Illustration Friday - savour

I liked this week's topic, and I decided to try something different. I wanted to use different mediums to draw the same scene. I tried vine charcoal, graphite, pen, and ink. The results were terrible. Very dissapointing.

I then tried to draw the scene using an eyedropper. A picnic on a warm summer day, a good book, a bottle of wine and good food to savour ...

I added a bit o color to see the difference:

I think I still like the first one better.

Then, I taped the brush handle to another brush. The resulting tool had a handle of about 1.5 ft. and the resulting picnic scene is this:

 I might keep practicing drawing with the eyedropper and the long-handle brush, the results are interesting ...

Who are they?

This is the first spread in the guerilla journal. I started by stapling a piece of mat board on the inside left cover to make it sturdier. Then I applied some paint. As I was about to glue down images, I started having "visions"...resulting in this:

The only thing I do not like when creatures pop up like this is that there are too many of them ...people who work this way usually have a focal image. I end up with a crowd and I can't figure out what their story is and how to streamline the resulting composition. If this makes any sense at all?! In this spread there are kids, old people,a wasp or bee of some kind, a rabbit, birds, an orchestra director (right page in the middle on top of the birds), a birds that reminds me "The invisible man" (the green spot of color in the middle of the right page).
But once I start seeing them, I cannot ignore them anymore .. sigh ...

The end of the journal ...

This is the last spread in this book has a halloween-ish look to it. I had some leftover black paint to get rid of.

Stencils, masks, spray paint, Golden interference paints. Fun and fast to make. I don't have a lot of time these days. I am busy with the writing course, among other things. It is getting cold and depressing - that does not help either. I am contemplating signing up for an online course. I need homework to stay on track ...

Illustration Friday - sneak

 I wanted to skip this one, but free associating around the word, I remembered Zorro. He wears his mask and sneaks around at night to avenge the poor .. all that romantic stuff, especially when he looks like Antonio Banderas, right? So I made a cartoonish character inspired by Zorro.

 The line around the face was too thick, but I did not want to erase it. The whole look made me think of somebody with a toothache and the hear wrapped in a handkerchief. Or maybe that is a propeller that helps Zorro over the wall. Even better, this is Zorro-ant on his way to save the ant colony.

Crusade nr. 46 - What's your hang-up?

I thought I had nothing to submit for this crusade ... but then I found!

I enlarged some collages at the print shop and tacked them to the wall. I want to find a way to print them even bigger and use as wallpaper. The first three are printed on color copy paper - a bit too shiny.

 This one was printed on cardstock.

 These are assemblage pieces.

 This one is about the pilgrimage to Compostella.

I also "found" paintings from my previous "artist life" - when I was into oil painting. I painted the orchid with the fingers.

Thanks for visiting!

Illustration Friday - burning

I went about the usual way for this week's topic. I lookd up some quotes and I found a nice one by Leonard Cohen:

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

I love the quote, but how am I going to go about drawing this? And as I pondered this question, I thought that maybe I should use a literal approach this time ... and I made three smoke paintings and three different types of paper: 

I revisited them with ink and charcoal:

I like the middle one. In the last one, I saw a figure on a chair draped in some kind of cloth, but I could not draw it, so I decide to "see" something else. Then the ink smudged and so now I have a face with moustache. Smoke painting is fun as long as it is done carefully. My first attempt burned, luckily I had a spray bottle handy...

Another weekend of hard work ...

... painting my office/studio. It was greenish, now it is sand.

I used recycled paint. I asked at Home Depot what happens to the paint people bring back and if I could get some of that. I wanted to use for painting a large canvass, but the clerk said that it is illegal to sell leftover paint. I could however buy recycled paint. It sounded interesting and I decided to go with it.It looks ok to me. The color choice is limited, but otherwise it seems fine. I guess I will see what happens in time. That empty wall bags for some kind of treatement. I tried having message boards and the like, but I never liked the result. I  think I will eventually paint a long canvass or paper that will go the whole width of the wall. One day ...

Style statement defender

Style statement is a workbook that helps the readers figure out their style . The premise is that the style is made of two defining words. One word represents the person most of the time and the second word is the accent. Similar to the 80/20 principle - 80 % of the income is from 20 % of the customer base. I am not done with the exercises so i do not know what my statement is. No wonder I am not finished, look who's fiercingly defending the book:

Jewelry holder

Since I replaced the nighttables with bookcases, I needed a place to store my necklaces ... so I made a jewelry holder out of a wire hanger.

 

I read about this somewhere. I like the result because this way I can see everything. This is a problem - if I don't see what I have, I forget. The same is true with the art supplies - unfortunately, I cannot display them as easy as my necklaces.

Illustration Friday - afterwards

Once again, I had to use google for ideas. I found an interesting quote and, as always, my drawing qualities were inadequate for the challenge ... Here is the result:

I used Posemaniacs; I wanted to have Atlas crumbling under the weight of the world, and then raising up. I settled for a crawling Atlas. Ink and dip pen; I tried some new nibs I bought.

The world breaks everyone and afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places.

E. Hemingway

How joyfull to be together

This is a journal spread I did using small scraps of papers from my desk. Whenever I undertake the daunting task of cleaning up, I have all these tiny bits of papers resurfacing from under piles of stuff. So I just used them here pretty much as they were.

I found the following poem and I wrote it over the house:

How joyful to be together, alone

as when we first were joined

in our little house by the river

long ago, except that now we know 

each other, as we did not then;

and now instead of two stories fumbling 

to meet, we belong to one story 

that the two, joining, made. And now 

we touch each other with the tenderness

of mortals, who know themselves...

Wendell Berry

from "The Blue Robe"

Il Campiello

I enjoyed the play. I saw it at the Place des Arts. Now, I was prepared to listen to a waterfall of French after Triloggia della Villeggiatura. I guess that was a good thing. What I did not like was the shouting part. I am not sure what is with this new tendency in theatre where the actors instead of acting, shout. The makeup and costume where great. Definetely worth seeing.

Bakery reopened

Another thing that happened this past weekend is that I reopened my private bakery! It is cold enough to use the stove now (we had a few centimetres os snow on Sunday morning!). I am proud to repot that Prospero turned one year old and survived being frozen for three weeke while I was busy learning Spanish in Guatemala.

I made the basic sourdough recipe from Peter Reinhart's book. Yumm ... I froze one loaf for next week.

Illustration Friday - spent

When I read the topic of the week, the only things that came to mind were spent candels. Not much to go with, so I summoned google to the rescue and looked for quotes with "spent". Lo and behold, I found this one:

"Time spent with cats is never wasted." S. Freud

Not exactly what I would expect from Mr. Freud! I thought it was too funny to let it pass. I thought about drawing my cat sleeping on the sofa, but he refused to pose for the occasion. I wish I could say that the cat pose was my idea, but it was not. I drew it from a picture.I used pen, watercolor, acrylic ink.  Here is the result:

 

Lots of hard work ...

... during the weekend, and not of the artistic kind. I decided to paint the bedroom. Just like that. So the best part of the weekend was spent doing that. I bought a gallon of Behr - Sandstone Cove and I painted anything that did not move! The cat looked at me with quizzical eyes - I disturbed his beauty sleep!
Before:

By the time I finished, it was dark already so I took the pic at night:

I also moved the bookcases in the bedroom and I will get rid of the nightstands. I don't know why I bought them in the first place when there are so many other alternatives that work better and are more interesting. The duvet cover hanging in the window is for testing purposes. I am contemplating repurposing it as a curtain and I am trying to get a fell of how it would look like before I do some irreparable damage.

After all this hard work, I decided to reward myself:

That is a tiramisu and a set of three lined moleskines. They were on sale and I could not resist ...
The plastic container got a second life as a jewelry container:

Not much at has been done this weekend ... but I suppose one cannot have everything in life right? I am pleased with how the color turned out in my bedroom and now I want to paint the office too!