This and That

Wow!  It's been more than a month since my last posting. 

Persistence is what I've been practicing.   I've started over on the osprey piece 4 times, finally settling down on a purely colored pencil piece.  That might have been a mistake, as it took me weeks to get  the sky done.  The clouds have been nearly impossible, although they are coming along.  They don't look very cloud-like to me.  I'm starting on the bird now.  I hope this will pull everything together.  Maybe I need to practice the 10-10 rule.  Every 10 minutes, step back 10 feet and look at your work.

Some of you know that I have another blog, doviesaprons.blogspot.com.  I find that I can't keep both going.  So I'll just be posting everything to this blog.  That means that there will be more than just art here.  I also crochet, knit, sew and occasionally cook gourmet.  For example, this winter I've made 3 shawls and I'll be posting about them soon.  Just recently I  made French moelleux au chocolate.  

Thanks for being patient.

WIP

I sincerely hope that my few readers have had great holidays and a good start to a new year.

I'm starting on a new piece.  The drawing has taken me quite a while - several weeks in fact.  This is an osprey and chicks.  Composition is sometimes a problem for me.  I had several other versions of this.  But I figure that the more drawing I do, the better I get at it.  Hopefully this piece will be accepted for a summer touring show at the NC Aquarium.

This year's Christmas Card

I did this piece last December and some of your may remember it.  It was part of the original Virtual Sketch Date.  So this year, I'm using it for my Christmas card.

I'm having them printed by Shutterfly.com.  I've had cards printed by them before and they have done a good job.  Plus their prices are reasonable and they are fast.

So with the holidays approaching, I want to wish each of you, dear readers, a joyous holiday season and a happy and prosperous new year. 

The next few post may not be art related as I'm doing some sewing for gifts and I've made my 3 year twin neighbors aprons and chef's hats so that we can make cookies.

New Shots and Changes

Take two on the heron in flight. I've modified the ripples in the water some. I thought that the other was just too much white for the background.


And a new shot of the wading heron. Just a bit better color, nothing in the artwork itself has changed.

I've sprayed both of these with archival spray - it's an acrylic spray that claims to preserve paper works for an extended time.

Herons

Here is my wading heron. This piece is in colored pencil on dark blue Tiziano paper. Many thanks to Alan and Elaine Wilson of naturepicsonline.com for allowing me to use their photography as inspiration.



















This is my heron in flight. Both pieces are 11 x 14 inches. I'm using the paper itself as the background with rings and reflections as just a suggestion of water.

Horse Feathers

Not really....

Just a quick peek at my current project. I'm about 25% finished.

I'll be at "A Day Downtown" in Fuquay Varina October 31st. I'll have some original art and photographs.

Mandeville Vine Studies

...and you thought I'd fallen off the edge of the earth!

Summer is a busy time in the garden - planting, weeding, fertilizing, weeding, transplanting, weeding and more weeding. Now fall is nearly here and I'll be prunning and cutting back dead flower stalks. Next comes raking up millions of oak leaves to use for mulch.

But in the meantime...

I have been doing some studies of my mandeville vine in preparation for a much larger piece. These are also experiments. You might notice that each leaf is different in color. Some are colored pencil on top of watercolor, come are just colored pencil and a few are lighter green colored pencil on top of watercolor shadows. The bloom is on top of a pale pink watercolor. I have found that the pinks in the Prismacolor lines are kinda' lacking. The background is colored pencil on top of pale blue watercolor. I used an artstix blender and instead of blending the background, it pushed the colored pencil around in such a way that I ended up with a speckled looking background. Not quite what I had in mind.

This one just didn't turn out anything like I wanted. It has the look of a tropical shirt print. The background was darker until I went over it with a white artstix. It made it too light and it's not an even tint any more. The biggest problem is that the background and the flower are nearly the same value in color. So the flower doesn't stand out from the background as much as the piece show above.

These are small pieces, about 6 inches by 6 inches, on Magnani Aquerello hot press paper.

Back to the studio for more experiments.