Sun Bathing

I haven't been able to post in a while but I got a chance to do a fun piece of art today, so I thought I'd share it.

Sun Bathing, 8.5 x 11", pastel and colored pencil

Hope you a great day.

Characters for June

After spending last month drawing a doodle a day, I decided to keep up the momentum and use my daily drawing time to work on figures, faces and characters.  I want to do cartoony characters, as well as more detailed drawings.  I swing from wanting to do highly realistic renderings to wanting to make quick energetic characters.  Then some days, who walks on to the page but a fish in boots. 

I usually draw every day anyway.  This is a way to focus and work on my problem areas.  I resisted joining a challenge because I want to be flexible and force my imagination to come up with a daily theme.  I'm not quite coming up with a daily theme, but so far, I'm bumbling along with the focused daily draw.

For the last doodle of May, I did this self portrait character:

Ink and colored pencil

The second day I drew from a photograph of a model in book. 

Pencil and colored pencil

Blue fine line sharpie

A girl in my neighborhood -- pencil and colored pencil

Freckles are hard to make look like freckles aren't they?  Sepia Micron

And today, a quick gesture at a community meeting in ball point pen

I was actually a little disappointed that no distinct anthromorphic character showed up in my head this week, but I got a copy of Bert Dodson's Keys to Drawing from the Imagination and I feel like something interesting will pop into my head soon.  If you haven't see this book, or his other one, Keys to Drawing, it's a wonderful reference and has great exercises in it to help get your drawing and imagination muscles pumped up.  Keys to Drawing and Everyday Matters by Danny Gregory are responsible for making me think I could draw in the first place, so blame them.  Or better yet, start drawing and join the party.

I'm also working with an 89 year old friend of mine, Nita, to write a poem a day. Nothing grand, just a few lines on paper first thing in the morning.  It's amazing what you can do once you set your mind to it and you have a friend checking up on you.  I'll share a few poems before the month's over. 

June's going to be a great month!

Doodling Around All Month

I did a challenge this month to draw and post a doodle a day on Facebook.  It was organized by Alison K Hertz who does a wonderful blog called On My Mind:  thoughts of wife, mom, author, illustrator, juggler, toy designer, teacher, camp director...   She's the author illustrator of Flap!, which was published last year.  She'd been a great inspiration for my drawing this month.

I had a little downturn in my on-going health problems with the onset of seasonal allergies which led to a lot of fatigue.  I'd been painting pretty regularly but the idea of cleaning up after a painting session just became too daunting and I went back to pens and pencils.  With these, I can just start and stop and all my energy goes into creation, which is much more restorative than washing paint brushes.  Plus, I never have to wait for anything to dry.  There's a certain liberation in painting -- the flow of a brushstroke is soothing and exciting.  But since I enjoy detail, I can get the same thrill in laying down a smooth line or building a monster out of scribbles.

It was nice to have the group to spur me on.  I pretty much doodle every day anyway, the only difference would be I would post it.   Doodle Day May, it was nice to have prompts to compel me to stretch my thinking.  The wonderful doodlers and artists and children in the group also helped prompt me.  It didn't make me doodle EVERY day, but I got a fair amount of color and imagination added to my journal.  It helped me ride out this fatigue and made me fall in love with drawing and my colored pencils again.  I never would have envisioned a fish in boots otherwise.

With May coming to an end, I feel a real need to keep up a sort of structured-but-not-too-structured drawing practice, so I'm going to draw a figure a day -- human or imaginary.   I'd like, by the end of June, to have a better handle on body proportions and gestures.  I don't know if I'll post them yet.  It seems like a good spur, setting up a daily post.  I posted in a facebook group this month. Maybe I'll post on my own facebook page or here.  What do you think?

Here in chronological order are my 25 May doodles:

Crayon Monster

Expressions

Testing Dura-lar

Continuous line -- a line is dot that went for a walk

Fruit -- mine turned into Mad Orange Disease

Swirls decorated  my new portable journal

Triangles -- moon over mountain quilt pattern in ink and crayola crayons

Two doodle in one -- shoes and fish -- further adventures of the fish out of water

Fire and box

Paisley Prompt

colored pencil on dura-lar

Shell

I'm linking this to Paint Party Friday, even though it's Thursday.  I haven't had time to join the party for a while, so I'm looking forward to seeing all the art links there.  Have a great day and, when you're blue, do something creative for yourself. It's good medicine.

A Poem for Memorial Day

Memorial Day 2013
by Joy Corcoran

To those who marched off boldly

Determined to free the world,

To those who stumbled into service

Seeking a better life,

To those who could no longer sit

Anxiously in the sidelines,

To those who only wanted to stitch the

Wounded back together,

To those who fell because

They lived along

The quickest path

To victory,

We remember.  We regret.

We hope to not repeat.

Yet, even as we mourn,

A catchy tune

Lures us into war’s insatiable jaw.

I wish you peace in your after life.

A cool drink and quiet audience

For your story

And all eternity

To dream in peace.

Bridge Meadows: My Home Sweet Home

My dragon story and story friends

I haven't written about my community Bridge Meadows in a while.  They've made a new video about it and I thought I'd share it with you.  It's posted on their Facebook page, but it's a public page so you should be able to get to it without being a member of Facebook.  There's a shot of me reading the very funny picture book Socksquath by Frank Dormer, which represents what I do in the community.  I read stories to and with kids.  I also do a lot of drawing and encouraging their creative sides.  Everyone here knows there's no such thing as a bad drawing.  Yesterday, one of the girls here told me, "There's no such thing as a bad child."  Amen to that!  The kids in our community have been through a lot in their young years, but each one of them is a treasure and full of the potential that every human is born with.  Here's the link to the video: 

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=604397772906379

We have a great community space where all the buildings and houses open up to a courtyard.  My husband and I live in a small apartment that is frequently visited by children of all ages.  One of the great things is that the kids here are used to being around people with disabilities.  My walker is a popular item.

We all get to have fun with crayons, paints and our imaginations.

I've made great friends with people of all ages and some of the elders even like my children's stories.  Nita, my 89 year old neighbor, just joined me in a challenge to write a poem every day in June.  And if I'm every blue, my young friends always know what to do:

photo by J.E. Underwood

If you want more information on Bridge Meadows, just ask.  And thanks for stopping by my blog :)

Rainbow Crows

Last year, I started participating in Raiboeliza's Postcard Project.  Rainboelza is a wonderful artist who you can read about her here, and you can visit her Etsy shop here, where she sells lino prints -- little images from the sublime to the scatological.
The Postcard Project is pretty cool and it sparked a bit of mischief in me. The theme was blue, so I wanted to use blue, but it organized by an artist named Rainboe, so I couldn't limit myself.   I've always had a bunch of imaginary creatures flying around in my brain, so last year when I started thinking of a what to do with my card, one flew out:  The Rainbow Crow

Rainbow Crow in ink and colored pencil

The story

 "Dear Rainboeliza,
I finally spotted that bird that was waking me up at 3 a.m. every morning.  It looks & caws exactly like a crow, but its feathers were blue & iridescent in the moonlight.  I watched and saw 4.  They looked ancient and flew low.  I knew I'd seen the mythic rainbow crow of North Portland.  More soon!"

I had hoped to continue writing rainbow crow adventures, but lo and behold, a whole year came around before I did, so this myth may take a long time to develop.  This year's them was orange, so this is what flew out this time:

Rainbow crow chick - crayolas and copic markers

The story

"Dear Rainboeliza:
After seasonal flooding in the Willamette Basin, I found a Rainbow crow chick on the dock.  It was bright orange, suggesting the rainbow coloring emerges later in life.  I heard mournful cawing from the forest.  I ran back to the car to get a box, but the chick was gone when I returned.  I contacted the Dept. of Ornithology, but they still insist the rainbow crow is a myth!"

This is how the cards looked after the post office contributed their part to the process:

In spite of bad spelling and lack of perspective, it was a fun project and I'm pretty sure it won't be a whole year before I find another tale about the rainbow crow.

Thanks for stopping by.

Maple Whirligigs

I got obsessed with a cluster of maple seeds and drew them in colored pencil over the past few days.  I've since learned that a group of such seeds is called a "panicle."  My panicle was not of the double winged helicopters, but single ones attached by a delicate stem to the limb.  The whole thing fell out of the tree and I found it on a walk and brought it home.  I determined to do it in all colored pencil for the detail, but then got dismayed trying to do a dark background.  After 3 layers it still looked anemic, so I inked the background with a Pigma Micron Brush marker.  You can still see some of the colored pencil lines and tints of red through the ink, and there are a few little blotchy places where the ink pooled, but over all I'm pleased with my panicle. Never knew there were so many colors in a maple seed pod till I looked very closely -- purples and reds and yellows and ochers, oh my....

Maple Whirligigs, colored pencil and ink pen