Everyone's ideas and results were really clever: One workshop participant painted a landscape of fields of grain receding towards distant mountains (it looked like a scene from the Central Valley), and then in the lower left corner of her paper she painted a farmer scattering corn in front of chickens. Another did a diagonal row of baskets--lower left to upper right--filled with fruits and vegetables that looked like a stand at a farmer's market, and her "call-out" was a snail down in the empty right corner, whose slime trail then formed a mustard-colored border around the picture. My new acquaintance Andrea, with whom I have lunched every day, did a pale and ethereal positive/negative image of the Taj Mahal in the upper center background, and below that had a magic lamp, whose steam went up to form the headline for her writing, which was about a child who sold her a lamp outside the Taj.
Here is mine, and of course it has to do with...BOOKS. There was this great picture of a little independent bookstore, and the call-out HAD to be a stack of books that I presumably found and took home with me from my delirious shopping spree. My text is a bit wistful--when even B&Ns and Borders are closing, where can you go to truly browse the shelves any more? Well, the library--but what if you want to KEEP the books? So sad. Amazon and e-books definitely have their place, but it's too bad they had to supplant mom and pop bookstores everywhere.
But I was happy with my picture. It isn't my usual style at all--this drawing with pen seems to be bringing out a cartoon-like illustrator side I never knew existed inside my brain--but it's fun! Drawing and then painting a brick building was certainly a new challenge. Also, looking at it here in scan form, I have to ask--are those books floating? Maybe I need a shadow underneath to nail them down. Floating books ARE my speciality.
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