Sun Take 3 progress, and some Journals

Well this will probably be (for me anyway) a relatively short post. Above is the current status of my third try with my sun design. Note that I have darkened the background significantly with an olive green. I went back to the lighter lime green in the ribbons while leaving the center and the purple alone. I like how the center design and lime green pops against the background, while the purple is still dark enough to also show up.

I have a bit of tweaking left to do, but I think this will be the final version

Below is a scan of an interim step, I had darken the ribbon green a bit and added an overlay of yellow to the gray.

It is OK, but obviously I wasn't satisfied with it. Not sure why I picked the olive green, but once I started adding it to the background I decided that was the way I wanted to go. Then I needed to lift out some of the brighter green and redo the lime green. Both greens show up darker in the scan than they are in real life.

I think I need to live with this for a bit, before deciding how I actually like it.

Below are a couple of pages from my Nature Journal:

These drawings are from my Monday visit to Daniel Webster and North River in Marshfield, MA. I drew the log in the pond at Daniel Webster for the third time. The water level in the pond was as high as I have ever seen it and I wanted to document it. There were about 4 or 5 painted turtles all sharing the same log and catching some sun.

Otherwise nothing particularly to note, no new birds (for me) but the mosquitoes are viscous. I am beginning to look forward to the first hard frost.  Esp. as here in MA there is the concern about 2 diseases, West Nile and Triple E, Triple E is by far the worse of the two carried by mosquitoes, but West Nile can be no fun. I do use bug spray and thankfully haven't been bitten yet, but they do sometimes swarm a bit so are a concern.

The drawing of the trees is from North River, note the stone wall in the background. My problem with the leaf and the trees is that I am not sure what they are. The nearest I can come is some kind of Cherry. I think they are Choke Cherry trees, but only spring will really verify that for me. I know what the Choke Cherry flowers look like, even if I am not sure about the leaves or the bark. It is too late for the berries, which I just realized are very eatable, not just by birds and animals but by people.

When I was a kid living in Ill. we had a Choke Cherry tree in the front yard. I am positive that I was told then that the berries were poisonous. Though perhaps I was just told they were bitter and I made an assumption. During my research I recently learned that the Native Americans would crush the whole berry eating pit and flesh together, it was a valuable food crop for them.

The pages below are from my visit to Blue Hill Reservation on Tuesday Afternoon.

The top sketch is of the bird feeder area at the Trailside Museum location. The feeders were busy with Titmice, sparrows and some Chickadees. Over by the pond area the chipmunks were out in force collecting scattered duck food and maple seeds. I was able to make a few good photographs of the chipmunks, though they move so quickly I also made quite a few blurry ones.

The leaves are from trees around the parking lots. The maple is from a large Silver Maple located in the north lot, while the Black Locus leaf is from the lower lot along the roadside.

One last photo:

These pretty red leaves belong to a poison ivy plant. Needless to say I just photograph and don't touch these, though I am not sure how much of the chemical that most folks are allergic to is left in them when they are changing colors.

That is it for today. Comments are welcome.

May Day

I don't usually do a Monday Blog update, but yesterday was May 1st and I was out making photographs to document the progress spring is making here in the Northeast. So I thought I would share a few. All were made in different sections of the Blue Hills Reservation area. The above is just trees, but I love the colors and shapes of the leafing trees against a blue sky.

A photograph of the area outside the Food Pavilion at Houghton's Pond.

I photographed this Magnolia a week ago when the blooms were just buds, yesterday it was in full bloom. You can see some of the petals have been damaged by our recent rain storm. I think the pink/white is so beautiful against the blue sky. The young tree is in the picnic area at Houghton's Pond, Blue Hill's, Milton, MA.

A last image, an unknown type bush blooming against the backdrop of Hougton's Pond, Blue Hills, Milton, MA. Other than cropping these photos they have not been altered in any manner.  Comments welcome, tomorrow's post will be back to my art.

Countdown 1 Day left

Gems of the Sea

Today is the 14th of January and tomorrow was supposed to be the mailing deadline for my Sketchbook. I should make it, I have 3 more spreads and the end page to finish and I have all of them sketched in. However I received an E-mail from ArtHouse today saying that because of weather conditions and disasters in many parts of the world they are extending the mailing deadline to Tuesday the 17th. With this extension I may revisit what I had planned to do on the final spread in the book. Currently the design isn't really relevant to my theme, but hey I figured I was allowed some latitude on the last spread so even though I have more time, I don't think I will change it.

The above page is of oysters and pearls. Pearls are the only "gem" that isn't a stone, well... I had forgotten about amber and coral, but amber is fossilized resin, and I don't really consider coral a gem stone. Anyway my drawing shows 2 oysters and a few pearls, one sitting between the halves of an open oyster shell. Pearls after all are created inside an oyster, outside is the outside of the shells.

Footwear

Shoes, when I went back to school many of my art classes had me drawing shoes. I have to admit that I got a bit tired of them but when I was searching for themes for my pages it occurred to me that I could show a drawing of an indoor slipper and an outside shoe. Which is what I have done in the above spread. The black shoe looks fairly solid in the scan but in the sketchbook it shows more value variation.  They were actually kind of fun to do after not doing one for a year or so.

Scrapbook

For this page I actually glued in another piece of paper. The idea of a scrapbook is that you assemble in one place various items, usually papers like photos, ticket stubs etc. The rest of the image is of a glue bottle opened to show the brush inside the cap. I think this spread works with my theme on several levels. I like the concept better then my execution, the bottle and cap are both a bit wonky.

Drawing Tools

 The above spread is a drawing of one of my mechanical pencils, with an extra lead and a pink pearl eraser next to it. This is a bit of a stretch, but the lead does go inside the pencil. I love my mechanical pencils, so easy to sharpen the leads when you don't have to worry about getting rid of wood. The leads do come in different hardness's, I prefer using a 2B lead for my graphite drawings but have been using a 2H for the sketchbook pages. The 2H is easier to erase and doesn't leave any remaining marks on the paper.

Tree Rings

The idea for this spread was to show a tree trunk, and then the cross section of the tree with the tree rings. I didn't realize just how weird a section of a tree trunk would look on the page, hence the scribbles at the top with the lines to indicate cut offs. This is another scan that looks darker then the original page. Not sure I succeeded with the bark on the tree trunk, but I tried.

Outlook on Blue Hill

This drawing was done from a Photograph I made last spring inside the Lookout Tower built on the top of Great Blue Hill outside of Boston, MA. The tower was built in the 1930's by the Conservation Corp and from the top you get a great view of Boston and the surrounding communities. This view is from the ground level looking out one of the open doorways to the woods and ground around the tower.

Frog Pond

Frog Pond is based on some reference photos I downloaded. This is of a frog sitting in some water in its pond.  I added some lily pads just because. Don't ask me what kind of frog it is, I really have no clue, but I love drawing frogs so this one was fun. The frog is outside but in its pond.

Bottled Cloves

This drawing I did with just pen and ink, it is of a bottle of whole cloves placed on its side with a couple of cloves spilling out of the bottle. For years (while my mother was still alive) it was a practice of mine to make cloved oranges for Christmas presents. It was always one the gifts I gave to her. They smell wonderful for an extended period of time and are fairly simple to make. When I started doing this they were also relatively inexpensive to make, though when the price of cloves began to skyrocket the gift became a bit more expensive. I didn't do anything fancy, just stuck the orange full of cloves, I placed the cloves as close together as I could get them, and then let it dry for a week or so before giving it to her. To save my fingers I started poking holes in the orange rind with a knitting needle prior to pushing in the clove. Before I started doing that my figures used to get very sore by the time I had the orange about half way done. I also used to pick the smallest orange I could find, usually a navel, as they have a thicker rind and are what is available around Christmas.

Dog House

 Above is a dog in its dog house, which of course is outside. Not much to add to this, it is what it is.

Caged Bird

Last image for today is of a parakeet in an old fashioned bird cage. I did a fair amount of research for reference parakeet images looking for a bird color I liked. When I was young my sister had a sky blue parakeet called Sky. He could actually talk, and when allowed out of his cage loved to sit on my mothers head and lean down to preen her eyebrows. One day he flew out the front door and was gone. My sister was devastated, as it was pretty much a death sentence for him. We left the cage out in the yard for several days with the door open, but he never came back.  My cage has it's wires too far apart to actually hold a bird in, but it is my drawing and I didn't want to over clutter it with wires.

This is a long post. I was going to do it yesterday, but ended up sleeping most of the day with a low grade fever and a cough. The cold is better today so I am catching up. Here in Eastern MA we had about a foot of snow on Wednesday. Thankfully I didn't loose power where I am, but the city to the south of me had major power issues caused by downed trees. Hopefully all of my readers are safe, warm and dry. Per usual comments are welcome.