New Year Greetings

Happy 2009 to everyone.

OK I know it is a bit late to be wishing New Year greetings, but this is about the earliest I could manage to get to it. I just spent 2 weeks in Chicago, which included Christmas and New Years, with my sister. The Holidays were good, and I lucked out with my travel plans. I left prior to a big storm here in the Northeast and I arrived in Chicago after a smallish snow storm there. The bad weather in Chicago the week of Christmas calmed down by New Years and I had no problems getting home on the 3rd of January.

No classes of course for the past couple of weeks, but I did take my sketch book with me to Chicago and tried to do one drawing everyday. I am not going to bore you with images of all the drawings I did but I am uploading a few that you can check out. I tried to vary the subjects as you will see.

The boy on the left is from a photo in National Geographic, one of a group of young Monks running, the woman on the right is from a photo from Discover Magazine, she was being featured in an article.



The image on the left is from National Geographic and is a Maya God Incense burner, the cat on the right is a Maine Coon featured in Cat Fancy

This little girl was from an Ad in Newsweek Magazine

Since I have been home I have been catching up with my groups and their messages. I am behind on the FFFC group challenge for December. It is a bit tricky for me this time as the challenge is to convey a mood or emotion and to add a zinger to the design. The zinger I can handle, it is the mood or emotion bit that I am finding tricky, remember my series theme is structures. I am playing with a design idea so we will see. If it doesn't work out I may skip the Dec. Challenge all together though I would rather not do that.

Last 2008 Post

I am done, well almost done with school for the year. I have my final drawing critic tomorrow where I will get my grade for the semester, but the classes are done. I had the last Color and Design class on Monday where we did the final critic's for that class (I think I have an A) The computer class was done last week, and yesterday I had my final drawing class. We did more figure drawing so I have more nude figures for you to look at. There aren't any guys this week though, only females. And for the most part the poses were a bit more standard. I think the instructor was able to spend more time with the CD figuring out what he wanted to give to us to draw.

I also have images for you from my Drawing homework from 2 weeks ago. I really like the 2nd drawing and feel I did her quite well. The pity is that I did the drawing on newsprint so it won't keep, but still I really like her. The other is ok, but even though she took twice as long to do I feel she doesn't work as well.

My last picture for you this year is my Drawing final, we had to do a self portrait, I used a photograph taken by a friend about 30 years ago. I think I did a fairly good job, hope the instructor thinks so. It is pencil and I know he would have preferred charcoal, oh well I semi did it to please me so it is pencil. It took a while to finish to my satisfaction. It doesn't take that long to lay down the basic image, but to get all the shadows and details the way I want takes a bit. I tend to sit and stare at it, decide what needs fixing work for a bit then stare some more. I like the result, but it isn't quick.

Sorry for the photo quality this week. We are having an overcast gloomy day so had to use the flash, which makes it harder to get a good photo of the art work.

So long until Next Year, sending seasons greetings to all my friends (and readers) Hope the holidays are good to you,

Color and Design Final Project

Just a quick note this morning, this is my Color and Design final project. We had to do something with eggs. I browsed on-line for all the pictures I could find with birds and eggs, and then just eggs in a nest. There aren't a lot of pictures of nests with birds in the picture. Probably because most fly away if you get too close, and you have to be relatively close to take a picture. I sketched six of the pictures as possible finals, but when a fellow student suggested that I make a quilt for the final project I selected the one of the pictures with just the nest, eggs and a few leaves for my final project. The size is relatively small since I needed to get it done quickly, 9 x 11 inches. I found a hand marbleized fabric in the stash that I decided was perfect for the base of the nest, and picked fabrics from my hand dyed stash to go with it. I used a satin stitch machine applique to sew down the pieces. Shadows under the eggs are fabric paint, also on some of the leaves. The white highlight on the eggs and some of the green on the leaves is from shiva paint sticks. I used a fiber for the reddish stem, and zigzag quilted over it to hold it down. I am still contemplating whether I should add some more embellishments to this, lighter threads to simulate the light straw (grasses) the robin used in its nest, but I am going to leave alone for a bit and think about it.