Creative Tuesdays - Forest

Hi all at Creative Tuesday!

I live in a very wooded area, so I definitely appreciate the theme this week! Seems everywhere I go, there is a forest.

THis mini sketch was made at a friends' backyard - I was trying to write something in a journal, killing time, and found nothing to write! So I drew the trees instead. Funny when I think of how many weeks of my life went into writing long, rambling, self-involved journals, and now I can barely think of what to write when i feel like I might wish to! ha ha

Hope all have had a good August thus far!

SS- Quick Sketch of Mountain Magnolia Inn

Hi all at Sunday Sketches!

On Saturday we are usually in the town of Hot Springs, NC, selling arts and crafts - we are in fact here today as well.

I like to go on walks around, and one of my favorite places is the Mountain Magnolia Inn.  Please visit this place!! Whether virtually only, or in person, it is definitely worth it!

Occasionally I like to sketch the Victorian mansion when I'm there, and Saturday was no exception. It was a quick sketch with ink on notebook - doesn't compare to the original building of course! Full of gables and balconies and all sorts of great things (photo taken with cell phone, hence poor quality). Am including the original so that folks can see below:

This image shows the opposite direction of where I was drawing.

Have a great day y'all!

Creative Tuesdays - Curls

For today's Creative Tuesday (themed 'Curls') I wished to revisit a piece from the past - pre 2005! For some reason also I had never posted this one on my blog... so there we are.

I went through a decidedly 'curly' phase during that time - everything I was doing was, well, curly - I was working almost exclusively in pen/ink - and everything, no matter how simple or elaborate, possessed many curls.

I wanted to take the time to say that I really appreciate this blog hop! I love the challenge of a weekly assignment - somewhere I read that limits create larger freedom by eliminating needless, distracting options - this is something I strive for in my life & which I find plenty of in Creative Tuesdays. Almost more than other blog hops it seems to instill biographical/memoirish moments which are satisfying to me at least LOL!

Speaking of 'curls', I've been a bit of a TV bunny lately (online anyhow) because I've been 'stuck' doing a lot of admin/computery-type stuff - I can only focus with noise in the background - so, I wanted to share something I bizarrely ran into yesterday as I was working on a facebook page (please visit my page!!! please like!! it's here)

the show was Toddlers & Tiaras. Plenty of curls to be found there!!!!! (roll eyes)

At one pt in my life I would have boycotted this sort of show - I mean, gee whiz - here's the almost misogynistic objectification of women and early indoctrination into outdated gender roles - not to mention other icky icky stuff. Fundamentally, I find NOTHING GOOD about this show, or really, about the people who buy into the lifestyle (one woman comments with no sense of irony "after all, I had kids so I could put them into pageants") - but, eliminating critical distance ... it doesn't seem so bad... just children wanting to look pretty. Pretty silly, though, no matter how you slice it. It did get me through a particularly boring stretch of image uploading, so it did its job anyhow.

Creative Tuesdays - BUNNIES!!!!!!! (AKA 'Simply Cute')

For Creative Tuesday

To me, the sine qua non of 'cute' is BUNNIES. Even the word is, to me, cute. I absolutely adore the fuzzy wuzzy things, and just seeing one makes me absolutely silly.

I live in the country, so on morning walks I invariably run into 2 or 3! They're so darling - they sit there,  & upon seeing me, hop off. CUTE!!!!!

One of the worst times I got into trouble when a kid was upon bringing a rabbit home as a pet - unbeknownst to my mom. The sad d'enoument was that the bunny was given away to someone more willing/able to raise it. Have not had one since - I see what a responsibility animals are, and am not in a position to keep one happy  :( so I just have to look at them.

Here's a site with lots of lovely bunnies to those who love them as me!!!!

This is a pic of me with a bunny, at a petting zoo somewhat recently. 

Creative Tuesdays - Gift

Franz Liszt certainly had the musical gift!

All right - to be perfectly honest, this is one that started out being completely different from what actually came out. As in, I don't even know how that happens.

With the theme of 'gift' I had intended to draw Pandora opening the infamous box - but then realized that wasn't particularly uplifting - same with the Trojan horse, though by then I had already started drawing Pandora who ended up looking weirdly masculine and whose arms were in that weird position.

Then I had pretty much no choice but to realize it reminded me of Franz Liszt, famous-famous (even to this day) 19th century virtuoso pianist whose music has been much enjoyed (and parodied) over the ages - i used to play piano so the association's not entirely insane.

I was getting ready to scrap the whole thing & start over when it struck me - "say, isn't musical ability a gift? Isn't the power that some have with their musical expression a gift?" I say..... yes!

Liszt was interesting. In his day he was basically as sought after & fanaticized over as the Beatles - in fact, the mass hysteria known as Beatlemania was named by a Scottish music promoter reminiscing (not that he was there!) the intense hysteria and fan frenzy known as Lisztomania.

So that's the drawing today - Liszt and all the raving fans :D

And now I leave all with Bugs Bunny performing the great Hungarian Rhapsody #2

Sunday Sketches - micro comission

Appropriately timed for Sunday Sketches, here is a micro commission for a site called fiverr that I did for some people.

The fun of charcoal is that it allows many depths of expression with little colour, which is fun for me since I tend to go for the exceedingly oversaturated look re. my colour pallete.

Another fun part is finding is looking a bit like a chimney sweeper afterwards, what with all the charcoal all over the place!

All please peruse the other great entries on Sunday Sketches. Another week of creativity in action.

Sunday Sketches - stumbling onto online art co-ops

Sometime around 11pm last night, my internet spazzed out. I fought with it for an hour or so, then gave up.

Here I was at 1am with no internet! What was I supposed to do?

Seeing as I can never honestly get to sleep much before 3am, I decided to look at some old sketchbooks, recalling the days when I spent more time with pencil and paper than the electronic beast. I started with the bug, which led to the tree, which led to the... etc

So here it is - the first freeform sketch I've done in at least a year.

I have a dear friend on this blog who has indirectly introduced me to artists' blogs (due to her lively comments life), and I have, the past few days, become interested in what other artists do online. I have no idea why it never occurred to me to do this sooner - let's just say there's heaps of things that reasonable people do that don't easily occur to me.

But it's fun! And even more fun are the art co-ops, a very Aquarian modality of artists getting together to pool resources of creativity and support, and create a venue for structure, deadlines, and light critique - all things dearly missing to anyone blessed enough to have spent time in an arts learning institution.

So, here a list of some of these fine art co-ops

• Sunday Sketches
• Creative Tuesdays
• Paint Party Fridays
• Monthly Challenges at Blogland
• Sweet Saturdays
  

So, I took out my old sketchbook, looked at that tree thing that emerged last night, and decided "why not? it was sketched on a Sunday, after all." So I added the type a few minutes ago, and presto. Instant Sunday Sketch.

The interesting part is that the THEMATIC so clearly resembles the thematic of the SS blog button - entirely unintentional - I had not seen it till a good 10 hours after sketching the above. Interesting, eh?

---------

When i first set out to sketch, period, I was a little nervous, i guess. It's been 2 years since I habitually sketched something - no matter what it was, on pen, pencil and paper - that I wondered if I had somehow 'lost it'. At that point in time I used to go out in public and sketch people, a lot. I have 2 or 3 journals of live people sketches in various poses - not all of them good, but yes serving to keep a hand in the whole live figure rendering process.

Having a weekly process such as this might well be the thing to get me back into that vibe, which I wonder why I got off in the first place.