Drawing Lab 1A

The second part of the first exercise is to take several of your imaginary kitties and render them in different media. So I dug out a little moleskine and my charcoal sticks from my college days.....can it have been 35 years?

Drawing Lab

A huge thank you to the folks who mentioned Carla Sonheim's Drawing Lab. I did some work on the first exercise today:

"sitting or lying on your bed, take cardstock and a colored extra-fine marker and draw 30 or more cats from your imagination."

I love her idea that creativity blossoms when you impose more strictures on your exercise, not fewer.

So here are a few of my imaginary kitties.

I'm still working on a quilt for a friend, and still preparing to teach a couple of one-hour classes to kids at a community center in a disadvantaged area of town next month. They will be based on the Watts Towers to go with our theme of "urbanology", our word for urban art. The first week will be a whimsical sculpture activity with wire, beads and buttons, and wooden blocks to mount the wire structures on. The second week will be a hand cranked toy using tin cans as a housing, and bent wire for the crank, and again wire and beads for a moving sculpture coming out of a hole in top of the can. I'm having a little trouble getting a prototype together of this--- I need to figure out an easy and cheap way to keep the moving sculpture in place on the hand crank while still letting it move around the crank. I am thinking maybe styrofoam peanuts on each side of the sculpture? Does that make any sense? If anybody reading understand what I am trying to say and has any ideas, I'd be grateful.

May 13

"Draw or paint a fence." I used this one as an excuse to try out watercolor crayons, which I had not used before. They were OK for quick sketching, I wanted a bigger range of colors. My back fence, as seen from my balcony, with cape honeysuckle for the hummingbirds and roses for me.

May 11

Something fresh-- two red and one yellow-- raspberries.

May 10

The kitties love for the gas fireplace to be on all winter long!

Joshua trees

These interesting trees are found only in the California, Arizona and Nevada high deserts. The California range starts at Palmdale, a bout a half hour north of where I live. I took these photographs in late December after heavy rains, at the Red Rock Canyon State Park, a little farther north.

The largest trees are thought to be hundreds of years old. They do not form rings, and are evergreen, but the old fronds cover the bark similar to the way some palm trees grow. (Some people call Joshua trees yucca palms.) Woodpeckers love them and nest in them!

This was a fiendishly difficult project for me, and took several weeks. I realized part way in that I was not seeing the color correctly-- that everything that grows in the desert is greyed-down lavender, beige, or green, and that the landscape coloring is very subtle. Layering the colors was very challenging. And then there is the issue of my normal loosey-goosey style, the looseness of watercolor as a medium, and the starkness of the subject. I think it would have been much easier to tackle in oils, which would have allowed me to layer on color and texture. Maybe I should consider trying that.

EDIM 8 and 9

I think I need to switch genres, but here are my lightbulb and clock. I realized we have only digital clocks in the house. This one is satellite-correcting, but has the wrong dates for daylight savings time, so there are a few weeks every year when we are confused. as this is our alarm clock. The lightbulb-- we have been replacing everything possible with CFL bulbs, and through that and other methods have cut our electric bill in half.