I'm back. Circus life was not for me. No, I have too much baggage (well, boxes) to lug around.
Not much to say about this drawing, really, except that throughout it this song was in my mind;
Hey now, all you sinners
Put your lights on,
put your lights on
'Cause there's a monster,
living under my bed,
whispering in my ear
And there's an angel,
with a hand on my head
She say I got nothing to fear
There's a darkness,
living deep in my soul
it still got a purpose to serve
So let your lights shine,
deep into my home
God don't let me lose my nerve,
don't let me lose my nerve
From
Supernatural by Santana.
'Put Your Lights On' lyrics by
Everlast.
I drew this whilst listening to the news about
Chris Huhne on the radio.
ZenBrush and ArtStudio on iPad. Click to enlarge.
"You know those letters that you did with the dark blue edging and light blue center were far to bold for mural? They real drew too much attention."
"Yes, I know. That's why I changed the centers to green and posted pictures. I thought the green would blend in a little bit better."
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| Dark blue edging with a green center |
"Weeellllllll, it's still not working. That dark blue edging with the dark green is still too demanding."
"Oh, it's fine. Just live with it a little bit. You'll get used to it."
"Come on, who are you kidding? You should know to trust your instincts by now."
"Do you realize how long I've spent hunched over on the floor doing these letters over and over? My back is sore, I've got a kink in my neck..."
"Yes, I know. But, I think you're making excuses. Do you really want to drive by the mural for years wishing you had changed the color?"
(Grumbling...sigh)
"Alright, you win. I'll repaint the letters AGAIN. I'll use a dark green/light green comination so that it is more harmonious with the background...BUT THIS IS THE LAST TIME!"
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| Dark green edging with light green center |
I'm still experimenting with Ukiyo-e app on iPad as a proofing tool prior to committing designs to actual woodcuts. This is the second image for my new book project
Four Letter Words:
Ukiyo-e on iPad. Click to enlarge.
I'm trying to make time to draw/paint regularly. We've been so involved with work recently that this somehow made it's way to the bottom of my priorities list, when in fact it should be at the top for various reasons, not least being that it's super-therapeutic for me, and, hello, without art I really have no business to speak of!
As I have a long queue of designs and patterns waiting to be placed on gifts and cards on the stores, I actually now have the luxury of drawing whatever I please, without having to consider its commercial value. I know, I know, I shouldn't anyway -- but unfortunately that's what has been happening of late as I do need to fill the empty pockets.
So. I managed a quick sketch of a cupcake ... completely from imagination (which just goes to show what I think about during the day) as it's not easy finding the real thing in the countryside. Not surprising really, as the French have such delicious pastries of their own. And I love them, especially the lemon meringue tarts that I have a particular weakness for -- and my Patisserie in the village makes pretty much the best ones I've ever tasted. Still, there's just something about cupcakes that's, well, different, wouldn't you say ...?
Drew this in coloured pencil, in my moleskine journal. And as it really is a very quick sketch, completely from my sweetly warped imagination, I'm sure you'll be kind enough not to notice the horrendously obvious errors that I shan't mention either. I now have a cupcake craving, sigh. Cheers!
and
More from the Book of Four Letter Words
Ukiyo-e on iPad
Three more ersatz woodcuts done on iPad using the Ukiyo-e app, an invaluable proofing tool in my opinion. All part of the continuing
Four Letter Words project.
Ukiyo-e on iPad. Click to enlarge.
I actually have a lot of good ocean ideas, but I'm setting up my first professional website - eek - and it is stressing me out and taking FOREVER. So, I'll leave you with an old favorite of mine that is perfect for the subject.
wish me luck
Another in the
Four Letter Words series of pseudo woodcuts. Watch this space for updates about the book.
Ukiyo-e on iPad. Click to enlarge.
Now, here's something I've been meaning to post for a long time. For a long long time. Since I had
my first solo exhibition over a year ago, in fact. After the exhibition I was commissioned to create two of these 'small blue thing' drawings. This one was for Sally, a surprise gift for her husband (it's a scarab, by the way, Sally), and the other was for the Hughes family. When I delivered the Hughes' drawing I was given this poem, below. Karey had been inspired to write it after visiting my exhibition. I read it often, and have been meaning to come up with the perfect drawing to post with it. But, as yet, that drawing has not happened and as this one has remained un-posted it seemed fitting. Plus, if I continue to wait for the perfect drawing I'll never share the poem with you. And, that would not be right. It's one of the most lovely, and humbling, gifts I've received.
Thanks, Karey.
strictly ballpoint?
No, there’s pencil, ink, gel pen, crayon, marker
even tippex, in your riotous attention to detail.Thousands of careful lines;such small changes of pressure, shade, direction. How much of your timeto draw all those buttons, coins, badges, tickets, hair grips? Even tiny cat claws.
Obsessive? Compulsive?I can’t look away.
I’m a voyeur reading your notebooks,a kindred detective with too many clues:
mass-produced, man-made, plastic, metal
or something natural, unique?
Any object is subject.
Nothing escapes a curious eye.
You rummage in the attic of my memoryto conjour your magic; a delicate, crazy art
full of surprises
like your quirky picture-title puns
from songs in your head,
now in mine, old favourites -
Joni Mitchell, Suzanne Vega.
A kind of give and takewhere nothing is too ordinary
or too personal
so you offer up your socks,
like fat birds on a wire,
even a black bra draped over a line,
and in “drawers” - knickers,
blowing in a breeze!
Clothes in a washing machine,half-submerged in soapy water -
you call it, “slooshy sloshy, slooshy sloshy”
Washed pots draining
and lots of shoes from all angles
and pages of doodles and travel memorabilia,
with whimsical thoughts in curly calligraphy:
“will it ever stop raining?”
“trying to keep out of the rain”.
You must be local. You make me laugh.
It takes time and close attentionto notice everything –
Like peering through a doll’s house window
and seeing my own life,
in every shiny detail:
I want to empty out my pockets!
Karey Lucas-Hughes 2011
inspired by an exhibition of art work called “strictly ballpoint” by Andrea Joseph at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery 2011
Above is a photo that I took at my show. For some really great photos check out
THIS POST by Pippa, which was another lovely gift I received after the exhibition. I really am a very lucky, ahem, 'girl'.
I've been doing a bit of doodling. Not quite sure where this came from, but I liked it enough to transfer it into Corel Painter and paint over the original colored pencil drawing. Still needs a bit of a clean-up but I'll do that once I'm done with the queue of Christmas and New Year designs I have to finish up or redo! Cheers.
I was harder on Joan Didion's
The Year of Magical Thinking than many readers were. I thought it at times too self-consciously clinical, too reported, less felt. Many of my students at the University of Pennsylvania disagreed with me. I listened. Of course I did. I wanted to be convinced.
I do not feel disinclined about
Blue Nights, which I have read this morning and which will break your heart. The jacket copy describes the book as "a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter." It is that; in part it is. But it is also, mostly, as the jacket also promises, Didion's "thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old."
A cry, on other words, in the almost dark. A mind doing what a mind does in the aftermath of grief and in the face of the cruelly ticking clock.
Blue Nights is language stripped to its most bare. It is the seeding and tilling of images grasped, lines said, recurring tropes—not always gently recurring tropes. It is a mind tracking time. It is questions:
"How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen?"
"What if I can never again locate the words that work?"
"Who do I want to notify in case of emergency?"
Joan Didion, always physically small and intellectually giant, is, as she writes in this book, seventy-five years old. She is aware of light and how it brightens, then fades. She writes of blue—a color and a sound that has long obsessed me, and has obsessed writers like Rebecca Solnit. She writes of the gloaming, a word I will forever associate with the immensely talented Alice Elliott Dark.
Here is how she writes:
You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day "l'heure bleue." To the English it was "the gloaming." That very word "gloaming" reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.
I've been working on some commissions recently, a couple of which were for visitors to my exhibition in the summer. I was very interested, during the exhibition, to know which drawings people liked the best; not for any particular reason, just for curiosity, I suppose. The drawings of collections of little things always seemed to come out on top.
This is one of two 'small thing' drawings I have completed since then. I love these drawings. It's kind of like doing a jigsaw. There's so much satisfaction in finding another piece that slots perfectly into the blank space.
There is one issue I have with being commissioned to complete one of these drawings though; the moment when I have to ask "would you like me to include the pube?"
Thank you for your “get well” wishes–I’m feeling much better today with the exception of the occasion coughing fit. I had to leave the house to drop off some packages at the P.O. so I threw on this outfit. (It’s quite warm and Spring-ish today so no jacket needed!) I decided to snap a couple of pics since I haven’t shared this hankie top with you yet.
It’s a pullover style and has to fit loosely (to avoid tearing while slipping it on) because of the delicate vintage hankies, but it’s looser than I would normally prefer. My concern with too-loose fitting clothing is looking shapeless, but I think it’s okay with fitted pants. (Dare I say jeggings? Yes, jeggings.) Maybe I should add a ribbon belt to cinch it in a bit?
The pattern I used is Simplicity’s Built by Wendy 3835, my fave as you know.
My first post in Monday Artday is...raining...
My favourite fabric so far is a new version I designed of the
Art Deco Parrot, this time in a blue, white and grey colour scheme.
I ordered a yard so I could make a pair of cushions in the cotton-linen blend fabric they offer. Being able to design the fabric myself was great because I actually adjusted the scale slightly so that I could fit two cushions with parrots down the middle of the front and back with just 1 yard.
Here's a picture of the cushions:
I love this fabric, it has a bit of weight to it and the nice feel of linen while the cotton makes it less floppy than pure linen. Incidentally, I also love the new Kona cotton that Spoonflower is now offering for a quilting weight fabric.
So I feel I've finally reached the point where I can design exactly what I want to decorate the home without having to compromise. I'd like to do curtains too, but that's a lot more expensive so it may be a while!
like everyone who knows me didn't know this was coming!
pippa loves peyton:)
Let the fun begin!
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| This is the "before" |
This evening I thought I'd go back to the first panel, the first place I started over a month and a half ago - the sky.
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| The "after" |
The first layer was just Cerulean Blue and white. Going back through it, I am using the original mixtures plus an added mixture of the Cerulean and Ultramarine Blue which takes it a step deeper and darker = more contrast. I work with 3 mixtures at the same time - dark, medium, and light.
I kind of thought I'd get through more panels this evening, but I only made it through the first two. But, this is my favorite part - I've got the basic color layer down, and now I can build and fine tune (OK,
one of my favorite parts).
I also completed the tractor study.
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Hope it was cathartic! You could do worse than Carlos and the lads.
Ain't that the truth, Dinahmow! Love this one, Andrea...:)
This is a great sketch. It reminds me of an old friend who used to write stuff on slips of paper and put them in a box deep in the closet so she would remove them from her head. I can't for the life of me remember what it is she put up there, though, so that memory was useless. I could also relate to some of your boxes which was scary. I'm used to "cute". Welcome back for the circus!
That actually gave me a shiver! Do you feel better now?
That's such an amazing sketch. Super powerful.
Thanks guys, yes, it's a dark place - under my bed!
Dan, I love that idea. Now that would make a great drawing. Dark, yes, but I don't think it's such a bad thing, emracing the darkness.
Cheers!
I love this drawing every time i look at it i can feel everything you were trying to get across you are a great artist.