For Fun

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Grandma’s Kitchen

In January I love to pull out my tan paper and practice on the toned surface with white ink. However, I tend to be recovering from a 3 month push on Inktober and then holiday painting and crash instead.

This year I did do an image of Grandma’s kitchen. She had steps leading down into it and I remember sitting on those steps with this very view many times as a child. I never thought about it, but she had an old stove, and then the new one in the corner. But with the huge extended family, both stoves were put into service during the holidays. I think of how small that kitchen was. Her whole house, really. And she raised 10 kids and a lot of grandkids there!

I also did a tribute to Cassidy, a little mini-hini that ran with the mustangs at Skydog Sanctuary. He passed and it was a great loss to even those of us who never met him in person. This made me want to spend more time drawing horses and donkeys!

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Tea Dying Paper

As a part of the Tanuary activities last month, I also tried some tea and coffee dying of watercolor paper to see how that works. I learned that either one works, you just need to leave it in the mix for a long time. I can not wait to find some time to watercolor on these papers.

Tea dying
Coffee – I can not remember now why I thought the grounds should be in it – I think it was to see if it left any darker marks. It did not.
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Tanuary 2022

Pencil work

Work was extra challenging in January, but I caught a few moments on the weekends to do several drawings on tan paper.

A quick charcoal piece of my brother and I riding on Dad’s back.
Quick ink sketch for the prompt “bike” – yeah, it really does not look like my brother and I, but we were the humans.
“Self” – Yep – need to work on my inking of faces!! I got out of practice.
Finished glass “door knob”
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Finalizing Inktober

So Inktober almost went bust for me mid month when my brother passed, but I finally jumped back in on day 21 and did a few more pieces.

Here is my wrapup:

Day 6 – Rodent
Day 7 Fancy – this was a rare bird who showed up in our area – I was practicing ink washes and will watercolor this later
Day 8 Teeth – I added this to my Nature Journal since I heard the coyotes again behind the house.
Day 21 – Sleep – this was my re-entry into my creativeness after the loss of my brother. It seemed a nice, gentle way to get back to it. My cat and pointillism.
Day 23 – RIP – My brother, Aaron
Day 25 – Buddy – My brother Ron – we were buddies growing up on the farm as the closest to my age of the 7 of us.

I had to catch up on some Christmas commissions at this point, so I put my energy into those. I also was meeting once a week with a set of nieces who were participating with me, which I will share in another post.

One other thing that kept me involved is that I am an Admin on a Facebook group called Inktober SafeSpace where artists, young and old, can share their work without imagery depicting violence, hate, and sexually explicit material. The larger Inktober can trigger someone due to depictions of suicide and depression etc. Also, some of us simply do not like all that in-your-face art.

This is a place where people can safely have fun, share and not have to deal with the artists who are going for the shock factor, edginess, and trying to push the envelope of how disgusting they can be. Sometimes life is hard enough without having it in your face 24/7. We are a small group, but we certainly had fun this year.

All of this kept me Inktober-busy! I did enjoy the “season”.

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Inktober – 2nd half

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A combination of things (including Christmas commissions) added to the 2nd half of the month not being a daily, but I still did quite a few, as well as some gesture sketching on the busy days.

Inktober was fun, and I quit worrying about the prompts, but did get a couple more in such as #15 Legend – our own local celebrity cat – Pirate Cat.

I hope to keep up the weekly sketching (not daily – way too much happening in the next 2 months, but I do not want to lose that momentum of sketching. It is excellent for studying a subject and getting to know them.)

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Above- our local Cooper’s Hawk, stalking out feeders.

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A bit of fan art for James and Margaret – a pair of California Ravens I follow on Instagram and Facebook. @thedailyjames

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I love the little Black and White Warblers we see each year. And below is a Summit Lake Bald Eagle – reference photo by Patrick D. Conner, one of our local birders on the Facebook page, Indiana Birdography. You will be seeing more of these in various mediums, as I am practicing to do a watercolor for my nephew.

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