Baking for breakfast

I woke up this morning and found that I had no bread in the house. I was going to pour a bowl of cereal, but I really wasn't in the mood for something sweet--I wanted savory. But I also wasn't in the mood to get dressed and drive to the store or to go out to breakfast. So, I rummaged the cupboards and the refrigerator and made myself some drop biscuits!

Flour, baking powder, salt, butter, and milk--that's all you need. Of course, my baking powder was ancient, my "butter" was Earth Balance "buttery spread," and the only "milk" I had was almond...but I decided to forge ahead and see what happened. Just to make them truly savory, I went out to the garden and picked some marjoram, chopped it up, and added it to the dough with a little grated smoked gouda cheese.

Cutting the butter into the flour with two knives (I couldn't find my pastry cutter, that's how long it's been) was a nostalgic moment--it made me remember my mom making biscuits and gravy for my dad on Saturday mornings. Hers, of course, were properly kneaded, rolled out, cut with a biscuit cutter,  and glazed with butter, which I contemplated until I finished stirring in the almond milk (much more watery than regular milk) and decided that kneading was beyond this dough.

The drop biscuit recipe said it made 12, but I made them large so I got eight out of the recipe. I preheated to 450 degrees, mixed everything up, dropped them onto the cookie sheet, and popped them into the oven. Then I made coffee while waiting 15 breathless minutes for their emergence (would they be edible?)...et voilà!

I decided to celebrate my small baking victory by drawing and painting the biscuits, but I was in a hurry to eat them, so I decided to try a Liz Steel and do a 10-minute quickie draw-and-paint before the evidence disappeared. Not quite up to Liz's standard, but fun to do...and then I was rewarded with biscuits!

By the way, they were pretty good! A little doughy in the middle, which I attribute to the almond milk, but savory, crunchy around the edges, satisfying! I had three.

Lazy weekend

I'm finished with all the Teen Summer Reading illustrations, and my first thought was an ambitious one: Go out all day on Sunday and paint en plein air, picking one of the locations I'm forever driving by, but stop, park, draw, and paint the way I am always longing to. In fact, there was actually an urban sketchers group I was planning to join in this endeavor this morning.

But...I'm tired this weekend. In addition to making the paintings, there has been the tension of coming up with the ideas and putting them together in my head, which always happens over a period of days of near-obsessing over all the details. I don't sleep well for thinking about it!

Plus, I've been working hard all week getting the other elements together for summer reading--deciding on and starting to buy the prizes, finding volunteers to stuff the "swag bags" for sign-up giveaways, soliciting the other library staff for donations of miscellaneous junk for our "makerspace" crafts, emailing the principals at the middle and high schools to beg for five minutes to promote teen summer reading at their assemblies, bugging the publicity department to print my posters...the details go on and on. And that's on top of all my "regular" librarian duties.

So, instead of leaping out of bed, gathering my kit, and jumping in the car, I made a strong cup of coffee and "the sandwich" for breakfast, which I enjoyed on the patio, after having sketched it in pencil (adding in a couple of ingredient elements for fun). And, after consuming it, I painted it.

"The sandwich" is what my cousin Kirsten calls it--with the accent on THE. Both of us are vegetarian, and one of the things many vegetarians seem to miss most is bacon. The "facon" (fake bacon) out there isn't the best substitute, but when you put it into a sandwich with all the other ingredients of a BLT, or, in this case, a BAC (bacon, avocado, and cheese), it does well enough. Add a little mayo and enclose between two slices of a good, slightly toasted sourdough, and you have yourself the perfect weekend breakfast.

So...this one's for Kirsten. I decided to draw in pencil today instead of pen, for a more natural look, and I included my book and glasses because those are always required elements with breakfast home alone. (Also, I have to finish this book for book club by Wednesday!) Kirsten, don't you wish you were biting into the real thing right now?

In case anyone is wondering, the full saying on my coffee mug is "Do Something Creative Every Day." Done!

Halftime Horror!

I have to say that completing this drawing was a horror! I took photos, spent a day searching out all the elements, prepping them, scaling them, moving them around in relation to one another, and deciding what to do. Then I sketched it out once in pencil, and got approval from Anarda. Finally, I spent two evenings redoing the pen drawing three times before I got it anywhere close to where I wanted it!

The first time I drew it, I used a .5 LePen throughout, but that was too heavy for me to get detail in the features of the kids on the cards, and they came out coarse-featured and not resembling them much. Since I specifically photographed members of our Teen Advisory Board as models, I wanted some resemblance! So I drew it again, this time using the .5 for the big outlines and a .1 for the insides. It worked fine, and that drawing was probably better in some respects than this final one, but I got the angle of the cards all wrong and ran out of room at the bottom. (It has to fit on a certain size paper in order to be scannable on my flatbed!) So I drew it a third time, this time copying and pre-drawing the outline of the cards from the first attempt to get them in the correct position, and then going back to do the innards; and I finally got something I could use.

And then, I still had to spend a few hours on watercolor--and not mess it up!

This is the final (I hope) illustration for our Teen Summer Reading Program. Our big finale, which we also want to feature on the cover of our brochure, is a lock-in murder mystery. Although it will take place in our biggest library branch after hours, the supposed setting is the "big game" at high school. I have featured two girls from the rival high schools in town--Burbank High, and John Burroughs High--wearing their basketball team jerseys. There will be a mock game (for five minutes) at the event, and then there will be a miniature halftime show, hopefully featuring some cheer squad kids and/or band kids that our Teen Advisory Board members recruit to perform, plus dinner (probably in the form of pizza and hot dogs, per stadium refreshments). During the halftime, there will be an announcement over the loudspeaker that FOUL PLAY has taken place, the building is on lock-down, and no one may leave until the mystery is solved.

Then the game proceeds, sort of like the game of Clue: There are suspects and officials who can be questioned; there are weapons to be found; there are locations to explore; and there are clues leading to all of them. The teens will spread out over the library (supervised by half a dozen adults) to follow the clues and solve the mystery, and once it's solved, we'll have prizes and dessert!

Our TAB is creating the script and the clues and forming committees for food, decorations, set-up and clean-up, etc. (under our supervision), and hopefully recruiting more kids to help, because this is a gargantuan undertaking that we may be sorry we undertook!

So, the illustration had to have the feel of a basketball game, with the title over the scoreboard giving a clue about what's to come; and it also had to feature some suspects via the Clue-like game cards. I hope the two together will communicate the idea of the event to the teens (accompanied, of course, by some descriptive language on the flyer, poster, and brochure). And I hope my models are okay with their likenesses...it was hard!

It's such a relief to get all the illustrations done; the next step is to get the final flyer and brochure built and sent to the printer. Then I can concentrate on actually doing the program!

Makerspace: Are You Game?

That's the name of our craft this summer, which will be tables full of stuff from which people can make other stuff. Some of it will be specific and guided, and some of it will be freeform and surprising. We have learned that not everybody likes the box, and not everybody likes to work outside of it, so we're providing a little of both.

I have messed with both this illustration and the ingredients for it all day (first spending more than an hour at the 99 Cents store picking up random stuff that might be craftable), and I can't say I'm completely happy with it. I drew it from a sort of overhead, foreshortened view, with the result that the toilet paper roll, glue bottle, and tape look absurdly small to my eye compared with the socket cover and sharpies Although it's correct, it doesn't LOOK correct to me. Also, the pipe cleaners are funky looking, and I'm not crazy about the final layout OR the stuff that I ended up including in the drawing.

But once again, as with the books, I am running out of time. So unless Anarda looks at it and says "Yech!" we will probably go with it. And the idea of the illustration is to intrigue the teens--"What could we possibly make with all those things that don't go together?" so from that standpoint...okay.

Micron pen and watercolors.

Books, Take Two

Well, if you know me at all, you know that I just couldn't let it go. I kept looking at those two side-by-side blue books, and at the covers that were so covered up that you couldn't quite tell what they were, and the upshot is that instead of doing other illustrations this weekend, I revisited the Reading Log books.

I made one change--I substituted Marie Lu's The Rose Society for Michael Grant's Front Lines, for two--no, three reasons. One, I wanted more color variation between all the covers; two, I think Marie's book is probably more well known than Grant's, given that it's part of a popular series while his is a stand-alone historical fiction; and three, Michael Grant was curt to the point of rudeness with me one time when I wrote and asked him if he'd like to make an appearance at my library, so why should I give his book free publicity? (That last is petty, but really--when you write to an author and politely ask if he'd like to do a book signing at your library and his complete and total response is "I'm too busy writing," no "thanks for the invite" or even a salutation or signature, phooey on him! Who does he think buys bunches of his books? Librarians, that's who.)

Anyway, I am much more satisfied as a whole with this illustration. I think I actually did a better job on certain covers the last time, but the color array is good, the covers show to much better advantage and are therefore identifiable, and the shadows came out better. This will be my illustration for the Reading Log.

I have to say that books are the hardest thing to illustrate, in some ways. First of all, you want to achieve the same effect that the cover artist intended by getting the look as close as possible; and second, there's all that lettering! Both to do, and to paint around, because it is inevitably a different color, or white. So this one took me most of Sunday afternoon, although it was broken up into intervals by reading Illuminae.

You almost have to take frequent pauses when you're doing a composite picture like this, because you paint, for instance, the book cover on the far left, and then while that dries, you paint the one on the fair right. Then you move up to the middle, maybe, but if you can't move far enough, you are in danger of sticking your hand or arm or finger into wet paint, so you have to let things dry before you move along. And then there are the different sections of color on each cover to let dry before you move on to the rest. But--in addition to being hard, I think they're fun. So that's okay.

Game On!

We have decided that instead of a generic board games night (yawn), we are going to have a Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit tournament. We played it at our last board games night, and it seemed to be the one game that brought everybody together in a fun competitive way. So I painted some props--the game elements, plus Harry Potter specs--for the flyer. These feel a little boring--I tried to think of a way to snazz them up a bit, but I'm drawing a blank (so to speak). They'll do the trick for the flyer, I guess.

I thought I'd put the game pieces in one corner of the flyer and Harry's specs in the opposite corner. We'll see if it works.

Books!

I realized last week that I needed a new illustration to go on the cover of the Reading Logs for this year's Teen Summer Reading Program, since all the books I did last year are beginning to age (their sequels are out, or everyone has already read them). So 20 minutes before closing on Friday, I frantically searched the New Books shelves in the teen section for books that might be familiar or recognizable to some but were fresh enough to be intriguing to most. (They're so new that I have only had time to read two of the five myself.) I laid them out on a table and took a couple of shots with my cell phone camera. I did the drawing over the weekend, but didn't get to painting it until today.

Here's the drawing, which shows what was defined and what got drawn/painted in with watercolor. (Also, what parts of the drawing were unintentionally obscured!):

I realized a couple of things as I moved through the painting--there was some bad planning with putting the two blue books right next to/on top of each other; and I picked some challenging covers to illustrate! Also, I could have arranged them better in terms of seeing more of the covers on the underneath ones.

But...despite not being satisfied with several key elements, I'm so far behind that I'm not going to rearrange or reselect and start over--as it is, this painting took me more than two hours! I realized, from this one, too, that I really need to start painting these things on actual watercolor paper instead of continuing to do them in my sketchbook--while that paper is pretty forgiving, fixing things like transparent shadows is impossible without overworking the paper, and these really needed some fixing! Oh well...

Here is last year's. It was a little better color-balanced, and the layout was more compact.

Stay tuned for the final few TSRP illustrations...