and so we bid a fond farewell to opposites

it was an interesting month at the sketchbook challenge. i found ‘opposites’ kinda’, well, challenging. which i guess is the whole point! lol

but i have to say i’m not sorry to see it end and i am looking forward to the next theme!

wonky gardens

i think i like these.
i think i might have found my next series, lol.
(since i started 'sketching' my brain is going faster than i can keep up!)

February---opposites

pen/pencil; pencil/eraser

Opposites, yellow/purple

Grapes: done with watercolor on 140lb cold press watercolor paper outlined with micron pen, (cut out and then glued back on because I messed up! Lol) the yellow is yellow tissue paper on watercolor paper with golden medium and bits of yellow fabric stitched.

(It looks more blue than purple on the monitor, but it’s really purple, trust me!)

I'm still not sure if I like watercolor. Maybe I need to take a class.....suggestions anyone?

February--opposites

 

perhaps my most favorite oppostes ever!

what i did today



doin' taxes



watercolor fiasco

i keep trying to like watercolor. i really do. but i think this captures exactly how i feel about it! 

what I'm reading today........

http://www.yellowowlworkshop.com/

An absolutely amazing book. I’m loving every page.

Advertized as a tool for "low budgets and high expectations."

Christine Schmidt covers a range of fun and creative ideas with straightforward directions on execution.

i have a theory

i have a theory. (i’ve been told i have many!)

it goes like this…

you know how they say that your life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die in a catastrophic accident.

well, my theory is when you’re dying a slower death, as we all are, your life doesn’t so much ‘flash before your eyes’, it strolls by.
it ambles, moseys, meanders, saunters, and wanders aimlessly.

lately my mind has been wandering to these random moments from my childhood. just silly little flashbacks of insignificant incidents.

i have no idea why.

that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it!

When I was a little girl

When I was a little girl my grandmother had a manual telephone. It scared the hell out of me!

I didn’t understand a phone that didn’t have a dial tone! When you picked it up the operator really did say ‘number, please’.

(and before you think I’m older than dirt, this was in the mid sixties! Oh, wait, that does make me older than dirt! Lol)

sometimes an idea works, and then there's this! lol

on the other hand any sketch is better than none, right?

working in the studio

so, i was thinking....
i took a bunch of the faces i've been drawing and thread sketched them onto white linen and colored them with markers. i'm going to mount them on small (5x5) canvases. i want to do a 'series' of them.
what do you think?

playing....

i've been playing.
in my sketchbook and in photoshop. i drew the people one at a time in my sketchbook, then i scanned them into the computer.

i opened them one at a time in photoshop and used the magic wand to select just the image and put them all into a new file.
doing it this way you can pull one image in front of another. switch them around to see which one looks better in front.

family portrait

more sketchbook challenge--opposites

i think i might be stretching this one. lol what do you think?
opposites: wired/wireless

not quite right.........

the sketchbook challenge theme this month is 'opposites'. lying in bed last night i thought of this as an opposite illustration. light/shadow/ big/small.

but it's not quite right! lol i think the shadow part needs to 'bend' somehow where the wall and the floor meet. i need to work on this!

A is for angry

so, driving to the oncologists office yesterday i pass by a local church. this particular church has a sign out front where they post a different ‘message’ every week. on this day the message says ‘YOU ARE ON GOD'S WAITING LIST’.

wait, what?

on the way to the oncologist’s office for my follow up after surgery and i see that sign?

i am just superstitious enough to think, aw, crap!

well, the blood test was okay, but apparently the ca125 isn’t very reliable when it comes to ovarian cancer and its possible recurrence. so i have to go for a ct scan, but not until august.

once again, I am on tenterhooks. i am very angry. i feel like i’m being held hostage by this stupid disease. I swing between anger and feeling like I just want to curl up into a ball and cry.

i find it very frustrating to be angry and have nowhere to direct it.

i can’t be angry at the doctor. it’s not the doctor’s fault. but i can’t help feeling a bit of ire towards him.

i want him to say, “okay, all gone! all done. you’re good to go and don’t have to come back.”

i guess i’m just feeling sorry for myself. i need to ‘snap out of it’ as everybody is telling me.


i’ll work on that.

today’s opposite is brought to you by the letter “A”

“A” as in ANGRY, annoyed, bent out of shape, mad, irritated, fuming, livid, irate, furious, incensed,  generally pissed off….…. i could go on but i think you get the point.

just one of those days made worse by the entire outside world! start out with an iffy mood to begin with and you end up looking like this!

on the other hand, tomorrow i intend to look like this…..

much better!

Sketchbook Challenge, con't--'Opposites'

Just fooling around in Photoshop. (rather unimaginative, but still kind of amusing.)



Original color drawing: micron pen, Copic markers

from sketch to thread painting

Unfortunately, my iron threw up on it!

opposites attract

this is an illustration of my relationship with my husband. he sees the glass as half empty; i see it as half full! opposites really do attract! lol

a left handed story…….

i’m left handed.
when i was about 7 years old i had a babysitter, mrs. winesap. she was a nice, older, grandmotherly type. but she had one little itty bitty hang-up.


she believed because i was left handed i was possessed by the devil. for real. and she felt it was her duty to save me from this fate worse than death.

this meant that every time i picked something up with my left hand (as left handers do) she slapped it out of my hand. my mother never knew how/why i broke her favorite water pitcher and my teacher didn’t understand why my handwriting was legible during school hours but illegible on my homework assignments.

i never did tell my parents about it, because in my 7 year old mind i was afraid she might be right!



February theme for the Sketchbook Challenge, 'Opposites' 



I just noticed this (and think it's way cool, but I'm easily amused) the back of the paper kind of looks like a watercolor? sorta, kinda......

in 7th grade

in 7th grade i had an art teacher who made us draw a tree that stood outside the classroom window. the first day we sat outside and drew the tree from a distance . the next time we got closer and drew it again.

then he had us get up close and touch the tree. feel it, look at the texture of the bark, hug it, take rubbings. we pulled off leaves and made rubbings of those.

he had us draw it again, and again, and again. summer, fall, winter, and spring, we drew that tree over and over, all through the year.

at the end of the year he put all the drawings on the walls. from floor to ceiling, covering every inch of the walls, the evolution of our drawings of that tree. from the very first tentative sketches to the final detailed color drawings. it was an amazing lesson.

 and this is what he said to us:
 “it’s not the ‘drawing’ it is the ‘seeing’.”
now that i’m sketching again his words have come back to me, and i get it. here’s to ‘seeing’.



(an aside to the story: that was the last art class i ever took in school.
that year they tested us and put some of us in the ‘advanced class’. took away art and made us take spanish and advanced math.
which explains why, to this day, i can’t draw, algebra looks like hieroglyphs to me, and the only spanish i remember is ‘dondé ésta la biblioteca¿’ lol!


(i wonder where i would be now if i hadn’t been tested!)

missing Sammy

Not very good (yet) but at least Ifaced my fear and tried!  Sammy left us last April and we miss him every day. Maybe someday I'll be good enough to actually catch his personality. Pencil (so I could erase, lol) on Wausau vellum.