Showing posts with label sketch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sketch. Show all posts

Monday, October 6, 2014

Feeling Autumn

Here is my weekly photo from my deck, showing off the hot autumn colors!

It's less brown in person, much more rainbow with orange, yellow, and red with the green. My phone simply doesn't do it justice.

Well, this has been a less productive week, unfortunately. I'm still finding my balance with things. I needed to do something fun for Halloween, just because... So, I painted this:

4x6 inch acrylic painting on professional canvas panel
It sold right away, so other people are clearly in a holiday mood too! It felt good to paint something fun and carefree! Even though I paint fairy tales, sometimes my work can get so serious!

October also kicked off #Inktober online, where artists all over the world are doing a daily drawing in ink. I saw one set of artists that were each drawing a monster to eat the other's monster from the day before and told my son about it. He instantly fell in love with the idea, and begged me to do it. I agreed, and his first drawing was this (all of these are simply ball-point pens on sketch paper):


Kinda creepy to start with, don't you think? I went for the guilt-route and did a "you don't want to kill and eat lil ole me, now do you?" with this:



The next day, my goal was to eat/kill his squid creature so I went with this:

See, the little lantern at the end of his stalk lures in the evil squid-things my son drew, and he eats them!


My son had no problem with killing my cute creature with this:

EEEEK!


Now, that looks like a spider to me, don't you think? So the next day I drew this to squish the spider:

Big foot for squishing creepies!

And then my son quit. 

He said it's too much like a homework assignment to have to draw every day. *sigh* I ended up not drawing yesterday, because I was kind of bummed over the whole thing. However, my daughter had been watching from the sidelines and when she heard he quit, she said she wanted to draw with me. Instead of killing each other's monsters, however, she wants a daily prompt instead. So, we're starting back into it today, and the prompt is Candy Land. We'll see what happens!

I'm working on doing the flamingo over the shoulder in my Queen of Hearts painting, and shipping out other paintings, and I just discovered the owls I painted last year, I guess I never listed them!

2x2 screech owl, now in my shop
2x4 white owl, now in my shop


So, oops. Caught that... maybe I was saving them for myself?

I also, after another showing and feeling bummed about the season, went into my crawl space and pulled out a couple fun Halloween decorations, including my favorite Halloween Cat:



I'm thinking that perhaps that cat shouldn't be put away anymore, as he tends to get lost. Perhaps he should just migrate to my studio in the off season?

I know my house is not supposed to have much personality at all while it's for sale, but it was getting depressing. I love the holidays, and it's hard not putting all the tacky crazy stuff up! So, a few things are up now, and even my kids said it makes them feel better!

No news on the house. We're still having showings, but I imagine it's as I feared that we're past the real estate window and we'll be here until it comes around again in the Spring. Things were pretty stressful this past week, but I think it's all going to be OK. 

Just breath deep and paint!

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Doodles

Just this past week, I suffered a two-day migraine. It's very frustrating when you can't do any of the things you normally would. I've had migraines since I was very young, and I have always just sort of accepted them, but this time I actually had plans and I saw how I had to back out and let others down because of it. I felt very guilty.

On the business side, I was all set to paint in the white rabbit on my Queen of Hearts painting:



I even took my picture with the canvas, just as pain was sneaking in behind my right eye, but I didn't know it was going to be a migraine:


About 20 minutes after that picture, I realized it was a migraine and took something. An hour later I was in my bedroom, miserable, and nothing I took helped. It was a weird one, lasting two days and nothing really knocking it. I lost time, progress on work, and let people down.

It finally let up yesterday morning, but I had a sort of migraine hangover. I couldn't focus right, even though my brain was clamoring for me to get working on my Queen as soon as possible. I didn't want to mess her up, though.

So, since it was the weekend anyway and I'm not supposed to be working-working, I decided to do some sketching-doodling fun instead! I used to doodle monsters, all sorts of monsters. I called them guardians, and I once had the idea that I'd make them out of clay (about 20 years ago.) They'd be the little gargoyle friend that you put next to or under your bed and they would chase all the other monsters away because they were special. I had all sorts of sketches, but they are long lost now. I probably threw them away!

Well, I started doodling again and thinking about them while I did. Drawing little monsters is easy and fun for me, and I decided I'll do a painting of some of the best ones (not all of them turn out to be red carpet worthy *ahem*) in oil or acrylic. Here is one from last night:


I am having people suggest CUTE animal body parts and I'm combining them into monsters. This one is Bird, Sloth, Cat, Rabbit, and Duck. My son didn't like her, and said she was creepy.  Me? I like her.

I'm going to do more today, and see what happens. Maybe I'll revisit my clay idea if I can figure out which clay to use, and more as a figurine than something to give a little kid (I had envisioned something about six inches tall and substantial, but now I'm imagining something smaller and shelf-worthy instead!) Hopefully, no more migraines will hit and I can work on my queen this coming week.

I have no news about whether we're moving. It all got messed up by human error, and now we're waiting on pins and needles to see if all is lost or not. We really want to move, so cross your fingers for us! We should know over the next two weeks (but then, they've been saying that for the past seven weeks and I've been going nuts!)