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Archive for June, 2009

More Drawing….

Saturday, June 6th, 2009
Hand on mug

Hand on mug

One of the next exercises in The New Drawing on the Right Hand Side of the Brain is to draw your own hand using the “window.” (more on this in a sec)  PS–pictures in this post are (well…should be…) clickable for a slightly larger view.

The drawing above is one I worked on about six weeks ago (and haven’t had time to do much drawing since!).  I didn’t look at my old workbook prior to doing this exercise, which wanted you to hold something in your hand.   What a hoot… here’s the first attempt from 2003 (eeks it was THAT long ago?):

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The Window is a piece of plastic with cross-hairs on it.  You make a cardboard frame to make it rigid, then look through it to divide the object being drawn into quadrants.   Doing this helps train the eye to see the foreshortened object, in this case hands.

Here is a picture of a foreshortened hand done using the window this year.  I left the wash-off pen markings on the clear plastic window, on the left side, for you to see how placing your hand underneath allows you to just trace the outlines–presto, one of the hardest thing to do (foreshortening) made easy!:

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And here is the same exercise from 2004 ish–I used a different background technique in 2009 than this one just to see how it would look.  I like the dark background better I think…..

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Basically, I think I just need to draw more….Here is one last exercise (I’m doing more of them this time as I KNOW I need the practice):

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I like the cross-hatched (with eraser) background on this.  My hand is in the “figa” …with thumb tucked between the fingers.  I did this naturally as a toddler; we lived in Spain at the time and it is considered good fortune if one naturally makes the figa.  I hope so!

The Frayed Edges — May 2009, Part 1

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

A couple Mondays ago my mini-art-quilt-group got together, this time at Hannah’s house down the Harpswell peninsula.  It was a lovely quiet day, and a much needed respite from our insane daily lives….   When we first started our group in 2005 (OMG HOW has it been so long? ), we worked on various new techniques or projects in our meetings, and we decided to do a round robin of art books. Instead of doing a round robin quilt, we would instead make pages for each other.  We were each free to pick the size of the book and theme (or lack thereof).  Deborah chose numbers, Kate chose hands, Kathy chose the sea, and I chose Isabel’s fruits (Isabel Allende wrote a book called Aphrodite:  A Memoir of the Senses, which is about supposedly aphrodisiac foods….folks could pick anything from her book, or anything they considered aphrodisiac).  Here’s a link to an older blogpost about my book.

200906blogfrayedmay006When Hannah joined us about the time Deborah was about to move to Texas (SOB, yet again) , we talked about doing another round on the books so we could get Hannah a book, too. Well, at long last we have begun to make and trade pages!  The photo above is of Kate continuing to work on one of Kathy’s pages.

For this round, we gave ourselves the option of changing themes.  Kathy, Deborah and I kept the same ones (the sea, numbers, and Isabel’s fruits), Kate changed from hands to hearts, and Hannah selected Mothering.

Here is Hannah, being a mom with her youngest daughter, sharing her first ever page for her Mothering book:

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Kathy made these two pages.  The Peter Rabbit is, I believe, a transfer which Kathy free-motion stitched and decorated.

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The second page is based on a painting by Gustav Klimt and is glorious:

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Kate worked on Sea pages for Kath, including the jellyfish one in the photo above, and this one which is a quotation from Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s Gifts from the Sea:

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Kathy made two GLORIOUS pages for mine; both Absinthe and Lavender are on Isabel’s lists….   The absinthe page is a transfer onto silk with decorative threadwork, and I adore it… I wish the luminescence of the silk showed in the photo:

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And here is the lavender; my dear late father-in-law lived in Sequim which is home to many lavender farms, plus there was one on San Juan island where we used to live, and this is exactly how they look:

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Aren’t I lucky to be amongst such talented and wonderful people?  In a post soon I’ll share the pages I made for Deborah, Kathy and Kate (still working on Hannah’s).

And no post would be truly complete without the meal:

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YUMMM!