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2017 Ornaments

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This football helmeted tiger was for a high schooler whose team is the Tigers.

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A first Christmas for a new little cousin and another for some cousins who just got married.

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I first started painting these ornaments in the early 1980s. At that time my sister was very young and I copied a favorite artist (Karl Odenweller) for a gift for her. This past year, one of her own kids dropped it, so I recreated it for her, only with a slightly larger image. Second sister had the same thing happen. Hers was a Hallmark bunny that I placed in her little burrow. And no, I do not copy and sell these.

I do not know how I did those original images the size of a dime when I was younger and with no magnifier!

And speaking of magnification, I finally found a magnifying system that works for me now that I am wearing glasses. Getting older presents new challenges.

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Inktober Week 4

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The above image was my favorite for this week. I was trying new things – this was my niece having a hard time of it when she found her daddy’s jeans hanging on the line. It is one of my favorite moments. Faces and emotions are not easy to capture. I vow to work this next year to do better with them.

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Inktober Week 3

I am pushing myself to try different styles – quick drawings, purposeful drawings, tiny lines, emotion on faces, events.

Following the prompts of Inktober has been great at stretching my creativity and I hope expanding my range (depth and breadth.)

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Vintage Art

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I found a couple of old sawblades from 1984 when I was first starting out. I would sell a blade at a local consignment art shop and go buy supplies. These have been in the bottom of a box probably since 1988. A lifelong friend saw them and wanted them, so I cleaned them up today, fixing some scratches. It has me longing to paint again.

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Inktober

Inktober is an international challenge to artists to pick up a pen and practice ink drawing daily and share it online. I use the time as a yearly exercise to improve my observational skills with 10 second sketches, but this year I am also doing a few finished pages in my new nature journal. 

Above is my ink of a blue heron. Below I added light watercolors. Later I added notes and observations in the whitespace.

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Nature Journaling

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I have been wanting to take my love of birding, hiking the state parks, and nature photography to the next creative level – nature journaling seemed to be an obvious extension. To break through the paralysis that inevitably happens when it comes to my drawing, I signed up for a class by Jan Blencowe and it has been fabulous. I highly recommend it for beginners, as well as “stuck” veteran artists.

One of the new tools I am learning to use, and quite enjoying, is the extra fine fountain pen that uses platinum carbon ink.

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Sketching Birds

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This has been the year for sketching the birds I am photographing and spending time watching all the youngsters figure out their big new world. I started last fall doing the above types of 5 second sketches.

I like to use ink for the initial sketches because it forces me to capture their essence without overworking and overthinking it. Perfection is not the aim and ink is always full of lines that can not be erased, so that forces my letting go of the OCD side of my personality.

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This month I started spending a little more energy on the initial sketch then adding various views of the same bird in pencil.  We have had so many Downy Woodpecker babies this year that I decided to catalog them to see who sticks around. Did you know that you can tell them apart by their head stripes? It has been fun and very illuminating to learn about these individuals visiting my feeder.

Note: I have been naming them only because it is easier to talk about them with a name versus – “you know, that one with the squiggly stripe…”