EDM Challenge #75

Draw the ingredients and/or process of a favorite recipe:

This one is distinguished by being both tasty and EASY. If you have the ingredients on hand, takes about 5 minutes to get into the oven, then go do something else for awhile et voilá!

I decided to mimic some of you on the EDM list who work in pen first and then watercolor afterwards. I've never done this before (don't know why), but it's fun! I sketched lightly in pencil first, then went over it in pen. The thing I notice is that it encourages you (well, it encourages ME anyway) to be minimalist about line and also to simplify my watercolor technique. I won't work this way all the time, but nice to know it's an option I enjoy!

Hope you try and enjoy the recipe...

Uncooperative Cacti

Yes, that's right, I'm blaming it on the cacti!!! Here's the story: My friends Cindy and Tim were having a party for their 25th anniversary, and though they said no gifts, well, my mother came from the South, so I never show up at a party without SOMETHING in hand. I knew they had recently changed over their yard to drought-tolerant, so I decided a clever little cactus would be just the thing. I stopped by the nursery to get one, but they were all so cunning that I couldn't decide...so I bought four! Then when I got home, I had the bright idea (four hours before the party) of painting a picture of the cacti to give her as well! I set up three of them in a tableau, then I painted, and painted, and painted, and those darn cacti turned out to be HARD to paint, especially in a group. (Should have just picked ONE.) So I ended up taking #4 to Cindy and gave her an IOU for a painting sometime in the future--but this won't be it. I just couldn't capture them sufficiently. I'll try again soon.

Regarding the creative process

Margie (http://www.margiesartstudio.blogspot.com/) asked on everydaymatters@yahoogroups.com how everyone goes about the creative process--do you paint from your imagination? Only from life? Only from references? I thought that was a good question to illustrate with a painting (and a back story).

I have to have references. I am so envious of people who can paint from imagination (like Margie--look at her characters on her blog!). But I don't seem to be able to paint from within my head--or at any rate, very badly.

Frequently, however, I decide the subject of what I want to feature and then go looking for things to assemble, and they can be in-person, photos from Google Images, whatever. Here is a painting I did as a final assignment.The semester-long assignment from the watercolor class I was taking (from Carol Bishop at Los Angeles Valley College, a great teacher and mentor!) was to choose an object (mine was a blue teapot) and paint it every single week for an entire semester, looking at other artists' work and taking something from them to express in your rendition of the object: color palette, brush technique, theme, whatever. And the final assignment was to take everything you had learned and do a painting in your own style.

I soon got really bored with painting the damn teapot, so I kept trying to think of creative ways to use it. It featured in various paintings as an animated character, the moon, a teensy prop in the background, a wallpaper design...somewhere the teapot was there, but rarely the main event after the second or third assignment.

This painting included a back view of one of my "yard" cats from a window that I sketched really quickly one day, the blue teapot (from my kitchen), a mouse I found from a rodents and marsupials book in the library, trees/forest ditto from a botany book, and I also looked on the internet for a photo of Cinderella's carriage and the glass slipper to get good references from which to paint. I assembled them all, and figured out how to put them into perspective with each other, then combined them into this one picture. It's a plodding way to work, but my imagination seems to be limited to ideas ABOUT the painting rather than the visualization of the actual contents. It's called "Bereft of Cinderella."

Work-related again

Somebody on this list does wonderful paintings of books she is reading, and it inspired me. My middle school book clubs read The Mortal Instruments series (City of Bones,  City of Ashes, City of Glass) by Cassandra Clare over the summer, and we will be discussing them at our first meeting, so I did a quick re-read to be prepared, and then a quick painting just for fun. This isn't quite all of it, but I didn't feel like doing the patch job with the scanner like I did on the sunflowers! (All that's really cut off is the rest of the metal bookend and some background--

nothing essential.)

322 Continued

Here's another sign. This one didn't work out so well--I think I'm going to have to do a lighter/warmer color for the backgrounds and a darker/cooler color for the lettering, for these to work. Next, I want to try some with INK.

Challenge 322--something related to what you do

Everyone (including me) seems to be concluding that sentence with "for a living." I work as a teen librarian, and I am in the process of sprucing up my teen area, including new paint, furniture and decor. (I won a grant from the state library to finance the project.) I bought an area rug chosen by the teens, and am using it as the color scheme, keying everything off of it. Here is a picture of the rug:

The furniture will all be pale wood, with chrome legs, but the seats of the chairs will be teal, purple, and lime green (seven chairs in teal, seven in purple, and seven in lime green) (they're biodegradable linoleum!) and I plan to follow through with the paisley theme of the rug by stenciling paisleys in various sizes, in those three colors plus orange, on the back wall, which is now painted pale aqua. (Our whole library is in teals and purples, so I had to stick with the theme somewhat, but I'm going for brighter and more teen-friendly.) I need some signage to indicate a couple of sections, and am toying with the idea of doing some in watercolor, to put on the ends of the bookshelves. Here is one I tried out; I'm going to do a few versions, and then when I'm happy with it, I will do three or four signs like this for "Teen Fiction," "Manga and Graphic Novels" and so on.

Here are the chairs:

And here are some of our ancient but sturdy bookshelves:

More to come...

#76 Draw some flowers

I picked up these sunflowers at Trader Joe's this weekend, mostly because I had never seen sunflowers with a pale center before--only the ones with the dark brown center. I have to say, though, that it was impossible (at least for me) to satisfactorily capture the way the centers looked--a green depressed center with tiny yellow/orange/green filaments surrounding it--in watercolor. If I were a colored pencil person (and had a lot more patience than I possess), it would have been a lot easier. As it is, I worked it and worked it and finally decided it was done.

One thing I did figure out on this picture: The sunflowers persisted in looking flat, even though I added in some darks and shadows, until I finally decided to introduce a random color (alizarin crimson) and it suddenly gave them more depth and life. They still don't have the same three-dimensional feel that the vase--which I barely painted--has. Well, that's what these paintings are about--practice! (And no, it's not your imagination--I painted this 11x15 and had to scan it on my 8.5x11 flatbed scanner, so I put together four scans and you can see some seam lines. I guess I could take these out with Photoshop, but...I'd rather be painting!)