Finally Caught Up, Just In Time For A Hard One

So, the past few days I've been blogging about the 30 Day Drawing Challenge, looking at other people's works, beleaguering myself with the choices for each day's challenge (oh, such problems I have!). One of my fellow participants, artist Megan Mars, hasn't been posting to the same group I have, but has just been posting it to her Fan Page. When she posted her most recent entry, it occurred to me that I hadn't actually checked to see if we were using the same list. As it turns out, we weren't. So since I believe I used her list for my very first post (and it shares the first few challenges in common), I suppose I should post the list that I am actually going from myself.

I was a couple days behind, but I think I've caught up. Yesterday, I managed to finish and post Day 8, Favorite Animated Character. I have loved Looney Tunes' Wile E. Coyote since long before I ever moved to the Southwestern Desert. Having built almost my entire preconceived knowledge base of the desert on watching Wile E. and Road Runner, I have to say, living here now, I got it pretty much correct.

Day 9 was "Favorite TV Show", which is another thing that changes every few years. Some runners-up included "Supernatural", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", and "The X-Files", but as far as the TV show that I currently can't wait to see in my Tevo lineup each week, I had to go with the BBC/SyFy Channel series, "Merlin". It's a true escape from real life, present day, and, well, historical or literary accuracy. I think it's really sweet.

Plus, I got to pretty much make up the sword from thin air--Excalibur hasn't really made much of an appearance on the show yet. This drawing was all in graphite except for his blue eyes, which were colored pencil.

Day 10 was "Favorite Candy" and that was pretty easy. According to my Dad, my first word wasn't "Mama" or "Daddy", but "emmanem".

I only drew one, 'cos I'm on a diet. But the red ones are the best.

Today is Day 11, and the challenge is "Turning point in your life." I've had quite a few turning points, so that will require some thought. I guess you will just have to wait and find out.

Five Days in a Row of New Drawings!

I did not post anything to the blog about yesterday's drawing, so I will do a two-for-one today.

Yesterday, I'm not sure if the image was inspired by the song, or if the title popped into my head as I was drawing and reminded me of the song, but this one is called "Little Wing." You can go listen to the original Jimi Hendrix version here, or my favorite, the remake by Sting. Whichever inspired which, I really like that song. I'm going to have to get Sean to play it for me sometime.

So this drawing measures about 5 1/4" x 6 1/2" on acid-free drawing paper and was drawn using archival, permanent ink. It is for sale in my Etsy Shop already...

Today, I wasn't going to draw anything, I was going to get back to all of the other things I need to do. But, no, this image popped into my head this morning and refused to not exist. It is entitled "Argyle Beard" (and subtitled "Baxter," just to piss off my friend Baxter). For this one I got out my colored pencils and colored in the tweedy-looking argyle in his beard, as well as his swell purple shirt. He is also listed for sale in my Etsy Shop.

On a side note, a couple days ago, I watched this video on TED of a talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on genius. I found it quietly inspiring. I think my favorite bit was where she talks about separating herself from the creative process or "genius" as if it is a separate entity, and how it freed her to say to it, "You and I both know that, if this [work] isn't brilliant, that it isn't entirely my fault. As you can see, I am putting everything I have into this... if you want it to be better, you've got to show up and do your part of the deal... and I would like the record to reflect that I showed up for my part of the job."

So I suppose I have showed up for my part of the job, at least for a little while, every day this week. I'm not sure how many of those days my assigned genius came along with me, but we shall see.

Checking the Blue Corn Traps -- Finally Finished, Again

Drumroll please... I am not 100% positive, but I think this may be finished, again. This colored pencil work is one that I "finished" in 1999 (hence why the '0' in the '09' next to the signature looks a little like a '9') and have blogged about before. There is almost no space on this drawing that has not been drawn over now, but I think I like it. I have totally changed the color of the background, enhanced the original colors of the 'trap,' totally changed the color and shape of the corn, and punched up the little green, um, slug-thingies-that-are-doing-the-trap-checking. The most challenging part was the fact that this wasn't done on particularly heavy drawing paper, and erasing and colored pencils don't go together for a reason. I almost couldn't get the color to take on the last piece of corn for lack of a smooth drawing surface. I am still looking at it trying to decide if I missed any spots, or if I want to lighten up the corn a little, but overall, I think it looks okay. Pretty soon I will put it back in its frame and buy it new glass (found a place here in Albuquerque where I can get low-glare conservtion glass for cheap) and decide on a price! I appreciate any feedback from my readers so please, comment away!

Work in Progress! Checking the Blue Corn Traps

I thought I would post an update on my latest work in progress "Checking the Blue Corn Traps." This colored pencil work was already finished, matted and framed and hanging on the wall. It looked like this:

After looking at it on the wall for about 8 years, I finally decided that the lavender background makes me want to barf. The image itself I still pretty much like. So I took the thing out of its frame and started erasing the purple background and punching up the orange and red strands in the foreground...

I did manage to get most of the background ickiness off of there without damaging the paper. I decided to replace the background with an intense sky blue. Only problem now, was that the three pieces of 'corn' sort of disappeared. Time to do some more erasing.... So I have almost totally re-colored this picture, and am in the final stages of bluing up the corn:

Sorry if the pic is still a little blurry. I am working out some kinks in my new camera...
This does give you a good idea of what it will look like.
For some finished colored pencil works, go here to see my original drawings.

New Juried Show in Albuquerque at The Wooden Cow

I haven't blogged in a while, but I thought I should mention... My work is going to be in a juried show here in Albuquerque! The show is called "Eye Candy" and is being held at a gallery in the Northeast Heights called The Wooden Cow.

The show is called Eye Candy with the intention of providing a colorful feast for the eyes. I submitted three colorful works, but I think they probably picked the best one--"Sacred Heart--Cosmic Scale" shown at left, is a colored pencil drawing I finished early last year. I had recently broken the glass on it, so I had a good excuse to upgrade to glare-reducing conservation glass. As a side note, after calling around to several frame shops for quotes and getting prices from $28 to $52 for a 13" x 16" piece of glass, I found out where they all buy their glass from here in town is O'Malley's Glass, who wanted $13 for the same piece of glass! They were totally fine with just cutting one piece of glass, too. Believe me, I will go back to those guys!

So the show at The Wooden Cow will run from April 29 - May 30, with an opening on Friday, May 1st, from 5 pm to 8 pm. The show will feature the mosaic tilework of Meg Butler (having seen some of her work in person already, I can say it is worth going to see just for that), the colored pencil work of Wendell Unzicker, as well as many other colorful artists from Albuquerque. The gallery is located at 7400 Montgomery NE, Suite 20, in the Mossman Shopping Center, just east of Louisiana on Montgomery. Call them at (505)999-1280 if you have any questions.

Cool Drawing, Ugly Execution

Today's work is one that was recently downgraded from finished work, framed and hanging on the wall, to work in progress. The title of this piece is "Checking the Blue Corn Traps." The date inscribed on it, next to my signature, is 1999. I matted it and put it into a nice wood frame, and it has been hanging in various locations in my house (including the attic) for a few years now. I have always liked the design, but over the last few years, the intensity and choice of colors have really started to bug the crap out of me. I like the bright foreground colors, but they are just not intense enough, and there is much too much white space within those areas. That background purple color has recently started to make me ill just looking at it. Blech. So here's the plan: I have determined the colors I used originally (apparently, despite my posts that recommend writing down what colors you use as you are composing a new work, I glibly thought I would remember, or would never change it once it was finished), and have begun the process of punching up the foreground colors. I will probably not burnish the colors in, as I like the graininess for this image, but there is still room for a lot more pigment in the orange and red areas. The background I intend on changing completely, by overlaying (probably) true blue, as the purple just isn't working. I will try to post some snapshots as I go along, but if anyone looks at this image and thinks of the perfect solution, comments are always welcome.

The Versatility of Colored Pencil

Well, okay, most people have heard of colored pencil, but I thought perhaps I would introduce some of my readers to the versatility of the technique and show some examples of what can be achieved. "Stinky Cat" to my left was rendered in colored pencil in a somewhat typical manner, layering a few colors together in places, with a certain amount of the white tooth of the paper showing through. For a few of the details, I have used various burnishing techniques to make the colors blend smoothly and achieve more detail, for instance, in the eyes and the nose. Burnishing is a technique that uses a neutral colored pencil (white, cream, or a colorless blender) layered heavily over other colors to blend the colors together and create smooth transitions. Burnishing differs from regualr drawn lines as the technique involves pressing the pencil into the paper and blending it as you go, without showing the individual lines. In the case of the cat's nose here, I used a white pencil over the dark and mid-tones to create the smooth appearance with white highlights. The eyes, on the other hand, were burnished using a colorless blender. Colorless blenders come in pencil form (basically the plastic-y wax the colored pencils are made from) or in marker form, and they will each produce their own qualities, and each has their own pros and cons. The pencil form can blend incompletely or leave a slight bloom (waxy residue) on the image, but is overall my favorite for most work, as it has the same properties as any other colored pencil. The marker style blends very smoothly and evenly in most instances, but can soak up the first color you use it on, making it difficult to get back out in order to avoid transferring it to the next color. The markers also do not seem to last terribly long in my experience. It is also common to burnish with a white, cream, or grey colored pencil. Each of these will necessarily change the tone of the colors underneath, but makes some very nice effects. I have successfully pulled off some great experiments in burnishing two or more non-neutral colors together, but, strangely, some colors mix together well while others do not. My advice is to use a secondary sheet of the same type of paper your main work is drawn on, try out several variations of two or more colors blended together, and be sure to label your experiments, in case you forget later how you achieved a great combination.

The picture to the right was created almost entirely by burnishing together bright colors with one another. The sky is a gradation made up of various shades of grey, then burnished with white, to give it a grey-sky appearance. If you look closely you can see how hard I pressed the pencil into the paper in order to mix it together and seal the tooth of the paper at the same time.

Both of the images shown in this post are for sale in my Etsy shop!

Image a Day -- Day 12 -- Orange Cat in Red Flowers

Today's image is another one inspired by James Christensen and his characters. Personally, I don't even have a cat any more (three dogs, my last cat ran away, 1 block, and never came back), and it's not so much that I don't like cats--it is that I like other people's cats. This one reminds me of Benjamin, a big, lazy, orange cat my Mom and I had when I was growing up. He had no problem picking out my mother's favorite flower bed and plopping himself right down in it to take a nap.

This drawing is an original colored pencil, and is available for sale in my Etsy store here.

Image a Day -- Day 11 --Big Fat Purple Cat

I was looking through a collection of artwork by one of my favorite artists, James Christensen, and I remembered where I got the inspiration for this cat's face. If you check out some of Christensen's characters, you'll notice that this long, somber face looks a little like some of his musicians. I am currently working on a colored pencil drawing that has borrowed another of his character faces, but it is slow going. It was another one that I started, thinking I would figure out what goes on the rest of the page when I got there, and now there is here, and I am still trying to figure it out.
The purple cat was never meant to be all that complicated, just a small blurb of an image with pretty colors and cat with an odd face.
He is for sale in my Etsy store both as a print and the original.

Image a Day -- Day 10 -- "The Sun Was Well Over the Yardarm"

In this laboratory where I used to work was a man who had grown up in a rural, fairly wealthy part of Connecticut, and although he became something of a tree-hugging hippie in his later years, used to make these references to Northeastern countryclub colloquialisms. One of them was, "Well, the sun is over the yardarm," which was originally intended to mean that it was getting late in the day, and there was now a long shadow from the yardarm. If it is late in the day, then it must be proper to have one's first evening cocktail. But, if you think about it, any time the sun is up, it is over the yardarm, so really any time at all will do for the first cocktail of the day, right?

This image was inspired by that saying, as I'm imagining if your first cocktail was sometime during daylight, by sunset, the yardarm has got to start looking something like this. This picture is another colored pencil that is also not for sale, and also happens to be hanging in my kitchen (where, oddly, not that much drinking really ever occurs). I suppose I chose this one today in response to my 14 year old daughter's tyrade last night about the evils of alcohol, and how, anyone who drinks alcohol at all is going to hell in a handbasket. I really don't drink very often, so mine is probably a small handbasket with rickety handles and holes in the bottom. I should probably drink more to make it worth my while.

Image a Day -- Day 9 -- Brownian Paisley

I don't often create truly abstract images, they usually have some reference to something. This image was an attempt to create something truly abstract. It really doesn't have anything to do with anything, except that I thought of the title, "Brownian Paisley," which struck me as a nifty title, and drew the design from that. I love the idea of starting with something with structure, and then just injecting a left turn in one's thought process (I'd use the word "random," but as a scientist, I know that nothing is truly random, especially something created by humans, plus the word has been recently banished from use by Lake Superior State University as trite and horribly over- and misused.) Just the idea of trying to imitate the fractal patterns inherent in Brownian motion just with pencils and paper is a big part of what being an artist is all about--imitating nature, while at the same time, creating something that wasn't there before.

This image was rendered in colored pencil, and is the first of the Image a Day Series that is not for sale in my Etsy store. It is framed and hanging in my kitchen. There's lots of other Brownian motion in my kitchen to keep it company.

Day 6 -- Image a Day -- Imaginary Biology

In honor of the latest sale from my Etsy store, today's image is from my Cell Series. This was the first of four tiny colored pencil drawings designed after living cells. Inflammatory cells, such as monocytes, lymphocytes, and granulocytes, mediate the response in our bloodstream to invaders of all sorts, secreting chemicals which enroll other cells into the fight, and undergoing dramatic shape changes to suit their roll as defenders. This cell is no specific inflammatory cell, but it is getting ready to respond to some sort of invading threat. Plus the colors are pretty.

While I just sold its sister, the plant cell, this drawing is still available for purchase, as well as two more.

Also in honor of having made another sale, allow me to introduce my readers to the purchaser, who is also a clever and talented potter (no, not like the dorky kid from the movies, someone who forms clay). Her name is Katie, but on Etsy she goes by scrumdidlyump, and here's an example of her work! The grand bowl to the right is entitled "Not Yo Mama's Fruitbowl," and if you think the title's funny, go read the description. In fact, go read all her descriptions, they are very funny! Oh yeah, and go buy something!

Day 2 -- The Seer

The original drawing, a colored pencil on paper, is hanging in our living room, and measures about 9" x 12". It originally started as the eyeball in the middle, and was slowly finished between about 1995 to probably about 1998 or so. The date in the corner says '96, as, at a certain point, I inscribed my signature in the lower right hand corner, thinking it would inspire me to finish it in the year that it was signed. I did the same thing to the drawing I am going to go back to work on today, it is dated '99. This time, I'll put a -'08 next to the signature (that is, if I manage to finish this one in the next twelve months).
Sometimes I come up with a great idea for a piece of a picture, and then tell myself that I will fill in the missing areas once I get there. That strategy almost never works, but at least I'm challenging myself. The other thing about this piece is that, sometimes I come up with a great title for a piece before I've even created it, and then other times, the title eludes me forever, like this one, and I just go for some lame name like "The Seer." The aforementioned picture I'm working on doesn't have a title either, so I'll probably post it somewhere in order to solicit suggestions for a title. Stay tuned.
While the original of this image is not for sale, I am selling digital prints of it in my Etsy store, here.

Artwork a Day for 2008!!

Well let's see how many days we can keep this up...

So maybe I didn't start with the first day of the year, but I've never done this before, so I figure it's better than nothing. For a few days, I'll have images of old artwork, but the cool thing about this idea is that, pretty soon, I better start making more art to post!!

Today's image is my "Heart in a Box" ACEO. I created it one day when my husband was out of town on business, and I started getting all mushy about true love and personal freedom. To me, true love means never being "captured" by another, but being surrounded, nurtured, and supported. I have much more freedom with my honey than I ever had alone, because there were too many things I was afraid to do on my own. In fact, my husband has gotten me into things I never thought I would ever enjoy, and I've done the same for him. He's got big dreams for the future, and, thanks to him, I'm building some new dreams of my own. Together we are much more than the sum of our parts.