Dusty: the birth of an idea

Meet Dusty, the copper wire dust bunny. This week's Illustration Friday's topic is "dusty."

The number one question a children's book author is asked on a school visit is: "Where do you get your ideas?" I'm sure other artists also field this question frequently. Here's a peek into how the idea for Dusty came to me.

My 10 year old son wants to learn how to solder so he can make sculptures. He got some large gauge copper wire and a soldering gun from my father for Christmas. The first attempt was a failure. So I went to Home Depot to look for materials that might be easier to solder, and found some stranded wire. I couldn’t buy a small chunk to play with; I had to buy the whole spool: 250 feet. So the question in my mind was “What other crafts can use this wire?”

Tuesday night I spent some time with my artist friends. Sarah had bought some miniature bottle for us to play with. Woody amazed us all by making a polymer clay rabbit that fit in the bottle. (My brain was now primed with rabbits.)

Wednesday night I had tap class. My instructor remarked that the janitorial team at the rec center wasn’t doing a good job, as she pointed out the large dust bunnies in the corner of the room. (rabbit reference number two.)

Friday, the Illustration Friday prompt came in: Dusty. Later I thought, “hmm, I could do a gesture drawing of a rabbit, it would look sort of like a dust bunny.”

This morning I walked past the spool of stranded wire. All the things that had been going on in my brain this week began to bump up against each other and snarl, like a dust bunny, in the corners of my mind. Then I knew what to do, make a wire sculpture of a dust bunny.

Practical Arts

I was shocked to discover how long it has been since I last posted. Too much life going on I suppose. And my creative endeavors have been leaning towards more practical things, like patching pants. My son is very hard on pants. This pair somehow got a very long vertical rip in them--so I fixed it by putting in a tree. He is very happy with the tree with skull camo bark. (I am a little concerned because when I showed him the pants he said "Cool Mom! I'm going to have to rip my pants more often!" Not exactly what I was going for...)

Baker Face

My husband made a turkey cake for Thanksgiving, and I posted the image on Facebook. My Dad saw it and noted that one of the marshmallows had a face. So I took the image of the face, blew it up and added some lines and shading in Photoshop to make a baker face. (this week's Illustration Friday topic was "Savour" maybe that inspired the food art.) Below is the photo of the cake he made. Can you find the face?

Sketchpad Pro and iPad

My husband bought himself an iPad as an early Christmas present. (He's flying to Europe next week and wanted it for the plane ride.) I'd heard of the Sketchpad Pro app, and after some time trying to remember the correct app name he downloaded it for me. It's a powerful little drawing app. Hubby was amazed when he ran to the store for a few items and came back to find I'd completed this. "Wow! You did that fast." Well, the fact that the leaves were their own brush helped a great deal, and the mirroring option for doing the border.

It was kind of fun drawing with my finger, like finger painting with leaves...

Boganvia

A long time since posting. LIFE (all caps!) We rented a house, moved in, and 11 days later the house was foreclosed. I know that this story has played out for countless renters around the country--but you never think it could happen to you for real. The terms of our lease were sketchy--when we insisted on a one year lease the landlord hand wrote "min 1 year" on the Month to Month lease paperwork he presented us with. So we have found a new house to rent, will be taking the Bank's offer of Cash for Keys and getting out of a location that is a litigation hotspot. (the former owners are suing the bank, and weird mail for many different people shows up in our mailbox.) But the house has a lovely garden with a boganvia bush in it--so something pretty to look at while we get ready to move again. But it is so hard to carve out time for art with all this going on.

Illustration Friday: Acrobat

With all the complications going on in my life right now I've been finding it not just hard to fine time to put pencil to paper, but also difficult to find the mental energy.

Our cat is named "Tidbit" because she was very tiny when we got her, and we thought she was full grown. Turns out she misrepresented her age on her Humane Society application and she's become a much larger Tidbit. But she can still jump like anything. We play a game with her, or maybe she plays the game with us? At the kids' bedtime she runs into the bedrooms and I have to call her out, and then give her a treat. But I make her do tricks, like dancing or leaping in order to get her treat. She's quite the acro-cat.

Illustration Friday: Immovable

The more I thought about explaining this image, the more tangled my thoughts became. I thought about how these old trees seem immovable, and in someways they are. But this image comes from what is called a "fairy ring." The mother tree was felled and shipped up to help build San Francisco in the 1800's. Daughter trees then grew up around the stump. So while the tree itself was moved, the spirit of the forest remained immovable. For now.

So then I thought about how art is immovable, in that it is a captured moment in time. But as I worked on this image I moved it around (it is 18 x 24) to get to the edges. And I realised that while the image itself may be immovable, our perspective and point of view aren't static. This drawing looks just fine rotated 90 degrees.

Is the world then in constant flux? Was Einstein right--it is all relative?