Noodling about

Well, on the down side, no housework achieved this weekend.

On the up side…

Tried out a bleach-spray process for decorating T-shirts using steampunk stencils, for a workshop we're doing later in the summer with our teens at the library… (you definitely should wear gloves and goggles for this…and keep paper towels handy!)

  

And tried out some character sketches for a story book I'm considering…

Haste makes waste

Odd title for a blog post…but I am referring to drawing skills. Which I have not cultivated in a long time. I have also, I discovered when I started trying to draw, come to rely way too much on photos off the internet, and while they can pinch-hit, nothing compares to live models, with which I haven't practiced in a long time. And when it comes to imagination, I'm great at assembling disparate items into a whole to make something new, but I have no original thoughts re: drawing!

In fact, I will confess here that sometimes, when I want to make a painting, I cheat by doing a trace of whatever it is I want to paint, just to get an accurate shape/outline, and then I paint, because that's what I enjoy.

So now that I need those drawing skills, my haste in glossing over them in favor of getting to the painting means they are nowhere to be found! I know I used to have some…or at any rate, they were better back a while ago...

I'm taking an illustration class this summer, and our assignment this week was to go home and do some preliminary sketches of our characters. The characters I selected are cats, and I am discovering that cats are hard to draw! You wouldn't think so, when you look at them as a series of shapes, but if you get them just the slightest bit wrong, it sticks out like a sore thumb, because we all know what a cat is "supposed" to look like.

So--I did a bunch of really bad sketches this week, which I'm not going to post here, and then I did a couple I kind of liked, and then I gave in and did a quick painting to make myself feel better. Which I did, but not much, because it didn't further me in my quest to discover my characters OR to regain my drawing skills. So…it looks like I'm in for a long slog to find both.

   

Imagining the characters from books

For 6+7 Book Club at the library, we're reading Across the Universe, by Beth Revis. The massive ship Godspeed is setting out across space, bearing a large sampling of humans to colonize a new planet. The trip is expected to take 300 years, so there are waking personnel who will live out their lives on the ship, and will create generations to come after them, all in service of ensuring that those persons important to conquering the unknowns of the planet--the scientists, the militarists--can make their voyage safely in frozen, cryogenic sleep. Seventeen-year-old Amy's parents are two such persons, and Amy is along for the ride as "nonessential cargo" because she didn't want to be left behind to grow up without her parents.

But something goes wrong, and Amy is abruptly awakened from her frozen chamber some 50 years too soon. It's powerful, violent imagery as she struggles to animate, to escape the cryogenic fluid, to pull the tubes from her throat and the IVs from her arms, and to get out of the box before she drowns.

With the constant cross-breeding of the generations has come a uniformity of brown hair, brown eyes, and light brown skin, so Amy's red hair, green eyes, and pale skin are an anomaly that can't be missed as she moves about the ship. I had a picture in my mind of Amy just as she was unfreezing and the blue fluid in which she was immersed began to drain away, and tried to transfer it to paper. (Minus, of course, all the tubes and wires, because they don't really lend themselves to this Sleeping Beauty imagery, do they?) It's never quite as I pictured it, but…here's Amy:

Memento

I had the idea today, at the very last minute, to do a little sketch of the Burbank Central Library for my boss. Our assistant director, Helen, is retiring after 30+ years, and the library supervisors are taking her to breakfast tomorrow morning, her second-to-last day!

She spent much of her career working in this building, so I thought it would be fun for her to have this. I'm not great at architecture (angles and perspective make me crazy) and this is some challenging architecture! This building is supposed to be a classic example of "Modernist New Formalism"(huh?) from the 1960s, but what that consists of is a LOT of different textures! There are bricks, there are tiles, there are posts, there are roof cut-outs, there are see-through patterned brick thingies, there are honeycomb walls in front of windows…all kind of a nightmare to draw. So rather than try to reproduce it exactly, I followed the example of others and tried to suggest rather than faithfully duplicate...but some of it was not too successful. (Fortunately, there was a LOT of foliage to hide a multitude of shortcomings.)

Still, it gives the flavor of the building, and perhaps Helen will like it as a small memento of her career.

If you want to see a document about this style of architecture, go here. Some lunatic is trying to get this building declared an historic resource. If he had to deal with the ancient plumbing, the noisy air conditioning, the lack of electrical outlets, the dicey elevator, and the horrible lines of sight inside, he might think differently!

Art with a purpose

We had an Open Mic Night for the teens at the library Friday night, and I was able to bring out my painting that I made for our first open mic night several years ago. My co-librarian Anarda and I had first gone to Burroughs High School to see their after-school open mic event to get an idea of what to expect, and one of the kids had made a great poster to put up on an easel behind the performers, which gave me the idea.

About a year before this, I had been out walking one morning and discovered a household a few blocks over where people were either cleaning out or moving out. By the curb, leaning against the trash cans, were four very large stretched canvases (maybe 3x5' each?). They were painted a horrible shade of turquoise, and were covered with little patches--the back side of velcro pairings; apparently they had been hung on the walls of someone's bedroom and had things stuck to them. I promptly jogged home, got my car, and came back for the canvases, but since I had switched my medium a few years before from acrylic to watercolor, they sat in my garage for some time. The advent of open mic night let me put one to use.

I gessoed over the turquoise, and went to the store to buy five very large tubes of acrylic in a particular color palate. I found a photo I liked online, drew a grid on it, and then duplicated that grid on my canvas. And over a weekend, I painted our "poster," which appears here in a photo behind Joey playing his trumpet on Friday night. Some of us can't play an instrument or sing, and painting isn't a talent that translates very well to the stage--but this is my contribution to our program. And it was fun, slopping acrylic around again!

A new art adventure

This weekend, the City of Burbank (which employs me as a teen librarian) is having a street fair featuring arts and crafts. More crafts, alas, than painters (you can sense my priorities here), but I did find some fab earrings for me, and a cool steampunkish toy for my friend Anarda. One of the things they advertised for the fair was that there would be sidewalk chalk art. (Turns out there were only three artists out there today, but whatever.) So, weeks ago I got the bright idea to have our teens do chalk art on the sidewalks at the Central Library, which is just three blocks away from the scene of the street fair, the day before, so that people could see their chalk art too.

Our workshop was yesterday afternoon, from 3:30-5:30, after school. We didn't get nearly as many participants as we'd hoped, but the ones we did get enjoyed themselves thoroughly! We hired a chalk artist--Bianca Ornelas, who had won awards with her work at the Pasadena Chalk Festival--to give the kids tips and tricks (and bring the good chalk--we had the kind that little kids use to play hopscotch, but Bianca's was more like oil pastels!)--and she was great. We had some really original ideas and executions, and if you'd like to see them all, you can go to our teen Facebook page, where I put up an album.

Alas, that's the only place you or anyone will see them, because when I went to the art fest today, I stopped by the library, only to discover that the lawn sprinklers had come on in the night, washing away about half of the chalk. It's always the little things (like automatic sprinklers on timers) that you don't think of that do you in.

Still…it is, after all, an ephemeral art, and as they say, it's the process, not the product, or it's the journey, not the destination, or it's the experience of making art on the sidewalk, not the immortalization of same. Right? Anyway, this is a definite do-again program for us, and hopefully word will spread of what fun it is!

Here was my contribution--since Bianca was in charge, Anarda (my co-teen librarian) and I got to play right along with the teens. Messy, hard on the knees and fingers, but what fun to learn a new medium! Happy Ostara!

By the way, the Pasadena Chalk Festival is June 14 and 15 this year (Father's Day weekend), from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Check it out--I'm going to!

Freehand Drawing Meetup

I went drawing tonight with a group I found through Meet-up. The venue was the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena--the museum has "free night" on the first Friday of each month, and this group meets there every month (as well as other meetings during the rest of the month) to draw together.

Question: Where can you find life models who never get tired, who don't need to stop for a drink or a snack or to visit the facilities, and who don't twitch, sneeze, shift, or breathe?

Answer: Your local museum!

What a great idea this was--why have I never thought of it? The Norton Simon has a bunch of foot-high sculptures of bathers, dancers, and horses by Edgar Degas, sitting around the museum on little plinths in plain view of large benches, and Phoebe, the leader of this meet-up, suggested to us that they were perfect for gesture and figure drawing. I have always thought of sculptures in museums as "those things I walk past on my way to the paintings." Not any more.

I was drawing with a pen, so my shading is a little wonky, because I didn't set out to do anything but contour, and then decided that some shading might be fun. But I still think drawing with a pen makes you commit in a way that a pencil doesn't. So in some cases I just scribbled over mistakes in proportion and kept going.

We started outside with the lifesize sculptures of Rodin on the front lawn, and then moved indoors when the sun went down to capture the Degas women. We had planned to head downstairs to catch a few Buddhas from the Asian exhibit, but ran out of time while wandering the galleries looking at all the paintings. I will definitely go back to do that!

I hadn't been there in many years (why?), so it was a delight to rediscover the collection. I took a few photos in the 17th century rooms:

This is Marie-Genevieve Bouliar--the artist and the picture, as it's a self-portrait. She was so beautifully serene. Most people in self portraits can't help reflecting in their faces the effort that's going into the painting, but not Marie-Genevieve! It amazes me when I think about all the self-portraits that were done before the existence of reference photos.

This is Baron Joseph-Pierre Vialetes de Mortarieu (what a mouthful), by the portrait painter Ingres. Doesn't he look like he stepped straight out of a Jane Austen novel? The epitome of the romantic hero.

And THIS is "Aldrovandi Dog" by the artist Guercino. He was the companion of Count Filippo Androvandi, whose castle in Bologna appears in the background. He was such a handsome fellow, I had to take a photo. This painting is huge--68x44 inches!

A fun evening, to be repeated next month!