Craft project: painting the birds

We all have our own quirks and proclivities and personal touches. I like weird stuff. Now, everyone has different sensibilities when it comes to weird stuff, myself included. I like to decorate with what I assume people would think of as weird stuff. I like frogs and lizards and turtles and apparently my new thing is birds. I have them all over the studio / office / living room. Most of them are probably supposed to be in a garden or a child's toy box, but, well, I'm not much of a gardener. So, yeah, I have garden statuary and toys standing in as knick knacks in my living room.

Basically, I like kitsch, and I decorate with kitsch.

And since I was done coming home from work and finishing up the holiday calendar — well, I suddenly had free time again! I know, it always seems novel to come home from work and not have to work on something. Leisure, who knew?

Anyway, after catching up on the last 5 episodes of the now cancelled Leverage and probably 7-10 miscellaneous hours of tv watching, well, I had to pry myself away from the facebook and do something (besides sleeping).

As it turns out, I had a little home dec project to finish. My vcr/dvd player died in the beginning of December, so, there was some consternation over hooking up the replacement and having the correct number of cables and looking at diagrams and attaching the right cable to the right slot between the new dvd player, the cable box, and the television. Apparently, in order to watch a dvd you need to have a degree in engineering...

Anyway, one of the cords was too short, and I had to rearrange things, and it was weird looking. So, eventually I was standing there in Target while Christmas shopping and bought myself a little stand for the tv to sit on so that the tv could be in the middle of the spot for the tv again...

Before: the original configuration

 Middle (the new dvd player) (above)

After (below)

So, of course, now there's more space for knick knacks, boo-yah! And by knick knacks I mean the birds, the turtle, the frogs, and the lizards.

I like to buy bird, frog, and reptile decorations that look realistic. Occasionally, I buy things that I think just need a new coat of paint, because I'm crafty like that. So, my post holiday I-did-it-for-the-fun-of-it project was to paint a couple resin birds I had bought that I thought needed a do-over with paint.

So, with some craft paint, a knowledge of bird plumage, and some satin and matte varnish:

 So, now I have 3 yellow warblers (2 females, 1 male) and a chickadee on a pine cone in my menagerie of creatures.

Oh, and the chickadee has a home too : )

Someone needs to make sure the plastic iguanas behave themselves.

I hope everyone had a lovely holiday (and perhaps some post holiday relaxation or maybe a craft project) and have a happy new year!

art fair, art experiments...

So, this week was the Ann Arbor Art Fair. Technically, there are like 3 or 4 separate art fairs going on at the same time — and different organizations jockeying for who is the original art fair... but really, I don't care about that.  I drive to the mall, park, and ride the bus into downtown, wander around in the blistering heat for 2-3 hours or until I can wander no more, and then get back on the bus and wander back to my car and wish there was someone there to drive me home, because I'm hot and exhausted, and home is like 30 miles away...

Oh, and somewhere in there — I buy stuff.

I actually started off the week having to go to the post office...

This is my Art Fair plunder. Yes, jewelry. And yes, those are all opals set in silver. I like what I like. And I buy a ring from the same guy every year (Alan Fisk)... and I buy something from Middle Earth every year as well...

 Last year - Art Fair was pretty miserable, largely because it was ninety degrees and there was utterly no wind, no breeze, no nothing. It was just hot and the sun was beating down like a relentless ball of fire... it was also pretty deserted.  This year, it was also hot, but on Thursday morning it managed to rain.  So, it was cooler (like mid-seventies / eighties) plus there was a breeze. It was nothing gusty, but it was flowy enough to be pleasant.  And yes, I pointlessly carried an umbrella in my bag the entire time. I was prepared for a downpour (as that has happened before).

I go to art fair for the jewelry.  I already have an art degree, and really, I'm not one of those people who goes there to get inspired. Nope, I go there for the jewelry... and I have never left there without making a purchase.  If I'm gonna drive 30 miles to walk the expanse of downtown Ann Arbor in the noonday sun, then I'm leaving with something silver and sparkly, preferably in a size 8. At the very least I will buy shoes...

Anyway, after Art Fair, I'm pretty fried. So, I spent a lot of time sleeping and staring at the television.  In the mean time, I apparently felt like painting something, so I decided to experiment with the watercolors and the gouache and some masking fluid... and some colors that maybe don't come that naturally.  I'm apparently not done playing yet.

Besides, the middle of the floor was all empty from where I put everything away last week, so, you know, I had to get out a bunch of stuff.

Oh, did you know that Mounds makes ice cream bars? Why, yes, they do. The only drawback is that there is no stick. Anyway, they're delicious even if my hands are a mess by the time I have consumed one.

Also, Homemade Coconut Almond Chip Ice Cream — that stuff is fabulous.

And have you heard that new song by Dawes — "If I wanted someone"? Yeah, I like that song.

Have a good weekend, and stay hydrated!

another lost week

Sometimes doing nothing is doing the most.

And nothing is pretty much what I did this week... I mean, not quite nothing in a nihilistic way, but nothing. I slept (poorly), I ate, I showered, I ran the dishwasher, I did laundry, I put on clothes and went to work... but I didn't sketch anything or draw anything or write anything, so I guess I didn't really do anything. And that's fine.

I was taking some medication, and it was affecting my thinking, and well, I stopped taking it... and I feel like myself again, relative to how long it would take for that kind of thing to wear off. To be vague - it made me feel tired and sleepy, so I'd go to bed and then wake up long before the alarm was set to go off and become unable to fall back asleep, so then I was zombie-awake and lethargic... there were times when I was at work and having one of those 'trapped in my body moments' where I would be shuffling down a hallway and thinking, "shit, I should be able to walk faster!" But I couldn't. I didn't have the energy to do it. It was like I was made out of sand.

I would cry for no particularly good reason...

And eventually I finally picked up the paperwork that came with the prescription and read it. There was a moment of ruefully sarcastic laughter when I scanned over my exact "side effects."

So, uh, yeah, that little boondoggle is drawing to a close.

I, like millions of other people, sat in my living room on Thursday night (well, technically Friday morning in my case) and watched "Brand X" and "Anger Management." I' 33, so technically, I'm too young to be a 'brat pack aficionado,' and I'm not. Charlie Sheen and his coke fueled meltdown or whatever that was last year — that was something that while I was aware of it, it just didn't really affect my daily life. I never watched "2 1/2 Men" — so the fate of the show wasn't really something that was bound to affect my entertainment... and it isn't exactly like I've seen more than 3 movies starring Charlie Sheen... but I watched "Anger Management," and it was funny, so, there's to winning.

I liked Brand X too.

I'm looking forward to the return of "Episodes" and to the July return of "Leverage." Sorry, book readers, but I do enjoy the television.

I have, however, in bits and pieces, been reading Keith Richard's autobiography "Life" in my spare time. People my parents age have that age old dilemma of 'Stones or Beatles? Well, I guess I come down on the Stones side. For the record, I also pick Zeppelin over the Who... but anyway, really, my favorite band it Pink Floyd, so it's irrelevant. Except, Keith was always my favorite Stone. "Happy," btw, is my favorite Stones song. So, even though I'm no groupie or superfan (and no, I don't own all their records) — and I know nothing about playing guitar — it's a good and genuine autobiography — and even reading it in bits and pieces out of order (which is how I prefer to read biographies) — it's been very interesting. The last part I read was something about the open G tuning of a guitar, and even though I know nothing about reading music, it's described in such a way that I don't feel like I'm reading Greek.

Anyway, on the accomplishment front — I sent this painting off in the mail yesterday. Shhh, don't tell my other paintings, but it was one of my favorites. Particularly this part:

Technically, it's a gaff, really, that crinkly / crusty / lumpy paint right there. And how when it dried - chemically it was such that it repelled the pristine paint that it was sitting there on the surface with, which is why it looks all crackly like that. And yet, to me, it's perfectly catastrophic - this little gurgle of texture in the middle of the painting. As much as those paintings are about a play on color, and literally the shape that paint takes when it just pools and sits there even after it's been pushed in a direction — it's all the things that come together that make the picture.  That painting is just as much about the juxtaposition of color and the abstraction of shape as it is about that little gurgle of crackling paint... which reminds me of what I read about how notes reverberate as per how a guitar is tuned in Keith Richard's book...

So, I hope the new owner of sunkissed alchemy phantasmagoria likes the painting, for whatever reasons they may like it.

And now I guess I should try to get some work done ; )

midnight mist

I've found myself in a funk lately. I'm tired, but I can't sleep. When I wake up I don't want to do anything but watch tv. There's nothing on tv (oh, shush, PBS devotees, I want zazzy scripted drama, not pandas mating or opera or period pieces)...

Anyway, in an effort to make the most of the garbage bill (since I'm the one who mails out the cheque) I have been going through the house and throwing away a lot of things that no one wants or needs. Yes, recyclers and thrifters everywhere just groaned. Seriously, I can guarantee you that dusty cardboard that has been sitting in the garage for 8 years and has been crawled over by all manner of insects is, in fact, not a glorious vintage find. Neither is that broken plastic hummingbird feeder...

I have lived a life of what a professional organizer would probably categorize as chronic disorganization. And I have a lot of stuff, and some of it is cool and some of it is useless, and a lot of the time it ends up in a pile on the floor or on my desk or on a shelf. I always think "I'll organize that eventually, but right now I really have to vacuum, because company or the cable guy is going to be here soon." There's never enough time to clean, but the future to organize the piles and boxes and bags of stuff squirreled away from the curious eyes of family and strangers is endless, right? Of course.

So, every once in a while I flip through one of my old sketchbooks and bask in the glory of all the things I have drawn or half drawn and not finished over the years... and the funny thing about my sketchbooks is that they were always kind of there.  They were there in junior high and high school, and they were there in college.  And they don't just have drawings in them, I often took notes in my sketchbook, which was my way of sitting there during a lecture and entertaining myself while pretending to pay attention.

So, when I got to my "Art History" notes, I was pretty amused. All those 'famous' paintings and their periods and dates. Except for the ones that don't have dates, those circa some year paintings. Well, I have plenty of undated work.  In fact, this little gem has no date on it:

midnight mist

All I could really tell you is that: yes, I painted it, it's salt on watercolor, and it was done in or after 2008 and probably before 2011. But really, I painted it and the date of the painting is irrelevant. It doesn't indicate anything. It'd just be a factoid.

I like this painting, although it's not exactly my personal color palette. I wear a lot of black (t-shirts) I don't so much decorate with it. And color scheme-wise it is a little goth/noir/dark in the vibe department. That's something I like as a character, not necessarily something that is my character. Technically I might be dark and moody sometimes (or a lot of the time) but I never had a penchant for dying my hair black, reading poetry, enjoying the Cure, or wearing eyeliner. Come to think of it, I've never seen any of those Twilight movies that the kids were all raging about, in spite of the fact that I watch Grimm & Once Upon a Time (and watched The Gates and The 9 Lives of Chloe King) and enjoy that Caress Scarlet Blossom body wash (which you know was meant for girls on Team Edward) (I just like the way it smells, and Patchouli is supposed to be the official fragrance of hippies, right?).

Anyway, I made that painting. And I probably wasn't thinking about goth things or romance novels when I did it. The truth is always more droll. I probably had a big puddle of black paint on my palette, along with the puddle of blue and that old tube of crimson red I bought way back when I was still in college (graduated 2002) and yet it is still pliable in the tube... and since it happened to be there, well, the painting happened. I know, that so lacks zazz. Lack of a cool story or inspiration aside — I think the painting looks cool. And well, paintings are things to look at.

So the lack of date or inspirational story is irrelevant to me. The painting is the painting. The paint is right there on the paper.

midnight gypsy

And so, via the magic of drawing and process and photoshop and my epson scanner — midnight mist is now immortalized in the wings of a fantasy butterfly. You can check out the rest of it's gypsy cousins at sarahkdesigns.

Have a lovely weekend!

plum aurora alchemy

My favorite color is always going to be violet. It was my first favorite color. It's probably why I secretly rooted for a lot of the villains in all those delightful products that were marketed my way as a child. EviLyn was my favorite He-Man character. I mean, look at her purple outfit, plus she had magic powers... and then there was Sour Grapes from the Strawberry Shortcake franchise. Not only did she wear a purple dress, she also had purple hair and a purple snake. That's a lot of purple. To be fair, I also liked Raspberry Tart - I mean, she wore purple, and had purple hair in boing-boing curls.

Clash was my favorite character on Jem and the Hollograms - mostly because of her awesome purple hair. She was one of the villains, but that didn't matter to me...

Anyway, I like violet or purple.  I sit here typing this on my computer where the "wallpaper" on the screen is violet.  The clock above my desk is violet. I have a violet stapler, a violet trash can, a violet lamp... I buy a lot of stuff just because it's violet.  Oddly enough, most of my clothes are green or black.

So, while I have a favorite color, not everything is that color.  For instance, this is my office / living room / studio (when it was cleaned up some time ago):

So, while violet is my favorite, it isn't the one and only color for everything. Although, clearly, the carpet is purple. :D

Anyway, I have no qualms about other colors, or using them.

plum aurora alchemy

Color theory was one of those classes I had fun with in college. Not just because Vincent Castagnacci was the Prof, but because color was something I always had fun with. BTW, Castagnacci was like my favorite professor ever, even if I did occasionally refer to him as Satan, which was meant as a sardonic compliment, considering my childhood of casually rooting for the villains in cartoons... That, and Castagnacci didn't accept any sort of crap or half-ass anything, plus he had a New York swagger... it was the perfect escape from the pasty Ann Arbor vibe of organic this and that.

Anyway, I enjoy color. And I enjoy playing with color. I happen to be fond of that painting — plum aurora alchemy.  Apparently, according to the info on the back of the painting, I made it on 8 January 2011, which was a Saturday. And I probably did like 20 paintings that day, because that's simply how I paint. 

The painting is mostly just color. And considering the colors that it's made from - it could have been a total crapshoot. Dark purple, fluorescent red, orange, sky blue, dark pea green, and a smidge of yellow - via someone else's application or technique - that could have been an entirely different image.  I don't paint squares or shapes or lines or splotches or blocks.  I just paint with color.  And completely arbitrarily - albeit my color choices are often outside the box - I paint with color in such a fashion that the image is implicitly a landscape.  Green at the bottom does it every time. Of course, the horizontal nature of the application of color aids in implicating a landscape. If the paint had been moved up or down or in spotches or spots or blocks or something - then maybe it would be different.

What I'm saying - is that while my color choices are somewhat random based simply on what paint I have sitting around when I'm painting, they aren't that random.  And that artistically, I know what color of paint interfaces with what other colors of paint.  There is orange paint in that picture that is mixed on the surface of the illustration board directly with sky blue paint. Think about that for a moment: orange + sky blue, what does that =? Is it mud? I guess it might be, but it is and it isn't - because if the whole image was saturated color, then there would be no contrast. Or the orange would just sit next to the blue and the stark contrast would just be obvious.

But it's not like I pondered that before I spent 7 minutes putting the paint on the illustration board on some chilly Saturday in January a year ago.  It just happened because my use of color is the accumulation of all the things I know about it and how it occurs in paint.

I didn't carefully calculate every line or blotch of paint, not consciously. I did it because it was there to do while simultaneously being inherent, which I know sounds like a lot of polysyllabic gobbeldygook.  I think paintings are there for the visual, not necessarily a dissertation of words. Some people differ on that ideology, but then, one size never fits all.  And the accumulation of all the things that lead one person to make whatever they make based on the materials they have at hand isn't going to be a ubiquitous experience for all people. In other words, my paintings - color choices, application, style, and subject matter are the accumulation and expression of my experiences, and like favorite cartoon characters or colors - they aren't for everyone.

I like this little snippet of the painting. The graphic shows it at about 3X the size it is in reality - but look at all those colors - mixed and separate and coagulated, random and smeared, but moving in a direction based on application and technique.  For a painting that is technically nothing but color and situational pigment - there's a lot going on there.

It's not all neat and compartmentalized; nor is it demure and polite and subdued.  But in the end it's just a painting that I made one day in January based on the paint that I possessed at the time and what I felt like putting on my illustration board... and it's available somewhere out there on the internet, sometimes...

Life is full of random choices and decisions that materialize into things.

So be adventurous.

so beautiful or so what

So beautiful or So what? So, I'm a little behind on my musical releases... that's just kind of how I am. You know what? I didn't go out and buy skinny jeans whenever those became "stylish" again. It is what it is. Right now I have this song —  so beautiful or so what — stuck in my head. So, that's so what.

 Paul Simon's website...

Truth be told, I just took a shower. So, as I type this I'm waiting for my hair to dry.  Normally, I default to TRESemmé shampoo and Pantene conditioner.  I'm a creature of habit. But every once in a while one must be adventurous, or just wash all the residue out of one's hair. So, I liked the way this smelled. Yes, as a consumer of hair care products, these 2 Herbal Essences products had all the necessary marketing tricks:

√  purple stuff comes out of the bottle

√  the bottle is purple

√  alleges to smell like "wild cherry"

√  use of the word "orchid"

Okay, so I actually think it kind of smells like grapes. But, well, it made my hair all snazzy when I used it. In the event that it's not apparent — violet (and by proxy all purple derivatives) is my favorite color. I love cherries, and I have long curly hair.

 

I also like cake. Strawberry with cream cheese frosting... mostly because that's what I found in the cupboards. Mmm, cake.

I decided, on a whim, that I wanted to do some watercolors... which might have something to do with the sudden influx of watercolors to my sarahknight etsy shop.  You know, when I list them I have to leaf through the pile and make sure that I've scanned them, and then I'm probably day dreaming about my fantasy house with all my paintings on the wall or something.

Anyway, yesterday  when I got home from work I sat down and caught up on the last 2 episodes of Californication and cleared off a good area on the floor in order to get out my case of paints, the box of watercolors, the box of gouache, the set of gouaches, the watercolor palette, the gouache palette, the bowl of salt... and then I spent a good 10 minutes cleaning up paintbrushes so that I would have something with which to fling wet pigment at the parchment...

I highly recommend Californication as a series.  I always enjoy being surprised by the plot twists on this show... and like Hank, I can't exactly say I have any fondness for Tyler...

I painted 14 yesterday, and four so far today. And now I'm waiting for them to dry. That's probably the hardest part.  There's a difference between the way they look when they're wet and how they look when they're dry. And even though I've been using this painting technique for 12 years — there's always an element of surprise, and it's usually the good kind.  I already scraped the salt off the 14 I painted yesterday, and it's going to be hard to not put most of them in the "keep pile."

Some notable keep pile escapees... here, and here, and here, and here...

It's unseasonably warm here in Michigan right now. A couple days ago I got my bike out of the shed and pumped up the tires. The first ride after the winter lay off is always the toughest... anyway, the crocuses have already bloomed, and now the daffodils, the forsythia, and the magnolia are going at it. I'm convinced it's going to snow tomorrow, even if the calendar indicates that spring has now begun.

Anyway, I recommend having a nice slice of cake and then going out to wander about and look at all the springy things popping up here and there... and maybe catch up on some Paul Simon too.
: )

love is like jazz...

I think I heard this song on the satellite radio at work, or maybe on one of the music channels on the television... because, as much as I am remiss to admit this, I haven't exactly just turned on the actual radio in a while. Anyway "Love Interruption" by Jack White. Oh. My. God. I am infatuated with this song.  I think the first arc of the infatuation was trying to figure out that the hell he was saying in the chorus, because I'm a tad deaf like that (there were a lot of hearing tests taken multiple times when I was a kid)... but after figuring out that it was "I won't let love disrupt corrupt or interrupt me" — I still have a desire to play this song repeatedly like a 12-year-old hopped up on the Bieber-juice. So much so that I looked to see if the album was available in a store, and then subsequently checked Amazon. Evidently "Blunderbliss" is available on April 23/24...

Yeah, I'm old (32), I still buy cds. I like having the actual thing.

I'm a casual Jack White fan.  I'm not exactly a devotee, I don't think I'm hipster enough for that.  The White Stripes were something that had to kind of grow on me... because Pink Floyd really does take up a lot of the oxygen when it comes to the atmosphere of my favorite bands (well, that and Dylan, Zeppelin, Cat Stevens, and Everclear...). "Elephant" was actually the first White Stripes album I bought.  I also got the next 2 White Stripes albums, plus the Dead Weather and the Raconteurs records.  So, when I remember some time in April, I plan to buy this one as well.

Anyway, until then I'll just be playing that video on repeat and letting the serotonin take over my brain every time it comes on that station at work...

Aside from saying that "Love Interruption" is just a damn cool song with interesting lyrics, an engaging lyrical structure, and an perfect harmony of sound, I really can't tell you anything about it beyond the fact that really, I like it because it's cool. So, I suppose the same model that applies to the way I like a song also applies to the way I produce work sometimes. 

orchid honeydew dawn

I apparently made this painting on 4 August 2011.  According to the calendar, that was a Thursday.  And, vaguely, apparently I did actually blog about it in the abstract.  But I don't really remember making this painting, like what I was thinking or what I was 'watching' on tv at the time — in that most things are made while I sit in my living room in front of the television while my eyes and attention are on whatever I'm making... So, I guess I was playing with gouache for one of the first times, and obviously salt and watercolors, but nothing quite jogs my memory to the specific moment when I made this.  Given the cumulative amount of random things I remember at any given moment — having no recall of precisely painting this painting amuses me.

But I like it, because it looks cool.  It's the wrong answer to give in an art school critique, but it's the simplest answer. Technically, it doesn't look cool; in that the individual and overall tone of the colors is warm, but, well, sorry Paris Hilton, I'm not one of those people that wanders around and exclaims "that's hot." So, yes, I'm declaring that I think it looks cool, which I guess might be me being egotistical, but well, I'm actually not completely neutral when it comes to the things that I make, and I like some of them more than others... that's why there's a keep pile. Sadly, I cannot keep them all. Well, I guess I could, but no, I can't.

I didn't get much made this week. Some weeks are more productive than others. I mean, redesigning my business cards doesn't really count as making something? Does it?

Maybe it does...
Watching Tabatha Takes Over, Criminal Minds, CSI (yes, I have a little girl crush on Spencer Reid too), and WWE Raw, probably ate up a couple hours of time as well. It can't all be Supernatural and Grimm all the time. Besides, the Rock sang for us. Yeah, I will never understand the appeal of John Cena... Rock 3 / Cena 0. That's all I'm sayin' particularly in the event that anyone was keeping score. Yeah, I know you weren't. Yes, I know, I know, people, the outcomes are pre-determined as we say.

Anyway, after 15 years with the 19 inch RCA, I finally bought a new tv. So, uh, now I guess I have to get that thing of the box and figure out where the red and yellow and white chords go. I figure this should be fun, and by fun I mean unnecessarily difficult. I guess that's really my project for this weekend.

*Update! I have now stepped into the 21st century! The television is assembled and functional. Woo-hoooooooooo! It's time to break out the cream soda and the pizza or something, or finally get around to watching The Rum Diary now that Johnny Depp's face will be life-sized.

Picture Story: winter winds

So, in the first week of December I had 2 out of 12 calendar graphics done... and sometimes that means that I flip through the old sketchbooks and look for things that I drew that I never quite got around to finishing. I needed a picture for January, stat.

I think I had some idea about a girl and a snowman sledding. But I was out of time to sketch new ideas...

The snowman with the kite was what I found. There's a note at the bottom that says "for January 2010." What that actually means is that I sketched this in 2009, and was thinking it could be one of the graphics for the 2010 calendar.

I scanned the sketch, converted it to a blue page and printed that. I inked the snowman and the kite, but nixed the birds (which were supposed to be bluejays).

Now, the snowman is wearing a scarf and a hat, so I needed something to fill those in with... this scarf appears in a lot of my winter pictures, like this one.

sapphire sunshine alchemy

For the sky - I wanted something more than just a photo of clouds. So, I decided to combine a scan of one of my paintings with a photo of the sky. I picked "sapphire sunshine alchemy." I played with the color settings and changed out the magenta and yellow - and made the layer more saturated with blue... and then used some layer styles to combine it with a photo of clouds.

"winter winds"
@sarahkdesigns

And this is what the finished picture looks like, of course after I filled in the snowman, the snow, and the kite. And that became the graphic for January 2012... so it only took me 2 years to get around to executing it, ha.

Technically, my illustrations may be digital, but visually, they are an accumulation of physical things: drawings, photos, paintings, a scarf... and then there are all those snowflakes in the background that I designed individually. There's a point at which making the picture seems mechanical: draw it, scan the drawing, convert that to a blue page, print it, ink it, scan that, block the scan, and then start filling it with bits and pieces of digital files - like photos or scans... but all that stuff comes from somewhere. I actually stood out in my backyard photographing the sky on some summer day. And I actually went out and took photos of tree bark - which were what was used on the arms of the snowman.

Anyway, it snowed here in Michigan for the first time in 2012 just yesterday. It's pretty, but I would rather not have to drive in it. I guess I like my snow better when it's on paper. At least then I don't have to scrape it off my car.
: )

ice cream, birds, and watercolors...

It was another hot week here in Michigan. Yes, I'm ready for fall. I'm ready for 60—70˚F weather. I'm ready for cool crisp mornings and cold dew on my car... but it isn't fall yet, it's just August.

So, in the mean time, I recommend sitting down and having a nice big bowl of ice cream every now and then. The greatest ice cream I have discovered this summer is Hudsonville's Orange Cream Swirl. If you remember or have recently had an orange creamsicle — it's like that translated into a tub of ice cream. It's delicious. Oh, and so is orange sherbet. Yes, I love that stuff.

Since I was drawing birds a few weekends ago, I decided to format some new pictures for sarahkdesigns:

say's phoebe | cedar waxwing
male northern cardinal | female northern cardinal

And then I worked on watercolors this week... which means I got out the salt, and the watercolors, and the gouache, and the brushes, and the paper, and conveniently used the empty tub from my orange sherbet to hold the water...

And after I use the salt I scrape it off the painting and reuse it... which is interesting, because sometimes it's covered in pigment and that transfers to the next painting.

details of some of the paintings of this week

And yes, I finally bought gouache. And decided to use it with my watercolors (although I did keep it on its own shiny new separate paint palette). I'm heavy handed with the pigment anyway - but it was interesting to see the white actually stay white when it dried.
(And for anyone uninitiated with my watercolor paintings - you can see the actual paintings here)

It's hard to explain making something abstract when you're not the stereotypical character archetype artist. I don't see the world through some narrow prism, and I don't think there's only one path to some ideal visual. When I sit down on the floor in front of the paper cutter with my paint and water and salt and brushes and paper - I have a vague idea of what I think maybe I'm going to do. But really, to a certain extent - whatever happens happens. And when I'm finally done putting paint on the paper or sprinkling it with salt - when I pick that wet painting up and set it down on the carpet to dry — I know it that when it dries it will look different from how it appears wet. Some of the salt will melt, some of the colors will run, pigment will be absorbed or overpowered by other pigment... and while some of it is knowable, there's a certain mystery and randomness to it.

So, the wet paintings sit there on the floor and I go to bed. And usually they're dry when I get up. And when I come home from work the next morning I scrape the salt off them and get to actually see the final result, which is the cool part. Because there's painting it and playing with color and juxtaposition and all that, and then there's finally seeing what it really looks like.

And then I have to sit there and name them all. Because, let's face it, I don't just ever paint one painting. Don't get me wrong, I like the paintings, but I can't imagine setting all that stuff up and having to vacuum salt off the carpeting for one painting.

Of course, I still have to do that vacuuming part.

So, stay cool and have some of your favorite ice cream : )

Summer begins...

Well, summer officially starts on 21 June... which I know because it's my birthday. But it's summer now. The weather really doesn't care what the calendar says. It's humid and 70-80˚F out right now — that's summer weather.

So, a couple weeks ago I happened to look up at the obsolete tv antenna that towers over the house, and sitting way up there on the top of one of the rods was the male hummingbird. It's amusing to see such a tiny creature sitting way up there, where presumably he's surveying the territory. So, I cleaned up the feeder and made some bird kool-aid for him and the rest of the hummingbirds to fight over... and this weekend I finally got around to taking all the snowflakes down. Yes, I still had vestiges of the winter decorations hanging around the place. Laziness, I suppose.

So, the hummingbirds and the butterflies are now up.

A few years ago I was looking for snowflake Christmas ornaments at Target, and I happened to notice that they had all these resin bird ornaments... so I picked through them all, carefully, and literally bought all the hummingbirds that didn't have broken beaks, as resin is fragile, and these were just hanging on hooks. They had bluebirds and chickadees and goldfinches too, and yeah, I bought some of those as well, but they were all made in a perching position, where as the hummingbirds are flying. (Some day I'll get around to making something that my bluebirds can sit on)

So, anyway, all the birds were painted as the male form of the species... so, I brought them home and repainted them. I made males and females, and went so far as to use iridescent nail polish to make their feathers more authentic. So, every year when I finally let go of my laziness for an hour or so - I get them out and put them up - and they stay up until October or November - long after the real birds have flown south.

I made the monarch butterflies probably about 10 years ago. I suppose it's silly or childish or whimsical or maybe a little 'Flowers in the Attic'-ish, but I like weird stuff I suppose. And if you looked at the pictures and you're wondering - that brown blob on top of my computer is a snail knick knack.

I did some paintings on a whim last weekend, so now I need to scan them and varnish them, and sign them, and print out and attach the labels for the backs of them... I finally went through my paints this week (since the garbage was off by one day in observance of Memorial Day), and threw away all the bottles that were dried up and chunky or almost completely empty. I do that every now and then, particularly when I can no longer fit all the paint into the basket that holds the paint. The overflow of arts & crafts supplies gets to be a little much every now and then...

The summer flowers are here. The irises are blooming! Irises are my favorite flower, hands down. I love them in virtually every color (except the brown ones - that I will never understand). But violet (and any other shade of purple) is my favorite. Violet is also simply and unilaterally my favorite color.

Plus, after probably not having ridden on an actual bike for like 15 years - I bought a bike this weekend. Yes, it's a lavender shade of violet, which was most of the appeal... aside from the fact that it's a female model, adult sized, and has brakes. Yeah, I'm not one of those cyclist people, so, really I bought it because I want a bike to tool around on mostly for leisure purposes - which means riding it around the block in a residential area where I am least likely to be impeding traffic or hit by a car.

Hopefully your summer is filled with color and happy things, and maybe air conditioning, a fan, or the occasional cool breeze.

Picture Story: spring sing

Technically, I was on vacation this week. Vacation, as it turns out was mostly about sleeping and not having to wake up at the sound of an alarm clock. Plus it was about getting some work done on some projects that I have been procrastinating on for a long long time. I am a hell of a procrastinator. But, I did finally take all the snowflakes down — my winter decor consists of my ginormous collection of plastic / resin glitter covered snowflakes (see this post for my hilarious prediction).

Anyway, now I have to hang the butterflies and the hummingbirds... which I just haven't quite gotten to yet.

In the mean time — a picture story: spring sing.
I finished this illustration in the spring of 2009 (see last graphic), but I probably technically started it around 2005. This first graphic is actually a painting. It was painted with acrylics with details done in prismacolor on illustration board. The original is actually 11X14 inches. But via the magic of a scan and a size format change in photoshop it became an 8X10.

What I actually did was I flipped the image horizontally, and then lightened the resized copy of the painting in photoshop and then printed that and drew an outline around everything. Then I scanned that outlined copy and adjusted the file until all I had was the outline on a white background.

When I have an inked copy, then I make a sample fill of every part as a separate layer. So I fill all the tulip flowers with one color, all the petals with one color, the grass, the tree trunks, the leaves, the sky, and the clouds. Because I am going to use scans or paintings or drawings, or digital photos to actually fill in the those parts.

This is a size reformatted portion of a scan of an 11X14 acrylic painting called "geranium sunrise." It's what would eventually become the background of "spring sing." Of course, I had to reformat it 8X10, and then I would go on to lighten the entire painting by creating a layer of white, playing with its opacity and then merging that to the layer of the scan of the painting.

The yellow warblers that appear in the painting were drawn separately. They were drawn with prismacolors. That drawing was scanned, and all the white space was removed. The clouds were created using the paintbrush in photoshop, and then using a layer fill style over the background. The sheet music that appears in the background was scanned, and then manipulated using the warp tool so that it is wavy instead of linear.

The leaves of the trees were created from a digital photo that was manipulated and resized. The original image is actually of maple leaves on the ground. The tree trunks were created from a layer I created by layering several different colors with several different brushes and then using filtering effects in photoshop.

The grass was also created from a photo. It's actually a picture of the grass in my neighbors yard (and this particular photo has been used in a number of my illustrations when I need grass, which I always think is kind of funny since my neighbor will mow his lawn on a diagonal and this shot is clearly of some grass that hasn't yet been cut) . The tulip flowers and leaves were both taken from the same scan that was used for the background.

And through the magic of layering styles all these things come together to create the illustration. You can see the finished piece here in my "sarahkdesigns" shop on Etsy.

If you're anywhere near Tecumseh, Michigan: Friday 29 April 2011 is the annual Tecumseh Art Walk. I'll be at Timeless Stitches, so if you're in town, then please stop by. The event is 6-9pm.

I hope everyone is enjoying their spring : )

paper bowls & nbc green is universal contest

So, a couple weeks ago I went on a handmade recycled paper bowl extravaganza...
And I think I made 36 bowls. At least, when I counted the ones I had finished that's the number that I came up with.

Bowls are a process. First the paper has to be torn and soaked in water. Then that has to be blended. Then the paper has to be strained through a screen, then that has to be pressed into a mould. Then, using a wash cloth, as much excess water as possible needs to be pressed out. Then they need to be left alone for a few days to dry. Once they're dry - they need to be painted on the inside, and then that needs a day to dry. And then they need to be painted on the outside, and that takes at least 2 coats and a day to dry... and then the tree needs to be painted.
It's a time consuming process I suppose.

So, anyway, they're all finally done. They've been painted, signed, and dated, and titled...

There's always something strangely anti-climactic about finishing a project. Because, well, now they all sit in 2 piles in my office... as if to remind me that I need to photograph them in order to list them. So, while they're done, there's still more to do.

But they're done. So, now it's time to move onto one of those other 3-5 projects I have been procrastinating on. Ha.

Anyway, there is a contest over at NBC: http://www.greenisuniversal-reuse.com/
Because they're promoting recycling, upcycling, and reuse. So, this is my entry:
http://www.greenisuniversal-reuse.com/home-decor/recycled-handmade-paper-bowl
(that one is also my favorite... well, one of my favorites)

Anyway, I encourage you all to register & vote ; )

Oh, and in the event that no one has ever seen these before - I sell the bowls in my "sarahknight" shop on etsy. You can find them here