Session 2 – December, 2012
I’ve always found male figures a challenge to draw. Female figures usually have a fluid line that I find helps me join the bits together, or emphasises force or movement, but males – they’ve got unexpected planes, flat bits, and angles where I expect curves. It really pushes the learning to see side of drawing and helps me avoid making assumptions about the anatomy.
Session 1 – November, 2012
I started going to life drawing with a couple other illustrator friends. It’s been years (probably more than 10) and I’m super rusty. So this begins a series of posts of wonky figure drawings. Hopefully there will be some improvement over the course of the next year, and hopefully I can keep finding the time to go.
A few years ago, I did an Illustration Friday topic (Garden) as a creative exercise.
A while later I messed around with the piece a bit more:
Continue reading
.
I went on vacation, a camping trip down the Oregon Coast. Because we were driving, and there was no packing for airplanes involved, I brought an oil kit down with me too. I’ve never done plein air oil painting before. The first attempt was not so successful as a painting, but successful as far as being a totally enjoyable process (and there were grey whales spouting not too far off the shore – I don’t get to see that when painting in the studio). I can’t wait to give it another go.
.
.
Although though we were down for 10 days, I didn’t manage to get as much time to paint as I hoped – time flew by and we moved around to a few different spots – Nehalam, Beverly Beach, Champoeg, & finished up in Portland (where we rounded out the trip with a comfy hotel room, some great food, and tasty cocktails). Now that we know what part of the coast we liked best, and we’re hoping to return again another time for a longer stretch in one location.
It’s been a few years, but I’ve started messing around with oil paint again. Nothing spectacular, just getting the feel back, trying to get comfortable with colour, and focussing on enjoying the medium.
.
I spent a couple of days last weekend on a two Bowen Island beaches, trying to get this watercolour thing to work for me, while remaining zen about the mistakes. I need to work much, much harder on editing out the unnecessary details, eliminating the overworking, and getting more confident with making marks.
.
Expecting failure, my first go at growing garlic yielded a decent crop of modestly sized bulbs so I was enormously encouraged. This year I put a bit more effort into it and was rewarded with a more than satisfying crop.
.
Out of all the vegetables I’ve grown, I’m not sure why I’m so delighted by garlic, but I am. Maybe it’s because it’s a root crop and you only really know how successful your crop is when you pull it up in August. Or unlike other rootish sorts of vegetables, this one actually does fine in our hard-packed clay soil that blunts carrots and squeezes the life out of beets. Maybe it’s because it’s a year round kitchen staple in my house and I find it easier to use than salad greens which require a certain amount of tedious insect extraction, washing and drying before use. Or because, until recently, the choice of garlic in our local stores left much to be desired (local farmer’s markets are now bursting at the seams with locally grown garlic scapes in June and bundles of healthy looking bulbs in the late summer). Or maybe it’s just because I think, from top to bottom – curling scape to twisting root – it is a beautiful plant.
My biggest issue with garlic has been that it requires planting around October and I’m rotten at planning ahead – usually the garlic variety I want is sold out by the time I remember. While I can usually find a day here or there in the spring to prep beds and sow seeds, I’m often way too busy with work to get out in the garden in the fall, and am also no longer in the vegetable gardening sort of mood, and rain in the fall is uninviting, dismal, cold, and void of spring rain’s promise of coming greenery.
This time around, I prepped the beds extra carefully, put a good dose of food in the hole with every clove, fed them a few more times throughout the year and was rewarded with a bunch of nice juicy bulbs, every clove planted yielded a plant. This year I also left the spade out of it, pulling them or digging them up by hand so there were no gouges or damaged bulbs.
I’ll keep about a 1/3 of the crop, the biggest bulbs, back for next year’s seed, and the rest should ensure we don’t have to purchase horrible supermarket garlic for quite a few months.
.
.
At long last! A blog post! Work took over my life for a very long time but I managed a Hawaiian getaway in the middle of things (but didn’t completely get away from work while I was there). These are a few non-work related things I got up to:
I haven’t painted for ages and it felt like I was starting all over again, but I’ve still got 950 bad paintings in me so I’m not too worried at this point. It was just nice to finally get outside and have a break from creating stuff on screens.
I have crafty friends and they are vendors at Vancouver’s Got Craft? on May 6, 2012.
Rachael Ashe works in paper cutting, collage, reclaimed materials, and altered books (etc). Her new paper cutting experiments are really fantastic, and have a wonderful 3D optical illusion quality. She’ll be selling collages like this one, as well as lots of other things:
.
Spark Design has neat, creepy/pretty jewelry. I’ve seen the brand new stuff and I love it and can’t wait to get my hands on some. These are some of the new designs:
.
Got Craft? is on Sunday, May 6th, 2012
10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Royal Canadian Legion
2205 Commercial Drive, Vancouver BC V5N 4B6
I answered a few art-related questions as part of Rachael Ashe’s ongoing interview series with artists. My interview is here.
Find all the interviews posted so far, filed on her blog. And she’s got more coming.
My friend Rachael Ashe has begun a series of artist interviews on her blog. The first one, with assemblage artist Valerie Arntzen, can be found on Rachael’s blog, here.
Kirsti Wakelin 