Illustration Friday: Poise (Art in Action)

A deviation from what I've been working on. I volunteer for Art in Action at my son's school. And my five year old daughter tags along with me. So she does the projects too. Today's lesson was based on Albert Bierstadt's Buffalo Trail. It was about drawing trees and forest animals. The image on the left is my demo, and the image on the right is my daughter's work. Besides the obvious comment on it taking a certain amount of poise to stand up in front of a group of third graders and talk to them about a painting that was created 140 years ago, I'm going to mention the amount of poise it takes to create art in a classroom setting. I take a lot of the creative process for granted. I hadn't really thought about the performance pressure to try something new in front of your peers. It takes a great deal of poise to put something down on paper while others are watching. As simple as my trees are, the kids were wowed as I took the oil pastel to the blank white paper and made a tree. I made sure to point out my out of scale rabbit--that seemed to relax them a little. "See even I can make mistakes. Yes it is okay that your table mate is painting with her sponge like that."

My daughter on the other hand, had no problem laying her drawing down boldly.

Illustration Friday: Subtract

I thought this topic would be really hard, but then I started thinking about subtractive art processes. My process is subtractive. I start with a black field and then erase to reveal the image. Sculpture is a subtractive process. And sculpture led me to thinking about classical sculpture with all the missing arms and heads because many of the statues were found in trash heaps and had been damaged by time and wars and whatnot. (Which leads me to the theme for the Lenten period at my church: Beauty in Brokenness. With the metaphor being beach glass, how it is something once broken that has become beautiful again.) How many of these broken statues grace our museums in places of honor? Time to try once again to let go of the Perfectionism demon. There is beauty in mistakes.

Illustration Friday: Legendary

(I've been working on another project--so I'm posting an older work.) This is Quan Yin a legendary Goddess of Mercy. A legend is, in a way, a stylized story. It has been repeated and honed over the years. But I've noticed we are all interested in stories, and the stories behind things. (like the prevelence of DVD extras--even if some survey I took claims that watching them counts towards being a geek.)


So here's the story behind my painting. It is the ink resist version of a sketch I did while traveling. In 1992 I participated in Semester at Sea. One of the countries I visited was Taiwan. I took a trip to the National Palace Museum where I saw a beautiful carving of Quan Yin. Back on the ship I did a watercolor sketch related to the carving.

Also in Taiwan, some friends and I went to Lion's Head Mountain where we encountered a statue garden that was full of identical Quan Yins. Opening our umbrellas, and posing with one hand up in the gesture of mercy and the other pouring the waters of life from our water bottles, we had another friend photograph us.

So that's my legendary encounter with Quan Yin.

Illustration Friday: Instinct

This started as a watercolor pencil sketch a few days ago. The kids and I went to a park, and of course they wolfed down their lunches and headed for the playground while I still had half a sandwich left. Then my daughter came running up telling me my son was stuck. I set my sandwich down and went to go investigate. I pulled my son down from the bow of the playground ship and returned to my picnic table to find a flock of seagulls dismantling my sandwich! Now there were a few misguided seagulls in Colorado that were very stand offish and never more brazen than the squirrels. Squirrels will at least give you a few minutes before they invade your lunch. I have to get used to a whole new set of wildlife picnic rules now that I live very close to water in California. This flock of seagulls had a leader with killer pirate instincts that knew to hone in on my sandwich and steal the ham first!

Illustration Friday: Celebrate

For some reason Mardi Gras seems to be the epitome of celebration (even though I've never participated in one...) I'm not quite happy with my color--it is more muted than I wanted it to be. I've included the black and white version because I think it looks good that way too.

Illustration Friday: Time

The physics of Time are always an issue in speculative fiction--and in this post you will be traveling backwards (and forwards) in time as I explain my process. Because the subject and the process both involved time. On Friday the IF email showed up in my email: Time. So I started as I do by thinking about it and waiting for images to come. That evening, it was raining and the kids were bouncing off the walls so we hunted down a McDonald's with a playland. As we watched the kids play I told my husband, "Illustration Friday this week is Time."
"Oh." He said, "How are you going to do that?"
Hubby looked at his watch, "Five minutes!" He called out as our daughter went flying by. Then he chuckled, "That's the true theory of relativity; five minutes lasts as long as they are getting along."

But it gave me an idea. And I thought it would be so cute to use goats so I could have the pun about "five minutes, kids." But I couldn't get the goats to do what I wanted and I couldn't get the composition to come together.

So I reverted to a playground. The whole composition is from memory. So the boy on the right has some proportion problems. My husband pointed them out last night. I said, "I know, but I'm not going back and fixing it." Because at this point I'd been working on this for a long TIME. And I'm feeling a time crunch over my other life obligations as well.

Illustration Friday: Flawed

This one was flawed in the design process. I usually read the prompt sometime on Friday (when it is sent out-hence the name). Then I let it drift to the subconcious side of my brain and just roll around there stirring up images. However this time the word must've gotten buried too deep because I somehow started thinking the word was "Faulty." Maybe that has something to do with living on the San Andreas fault now. Anyway the image started forming and I read the word again just to make sure and found out it wasn't what I thought! But by that time I was enamoured of my little fossil with problems and went ahead anyway.



Not really much in the sketch phase here. I did a quick sketch of the bones and scanned it in.

Then I went to the computer and drew some straightish lines and the mountains. Using computer magic I cut the lines and moved them up and down in relation to each other. I captured the lines of my sketch and put it over the background lines--cutting it apart and rearranging it in its corresponding areas. I then did my erasing away from a black field routine to get the contour lines. I made some custom brushes to simplify the hatching and stippling and then applied color. Simple--right?