Kitty Sketch

I took some photos of Smelly Cat in his regular sleeping spot in the sewing room with the plan of making some sketches from them. And now I have the first one.  He is Mr. Highly Prized, a lucky stray kitty who showed up on the front porch one day in 1996 and moved himself in. He is the mushiest kitty you will ever find, tolerates just about any hugging and squeezing you might need to give him.  He is a sweetie, getting on in years, and spends most of his time heat sucking on top of the cable box or in any sunny window.

So I turned one of the photos to black and white because I really wanted to see the light and shadow of the photo without the distraction of color. He's a grey cat so there wasn't much color to begin with. I haven't sketched like this in a very long time (count decades).  I consider sketching to be different from "drawing" which I do a lot more of the time.  I draw faces, designs, quilting line drawings, but sketching is different to me.  I don't know if I'm finished with this one but it was a good place to pause. So here is the photo and the sketch:

I think it's a good start anyway. I might do a quick pen sketch as well later today. We'll see what the day brings.

WIP It! WIP It Good!

I'm working on a number of things all at once-what's new about that, you ask-and I realized at least one of them had steps in progress and that it might be interesting to follow my own steps.

I started with sketches I worked on during my days at Dish that were exercises in drawing with a continuous line. Again this is so I can later use it on a quilt and I'll have worked out how I need to "draw" with the sewing machine. I have an autumn themed quilt top that I made a couple of years ago with dubious skill but that gives me permission to try more adventurous things in quilting it.  I have an idea in mind that is way out of my league at this point but here's how to get there.  Break it down into bite sized lessons and apply them when I'm better at them. Back to the sketches:

I started with this daffodil that will have a future elsewhere.  Then I went for dandilions:

(<--new friend found living in sewing room, now evicted) 

which led me to thinking about milkweeds which release fluffy things similar to dandilions but which are more autumnal than either daffodils or dandilions.

 I did a layout sketch for a general idea for the aforementioned quilt and then I made a small quilt sandwich with muslin and my favorite cotton batting and sewed just the milkweed, pods and floaty fluffy parts all with one line:

Now I want to attack the little sandwich with paintstiks and/or inks.  And we're off!! Let more fun begin!! Oh, and don't forget to feed the fish before you go!! Scroll down and they're there!

Self, Meet Worth.

I started my new job just over a week ago.  Day one was fraught with stress, as any new job day one is, but I seemed to have overdosed on it and it had me really questioning myself about being in this place where I so want to be-it's sewing heaven-and do I belong here? Fortunately my first day was followed by two days off so I had plenty of time to process what the heck was going on in me that I was so immediately feeling so hugely insecure. I really had to pick apart what all those scared-anxious-butterflies were about and when I got to the bottom of it, beyond just newbie jitters, I realized there was a lot going on about my worthiness to be there.

A lot of what goes on are classes that I eventually will teach which doesn't scare me so much.  But I look around at what some of the other, advanced and very advanced classes are learning, knowing I would not be teaching them for a very long time, if ever, and do I have the artistic ability to do all that? Because you're not just showcasing what the sewing computer can do, you have to make choices about color and design and the end result looks fabulous.  I know I'm not in that league.  So am I worthy of the new job turns out to be the underlying fear overdose.

Having picked apart those feelings and dug out the worrywart of "you might not be good enough" I put on the big girl panties and said to my self: they know I don't know about a lot of things and they're teaching me what I don't know.  I am an eager learner and I love tech-y stuff.  I also love fabric and color and sewing and now that I am past day one, I come home with excitement and I want to head into my sewing room after spending the day in a room filled with sewing machines. That can only be a good way to come home. I tend to my insecurities as they come up during the day, but I haven't had the Day One heeby-jeebies since. I'm where I'm supposed to be.  I belong where I am.  It will challenge me and I will grow which is why I even applied for the job in the first place.  (And just maybe, I'll stop blogging about living in fear of Everything!!)

Golly, Gouache!

Gouache has been this mystery paint to me.  I don't recall every running across it in all the years I stayed up on art supplies, and then came the crayola years of children (and farming and divorcing and working and going back to school, yadda, yadda, yadda) when only later would I find my art stash had been pillaged by curious hands.  So gouache had been unheard of until a couple of years ago, and ignored as I heard acrylics calling my name and I answered their call enough to purchase them but not enough to use them.  Way too afraid of something I knew nothing about, and gratified to learn a friend, whom I Highly Prize, and think of as an artist, also had the fear of acrylics.  We're working on that, but I digress.

Thanks to Melanie Testa's enjoyment of the gouache and willingness to do tutorials on using them, I acquired a set of beginner gouache paints (the only ones in stock in the store I went to, actually) and yesterday I faced the unknown and painted with them.  Cautiously, I might add, but they made me happy for at least an hour.  I don't know if it's because I've learned a lot more since I tried painting with watercolor for the first time since grade school (those attempts went very poorly as all of my Formal Art Training-one studio class in college-was with oils and watercolors are not oils nor do you work with them in the same way, but I digess) but I felt much more in control of these paints.  I set up a basic red-blue-yellow, with white, black, and I think burnt umber, and went to town with a little landscape.  It has no place in reality but I love my Virginia mountains and they are what I draw, paint, photograph most often so naturally I went for mountains, with a pleasing result:

Not spectacular but nice enough as a first attempt and encouraging much more to come. Later today I'll be headed into the sewing room to make some "inchies" which I've been dying to try and just haven't made the time. The wind is howling outside but the sun is out-it was snowing when I got up today-but I captured one of my favorite trees looking especially beautiful yesterday. It's an oddly shaped tulip poplar in the field across from my house; they're usually a very straight up tree but something happened to this one way back when and it's very curvy and branches out all over in lovely arcs.



I'm going to do some sketching of it in my forever attempt to draw a decent tree. It started in childhood. Yes, I had tree trauma, some boy peeing on an apple tree I climbed, while I was up in the tree, and I was certain the tree would fall over right then and there, but I digress.  So it goes.  Off to inchies and other fun stuff!

Here Come the Birds

Birds round 1:  I can now fold the swans with ease.  Next will be cranes, a more complicated folding process. Most are headed to be mobiles that will eventually be hung outside to weather and dissolve away along with their obsessed scratchings.  Some will be flattened and collaged into something else that I'm beginning today.  I'm really pleased with how this is going and how many ideas are coming out of this little directive of making new art from old.

I want to cut out profiles of other birds-swallows, wrens, hummingbirds and other favorites-to also collage.  I've not collaged very much and I'm digging through old magazines for some images and words to use. Much fun will be happening today.

Day one of new job: Every insecurity I have comes out when I go into the unfamiliar, especially when it involves a job I've really longed to have in a vague, fantasy way.  It's been manifested, I have that dream job, and after the first day I'm seeing the steep learning curve ahead to learn about all these different sewing/embroidery/serger machines and discovered that I've been doing a couple of things incorrectly on my own machine.  So out comes the manual to my machine to study up on, and the workbook I got when I took the classes to learn how to use my machine (as part of the new job includes teaching those classes eventually).

To keep the anxiety down I have to keep my sights on baby steps and off the panic button.  I'm reading a book, The Disorganized Mind, which is a guide to self-coaching the ADHD mind. It's really helpful for catching myself in the act of "all or nothing, black or white" thinking that precipitates panicking.  Most of it goes straight to fail/succeed options. In that mind set, for example, if you're dieting and you have the slice of chocolate cake, you've now failed and the whole diet goes out the window.  That same mind set can be applied to many life circumstances where one misstep tanks the entire endeavor. For ADD-ers (which I confess I have a touch of), who may have a life history of being criticized for their unique way of approaching the world, this can be magnified to not just having made a mistake but also to thinking "I am a mistake." This is the piece I am working on, not giving up before I even start because I could make a mistake, ie FAIL. Learning happens when we make mistakes. We remember what we learned because of having done it incorrectly.

So I have to be willing to make mistakes, to misstep here and there, because this is an opportunity to grow in a very major direction that is the direction I want to be taking.  There will be butterflies, there may be a panic attack here and there, but more important, I will be growing, learning, and finding continuity across my life.  The opportunity is to stretch who I am and become who I know myself to be, the one in hiding, ready to come on out and play!

Seems Like a Big Gap

...but really it hasn't been.  I had a whole post all written and ready to go and added my pics then decided to move one of them.  That screwed things up so I hit "undo" and, voila! My post went into Blog Ether, never to be recovered.  Sad, but true. That was just 2 days ago.

Since then I found a free workshop on Visual Journaling to which I am very new, and the first assignment is to cut up something from past journaling and make new art from it. Well, the only old journals I have come predominantly from written journals kept almost 20 years ago now and they're embarrassingly obsessed with the man in my life at that time, heat-driven ravings actually, that fill numerous journals which I started keeping as part of therapy related to working out Family of Origin Mysteries. I had planned to burn them but I didn't want to lose the really nice nuggets that are interspersed with the rantings of obsession. So I was going to read, rip, and burn the non-nugget pages.

In light of this new opportunity I thought these pages needed to take flight.  The idea felt right when I decided to make them into birds.  I began re-reading in search of nuggets and decided I just couldn't waste the time to sift through all the ridiculous angst of those years, let alone have the energy to re-visit the issues I was working through during the years I wrote them.  I have at times past gone back to them to revisit, but I know what's there and I know I've closed the doors on much of what I wrote about. Time for releasing some birds. Photos to follow.

Happy New Year and Day One!! on Day Two

Hockey Art from the Winter Classic from me:

Then from the wild and crazy mind of a 7 year old: I just love it!!

She's working on cursive and her little flowers look like bleeding hearts to me.  We did do some painting as well-she painted the backgrounds, let them dry and then drew more designs using the Sharpies, which she's in love with.  Child with a million art supplies (and attends a school that really values arts education) and she's after mine!!

More to come in the days ahead!!

Photo Catch-up

Here are photos now that I have my camera back!!
Trees to go along with the 12-21-10 post:

I like working with the curve-y shape and will do more with this in the future.  Here's the one where the tree turned into this girl's hair: 

 Then the woods, not liking so much. I live in a sort of snowglobe of woods and am always trying to capture how much they change the light inside the house as the seasons change.  We're now in the gray/brown monochromatic of winter.

And this tree I like a lot, one of my better efforts. I photograph trees frequently as they have so much going on with them, the roots getting exposed, critters tunnel into them to make houses.  We think of trees as more static but really they aren't.  They change more subtly, that is until they fall over.

Then the photos for the 12-28-10 post of the little watercolor sketchbook and the possible future quilt of the sea:

It's a rudimentary little book with two copper rings so I can add and remove pages to paint them, about 4" x 6".

And finally I really like this little guy, made a pencil sketch to get the main lines, which I colored with my new Sharpies and then added the other waves with colored pencils (the ones I now know are not watercolorable, if that's even a word).  Such a pleasant, meditative feeling while I colored it, extra nice.

Happy New Year and Day One!!

Camera is back home at last, I've had an overnight with Zoe here ravishing the new markers, and an overnight at Zoe's making a pair of earrings, necklace repaired by adding a magnetic clasp (easier for a 7 year old to manage) New Year's Eve with Zane playing chase (he runs, I "scare" him from the couch) then Scrabble with my son and daughter in law.  But the big excitment has been learning the theme for January-"Highly Prized."

Subjects could be so many things, but on New Year's Day is the Winter Classic NHL game and in my life, ice hockey has been a delight late in coming but a delight none the less.  So my first page of "Highly Prized" sketching is of skates, block lettering of my and Bobby Orr's #4, the names of the first team I played on, the White Knights, and my killer fantasy team, the Ice Crones (retired this year after never finishing less than 3rd).  Considering I started playing at the age of 49, against and with people half my age, and could barely stand on skates when I started, I have to give myself props for even trying.  I was never even close to good but I have such a love for the game and it was the only team sport I ever played.  My younger daughter was on the same team-she was really good, too-and it has given us a bond that remains special for that shared experience.  Some of my dearest friends are women from our Vixens hockey team.  Highly prized?  You bet!

I know this will not be my only work with this theme, but it's been fun to begin with a lighter touch, while watching the game.  This is a challenge of a whole different sort, but just as enjoyable, just as filled with personal satisfaction of boundaries pushed, not quite as physically demanding, but just as dear to my heart.  Every day is a good day for hockey and for art, and now there's a whole year of art to look forward to! What an outstanding new year ahead!!