Extreme Sketching

It's JUNE, it's cold and rainy, so cold, that when I came back from my Wednesday night sketch outing, I put the heat on when I got home. Did I mention it's JUNE? It's supposed to be warm in June, right?

One wouldn't think that sketching could be an extreme "sport," but sitting in a car by the bay, in the middle of a wannabe monsoon, chilled to the bone by the dampness, it comes very close to extreme. My fellow Sketch Club member, Susan, said we were the only brave ones this evening....brave, or crazy.

I am sitting back at the studio now, with my heat and my cup of Cinnamon Plum tea (Republic of Tea makes it) and thawing out. But it was worth it, rain and all, to get out of the house and to sit by the water in the rain to sketch. Sketching on a dismal grey day gives you another color palette to play with, the ones with the greys and muted down colors.

It's just another art lesson from Mother Nature.

Books and how they can inspire you

Artists like myself get inspiration from anywhere. We get it from something see on a billboard, lyrics in a song, an issue going on in the world, like the BP mess. We also get inspiration from what we read. In the movie "You've Got Mail," Kathleen tells Joe the first time that they meet, "when you read a book as a child, it becomes part of your identity in a way that no other reading does."

I agree because all the books I read as a child are still with me. Although, some books have a way of pulling you in and you become part of the story, even books read as an adult can hook you and become part of you. Some can make you think. Some, like the Dan Brown books, make you think "What if?" Books can shape and mold the people that read them and for artists, they can take us down paths we wouldn't have thought of without the idea that a book gave us.

There have been some books I have read that are not in everyday "gotta read it" list but I found them inspiring:

Einsteins's Dreams by Alan Lightman. This is a book about time, it really makes you think "what if?"

The Secret Supper by Xavier Sierra. A historical type novel about the painting of the Last Supper.

Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Scott Chessman. (read this twice)

Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair both by Sue Monk Kidd are very good books.

Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier.

The Art Spirit by Robert Henri

Any of the Pern books by Anne McCaffery.

I have read a loved a lot of books and have lots of favorites, but the must read book in my personal opinion is The Stand by Stephen King. I love all of his books, many folks don't like him but his genre isn't for everyone...but this one, read as a teenager, will always have that "something" in my psyche. A classic good vs. evil. His books have an "atmosphere" that can stay with you long after you read them....try 'Salem's Lot and you'll see what I mean.

Of course I like James Patterson and Dan Brown for entertainment, and of course I read all the Harry Potter books. A good book can tell a story better than any movie can.

Cape May Coffee Shop

While we were in Cape May, there was this great little coffee shop which I was totally smitten. If I were to open my own, it would be a lot like this one. It was an artist's paradise. I loved the way it was set up inside. Outside, it had an adorable garden, complete with all sorts of neat decorations that made it begged to be sketched. There was a little sparrow that was guarding his nest and he was chirping to be sketched.

There was a pair of children's galoshes that were designed as ladybugs that were reused as planters. There was a birdhouse made out of boards that used an old flagpole holder as a perch. As you can see in the first photo, there was a fireplace mantle with a chiminea in front to be used as a fireplace.

Another unique decoration was a mailbox shoved into a tree to be used for the birds, but it made me think of the Wizard of Oz.

E-Course by Kelly Rae Roberts

Some of you may have noticed a button on my sidebar that says "Flying Lessons."

This is a great e-Course that I am attending. I read Kelly Rae's book "Taking Flight," and when she came out with the e-course, I signed up. I am glad I did now, it's been a great class so far. It's being done in a private blog and we are discussing all sorts of topics from Blogging to marketing your art.

She also provides links to great speakers that I never heard of but you watch the video and just say wow.

You'll see some upgrades on this Blog as a result of this course. The internet is amazing where you can take classes and squeeze them in your evenings and weekends.

The Uh oh Heart by Sandy Gingras

We went to Cape May this past weekend. It's still a little tough getting around...any walking was met with many breaks to sit down and rest the foot. Walking is exhausting right now.

We stayed at the Chalfonte, where my sister got married several years ago. I needed a hat so we picked up one...Hubby looks tres chic in it...We visited this little shop called the Mystical Mermaid. I found this awesome pitcher for 10 bucks, a Diva fish to hang in my studio and this little book, called The Uh oh heart. This little book caught my eye...I wandered around the shop and kept coming back to it...I told my husband I'd like to do books like this....and I bought it.

Well I read it when I got home and that little book says a lot. It has quirky drawings but it talks about life and love, a broken heart and moving on...and I would recommend this little quirky book to everyone...it says a lot in a few words.

The last few weeks have been hectic

I have had a few projects to work on. One is for Art House Co-op. The project was "what do you dream about?" It had to be a small 4x6 and would be on permanent display in their gallery. It sounded like a fun project so I signed up.

I signed up, then I sat on the project for a while. What do I dream about? I dream about being a full time artist/creative person. I dream about living some place wonderful and artsy like Cape May or Annapolis. I dream of living close to my MAPAPA friends again and being able to paint in Chincoteague, Cape May, Annapolis, South Jersey/Delaware Bay area, the salt marshes or even a cow pasture in the middle of the mountains of Virginia. I dream a lot of things, we all do.

I go to a Belly dancing class once a week, for fun and for therapy for my ankle. We share a lot of what's going on in our lives there. A couple of weeks ago, on my way to the class, a song came on the radio, "The Riddle" by Five for Fighting. Tears welled up as I thought of the memories it brought back of my first summer of being independent and freedom from a bad marriage. They weren't bad memories, they made me think of a drive down to Chincoteague with my kids. The radio station we listened to was actually out of Delaware, and it was a summer of great music. I spoke of the song in the class and it stuck with me through the evening. I put Five for Fighting on the ITouch and popped it into my Bose when I got back to the house and sat down at my desk in my studio and pulled out my sketchbook.

I played "Superman" and it made me think of a lot of things, and I came up with the red cape in my sketch book over the lyrics of the song. None of us are Superman and all of us have to find the better part of themselves and be that better person every day. But we all can fly with the clouds between our knees if we are flying high on our dreams.

Then the song "World" came on. And I took my watercolors and painted a big clue world in the middle of the page and wrote the lyrics "What kind of World do you want? Think anything....Let's start at the start...Build a Masterpiece....Be careful what you wish for...History starts now...." Wow. After just hearing more crap on TV about the Gulf oil spoil on the Weather Channel early in the AM, my heart SCREAMED for holding BP accountable. And here was a song that simply said, "what kind of World do you want?" How could I make a statement by building a world that didn't include BP and oil, and all of the bad things that we hear on TV if we mistakenly leave the news on before switching channels.....So the idea grew.

I mulled around and thought of ideas and took the advice of artists that I had been reading about...I thought of the idea before I went to bed, I thought about it when I woke up...when I was in the shower, when I was making dinner...when I was at Physical therapy....I finally sat down after dinner one night and said, OK, how am I doing this? I needed to get this mailed out by Memorial Day Weekend...The first thing I did was print out a postage sized logo of BP and then drew a red circle with a line through it, so the first thing was the World was going to have NO BP....As I worked on this, the ideas came and the work took on a life of it's own...I pulled out 5 x7 sheet of watercolor paper and I was like, OK, now what? Do I paint the world? Then I thought, well we are floating around in outer space...so I'll paint space with stars and stuff. And What if I did the world separately and attached it on.... that seemed ok. I wanted to paint stars...hmm, do I use mask?....mmm hey, what about crayons? So I dotted the paper with some white and yellow dots....then I did a wash of Daniel Smiths Moonglow....ooo, the stars popped. Now what, I needed the perfect size for my round world....so I grabbed a glass in the shape I wanted and drew a circle on another sheet of 5x7 piece of paper. Then I mixed a bunch of blues, Ultramarine, Cobalt and Pthlalo blue until I came up with something that could pass for a new blue world...

OK, I have a postage sized NO BP. What did I want to keep in my world? I opened up my sketch book in green (going Green baby!) and wrote things like Orioles and Chickadees and Cardinals (the bird, not a sports team), the Eiffel Tower, the Washington Monument (after all, it signifies the beginning of Enlightenment in Dan Brown's latest book), I thought of cats, dogs, horses, mountains majesty (after Gene Hackman spoke about mountains on TV that evening in the movie Birdcage)...what about fantasy animals? we could have dragons (or fire lizards like in Anne McCaffery's books), we could have faeries and mermaids and unicorns (why not, it's a whole new world!!), elves, we could have Magic like Harry Potter's World! We could still have shells and dolphins and grapes, raspberries, strawberries and blueberries...we could still have clownfish and bettas and foxes...we could still have giraffes and other animals...trees and flowers....then I ran out of a little steam, so as I was working on some of these, my husband took the sketchbook into the living room and the kids added their ideas...one still wanted her peanut butter cup sundaes with mint chocolate chip ice cream and a diamond ring...some wanted singing people, some soccer or plums or bread (ok, the bread was my husband), ice creams cones, sunny days, the beach, bubble wrap??? (ok, I added this one with the intention of an earth friendly version of the little poppers), my daughter wanted No Math...then I sent out an email and texts to other family members and got back no styrofoam...for everyone to be happy and feel love, for kids not to go hungry, for easier shopping selections instead of the 50000 versions of each item in the supermarket....(I just heard this on a You Tube about toothpaste, small world where two women are thinking the same thing, LOL)...my sister and husband came up with Coral Reefs and sock monkeys?? (what da?) I added more to my list, butterflies...my aunt wanted pasta and bread, NO CALORIES (oh yeah, added that one!)...my cousin sent back something about chocolate...Holy cow!!! How could I forget Chocolate?!!!

I worked on these teenie little representations of what could go in the new world...the possibilities were endless.....But I had to limit to what I could handle and make sure I could get in the mail....the next problem I had to address was how I was attaching these...velcro would cover up my nice blue world...so I thought of the sticky tacky stuff that you use to attach stuff to walls...but I wanted to put a few things on the world, not cover up all the work I did on each little item...do I put them in a baggie and make it interactive? I liked the interactive art idea but I could see the poor gallery folks having heart failure with these little stamp things all over the place...so I pulled different colored threads through each one and attached them to the back of the piece so they would hang down and they could be swapped out by the viewer...but the watercolor paper was flimsy, so I solved that problem with a hard backing....I also glazed over some gloss to make it more permanent and also used heavy gel to attach the world. So the project was done...I signed it and mailed it out before I went to Cape May for Memorial Day Weekend.

So here is my little 4x6 finished product of "What I dream about..."

Studio Pets

It is my humble belief that animals bring joy into your life. OK, so when the dog pees on your carpet, the joy can go right out the window. But most of the time, it's nice to have that four legged furry companion. Some artists have dogs, some have a cat, others have the interesting household with both, some even have something more exotic, like a reptile or bird.

My little furry bundle of joy, Troy, passed away this past February. He was a 16 year Min Pin. His body was slowly shutting down. My husband took him over to the vet and they proclaimed that he was slowly dying of old age. I couldn't go to be him when they put him down and that hurt. I couldn't even take care of him his last two months because of my injury. Poor Troy. I broke my ankle slipping on ice, going out to bring little his little geriatric butt in the house. (I did this Troy sketch many years ago.)I'd love to have another dog but it's hard to replace a best friend. Troy was a big dog in a small package.

As I mentioned briefly before, for my birthday, I got a Betta fish. It's not Troy, but he's pretty cool and he won't pee on the carpet or lay in a basket of clean laundry. He's PINK and an iridescent purple and boy can he put away those Betta pellets. People don't give fish and parakeets much credit, but both are pretty smart in some way. I have heard of Koi that will allow their humans to pet them and I had a parakeet that was more loving than some people I know. This Betta knows me already after a month. He seems very friendly and happy, I couldn't think of anything more original to name him than Fishy, but he doesn't seem to mind.

So here's a sketch of Fishy the Studio pet.

Fishy also has company now across the room. I found another Betta tank that I didn't realize I still had. I sterilized it, went out and picked up another Betta. He's not as sociable as Fishy, and he's some sort of fancier variety with frilly fins, he's purple and red. His name is Pisces. I will sketch him and attach his sketch another time. He likes the pellets, too.