although I am a social animal, when I'm creative, I want to concentrate and don't want to be bothered.  And I don't like people looking at what I'm doing! 

However, I also know that you're supposed to challenge yourself and do scary things, so off I went.
Turned out to be really fun.  I was lighthearted about my art, enjoyed my friend, and we talked to scores of people all evening.

A good time was had by all.

Self Portrait

Well, every year I have my high school students do self portraits with graphing.  A couple weeks ago I decided it was about time I did one myself!  So... here it is.  I did it in pencil and Prismacolor markers.  I tried to keep the markers really 'sketchy' and loose because I'm a pretty spontaneous person.  You would note that I left most of the graphing squares in; I like them!  I erased a lot of them on my face but left some of the pencil lines in as well so people could see the steps I took.

My original plan was to do only my eyes in blue, and pop just a little bit into the curls at my neck to indicate my, uh, colorful personality, and reflect the unusual colors I've been putting in my little neck tendrils lately (blue, turquoise...)  But, the blue was too fun, so it got spread around.

This was from a photo of me when I was playing in one of our musical theater shows.  I got everyone in the orchestra to put Sharpie mustaches on their fingers.  At particular points during the show, we 'flashed' the actors to see if we could throw them off just a wee bit. :)

HUGE Woodcarving Begun

I wanted to show you the beginnings of my new woodcarving.  You have to look pretty closely here, because I've only lightly sketched it in with pencil.  Basically, this pic is to give you a concept of its size. 

The picture below shows the top of the tree only, and is about 1/4 to 1/3 of the entire piece.

As you can see from this photo (by the way, this is post-bike ride hair, so just forget-about-it!) I've begun the carving at the bottom.  I'm going to cut out all the negative space around the tree before I do any texturing on the tree itself.

The carving at the bottom represents two sessions; I've forgotten how physical carving is, and this last session exhausted my hand!  Time to stop for the night.  Once again, I big off one big bite, and I'm pretty sure this one's going to take me the lion's share of the winter to finish.  You can also note by the picture below that I've made some early cuts around the edge lines of the tree.  These isolate the tree so I don't (ideally) mistakenly cut into it.  I'll post photos as I progress.