Drawing class

Winter quarter I took a beginning drawing class at the community college where I teach.  It was a lot of fun.  I made a couple of friends of other moms about my age doing the same thing, going back to school to do what we never did before.  One woman was an engineer the other a physical therapist.  I learned some, but mostly got a lot of practice, which was what I need.  I would not have otherwise spent 6+ hours a week drawing.  It was fantastic.  Here are a few of the things we did.

My teacher once had a teacher who made them draw hands endlessly.  That teacher said that if you can draw a hand you can draw anything.  So we drew a lot of hands.

about 12" x 18"



This was one of the teacher's favorites.  We were to copy an etching by Morandi using dip pens.  I just about went cross eyed with this one.  I would have to take breaks when my eyes started to swim.  It isn't one of my favorites because of the subject matter.  The still life seems cold and lifeless.   I did like trying to define the edges without ever drawing the edges with a single line. I also like the way some of the items are sort of hiding in the shadows.  I think that I did a technically good job, but I don't love it. I did however submit it to the juried student art show and it was accepted along with a charcoal portrait I did in my sketch book.

about 12" x 18"

We copied this from a photo in our textbook.  I like this one a lot.  I really like working with charcoal.  you put it on the paper and move it around like finger painting.  I also like that you can get really dark darks for high contrast drawings.

18" x 24"

This is another charcoal portrait copied from a lithograph self portrait.  It is interesting to copy drawings instead of working from life or from photos.  Sometimes it is easier, like this one, and sometimes it is much harder when you are trying to mimic the artist's gesture.

18" x 24"

This one is conte crayon.  Again, a copy from the text.  I'm not sure I like this media.  It isn't nearly as forgiving as charcoal.

18" x 24"

The final project for the class was to come up with a cover for the New Yorker magazine.  It could be anything, but it had to be original.  That was a tough one.  Cover art is often political or some bit of social commentary, but not always.  I tried to think of something that was something I could feel something about.  I looked on the FAO website and there was an article about women in agriculture for International Women's Day.  Women are an increasing part of the labor in agriculture as the men leave the farms for wage work either locally or in the cities.  This leaves the women to do the field work and the work in the homes.  I used colored pencil to draw two African women in a parody of American Gothic, an iconic work that is often interpreted to be about the stoicism of the American farmer.  Looking at it again now there are several things that are a little off, but I like it anyway.

 

 

These are just a few of the in class exercises.

It has been a lot of fun.  My schedule didn't work out to take a class Spring quarter, but I hope to take something else in the fall.  Maybe more drawing, or art history, or 2D design, or a painting class.  There are so many that are interesting.  This class may be over, but I am back to my weekly watercolor class.  I've missed painting and working in color.

20+ Questions: My Girl

Another year, another set of answers from My Girl.

Height 48.5 inches (46th %ile) Weight 52 pounds (49th %ile)

 1. What are your favorite colors?
 Turquoise, violet

She has been pretty consistent about this.  She likes other colors, but turquoise always comes out on top.

2. What is your favorite thing to eat?
Pizza, cake, candy

We really need to work on the variety here.  Sometimes it feels like we eat an excessive amount of pizza and burgers.

3. What is your favorite candy?
Gum drops, lollypops, popsicles

This one always surprises me.  We don't eat a lot of candy so I never know what the answers are going to be.

4. What is your favorite drink?
Soda, Sprite

Probably a favorite because she doesn't get it very often.

5. Where is your favorite place to go?
Happy Hollow

She loves this place, but we don't go often.  Buddy Boy is getting to be too big for a few of the rides.  I'm not interested in taking them to Great America for the bigger rides.

6. What is your favorite thing to do with your family?
Go to Utah

She loves being in the middle of the pack of cousins.  We also have gone for the 4th of July fireworks for the past couple of years.  I don't even know where to find fireworks around here outside of an amusement park.

7. What is your favorite toy?
My stuffed penguin

Her newest toy.  Grandma and I made 22 life sized stuffed penguins for My Girl and every student in her class.  Emperor penguins are about the same size as a first grader by the way.

8. What is your favorite thing to wear?
clean shirts and clean pants

Last year she said dirty shirts and dirty pants.  She isn't that picky about style, except that she likes short sleeve shirts and "medium pants".  Shorts are too cold in the morning and long pants are too hot in the afternoon.

9. What is your favorite animal?
dolphin, emperor penguin

The dolphin is a long time love and the penguin is due to the penguin unit her class just finished.  Each student was in an expert group for a type of penguin.  She was in the emperor group.  There were rockhoppers, gentu, chinstrap, king, and little blue penguins.

10. What is your favorite song?
Potato potato

From a very silly and cute show, the Odd Squad.  The show is on PBS and teaches math concepts in a very fun way.

11. What is your favorite book?
Jedi Academy

She does love her Star Wars.  She is also reading a lot of the American Girl books.  It is funny to hear things like "What started the war of 1812?" coming from the back seat of the minivan.

12. What is your favorite game?
Mouse trap

I think it may be time for this game to go away.

13. Who are your best friends?
Rachel, Leila, Caroline, Kaleigh, and Isabelle

There are more who could be added to this list.  She has a lot of good friends at school and church.

14. What is your favorite thing to do outside?
Do yard work

Funny answer since she does so very little yard work.  I think kids like to do real things.  Unfortunately there aren't a lot of opportunities for real work in the suburbs of California.

15. What is your favorite TV show or movie?
Star Wars, and Frozen, and the Lego Movie

We also saw the live action Cinderella a little while ago.  She loved it.  She also loved Dolphin Tale 2, a B grade family movie that was enjoyable because it was dolphins after all.

16. What is your favorite holiday?
Birthdays, Christmas

 17. What do you like to take to bed with you at night?
My stuffed animal penguin

The penguin and Baby Leah and her blue butterfly blanket.

18. What is your favorite thing to do inside?
 Play with my Playmobile trains

She still likes the Playmobile and she has ben playing with her dolls more now that when she was little.  She is also quite crafty.  She is a master paracord bracelet maker and finger knitter.

 19. What do you want for your birthday or Christmas?
Lego friends set

20. What do you want to do in the next year?
Get Baptized

She turns 8 at the end of the year and is looking forward to her baptism.

21. What do you like about school?
Food, food, and food

Strange.  I thought it would be friends.  They do have lunch, and cooking center, and it always seems to be someone's birthday.

22. What do you want to be when you grow up?
 A marine biologist, ornithologist, or paleontologist.

They have been learning about ornithologists as part of their penguin unit at school.  The paleontologist thing still hangs on.  I don't know why.

Yup, that pretty much sums up my girl.  She is a delight.

20+ Questions: My Boy

Another year... another set of answers.

Height 57.5 inches (87th %ile)  Weight 91pounds (89th %ile)

 1. What are your favorite colors?
Cyan, blue

He is pretty consistent on this one.  He loves turquoisey blue.

2. What is your favorite thing to eat?
Bacon

3. What is your favorite candy?
A lot for example Kit Kats, jelly beans etc.

4. What is your favorite drink?
Diet 7up

 5. Where is your favorite place to go?
Cyberspace

He likes to spend time online playing games and watching video game you tube videos.  I can understand the appeal, but it gets to be too much at times and we have to ratchet it back.  We don't have a specific time limit for screen time, but there are things that need to be done first and sometimes the answer is just no.

 6. What is your favorite thing to do with your family?
Work in the front yard

Funny.  We have been relandscaping the front yard and the kids have helped a bit.  I let them leave when they are done, so their overall work output isn't large.  They like shoveling dirt and we have definitely been doing a lot of that.

7. What is your favorite toy?
Teddy Panda

Teddy Panda is starting to show his age.  He has been joined by Bomby (a Minecraft Creeper I made) and more recently Gentoo (a life size penguin).

8. What is your favorite thing to wear?
My pajamas

9. What is your favorite animal?
Panda

10. What is your favorite song?
Rawhide, Where the wind blows, Big iron.

He really likes the old cowboy music.  It is pretty funny.  I think he likes the stories in the ballads.  He listens to the Rawhide channel on Pandora which plays the old cowboy music as well as some country.  He likes it. 

11. What is your favorite book?
Too many, By The Great Horn Spoon, The Big Book of Boy Stuff, Bush Craft, etc.

He reads and reads and reads.  He rereads the same books a lot.  He studies the Dungeons and Dragons rule books and discusses them with a couple of friends.  He giggles over Garfield and Tin Tin.

12. What is your favorite game?
Terraria, Minecraft, Spatials

Computer games of course.  He also likes to play other games, but it is harder to find other players.  I don't always make the time.

13. Who are your best friends?
Ryan, Langdon

It is good that he has a few good friends.  He eats lunch with Ryan most days, but next year Ryan goes to middle school.  That will be tough.

14. What is your favorite thing to do outside?
Varies, Build shelters, goof off etc.

He has a great imagination and likes to play survivor type games in the back yard.  Sometimes My Girl joins in, but not often.

15. What is your favorite TV show or movie?
The Lego movie

He doesn't watch TV very much.  Mostly his screen time is spend on the computer.

16. What is your favorite holiday?
My Birthday and Christmas

I sense a present theme.

17. What do you like to take to bed with you at night?
Teddy Panda, and Bomby

I'm not sure what we would do if something ever happened to Teddy Panda.  He is 10 and Teddy Panda still comes to church with us on Sundays.

18. What is your favorite thing to do inside?
Play computer games

We need to expand that.  He has piano and is starting guitar and sits at the park during My Girl's soccer practice.  He plays with his Legos, setting up elaborate zombie apocalypse scenarios.

19. What do you want for your birthday or Christmas?
I don't know.

Hmm.  He asks for stuff all the time, usually computer games and things he sees online.  If he can't remember it it must not be that important. I don't feel bad about saying no.

20. What do you want to do in the next year?
I'm not sure.

21. What do you like about school?
Seeing my friend Ryan and learning about the gold rush.

He has been looking forward to studying the gold rush for a long time.  He has been reading about it for years.  I'm glad he is finally there.  I think he is really enjoying it.

22. What do you want to be when you grow up?
A programmer and a husband and father.

He keeps saying he wants to be a programmer.  He may or may not end up there.  That is OK.  He is learning something about programming each week with some online lessons he does with a teenager in the ward.  He was getting stuck on his own so he is now working with someone else to help him through.  I think it was a bit much for him to take on at his age, but he is working his way through.

I'm really glad to see husband and father on the list.  He is such a family boy and home body.


He is a good boy and still very sweet, but he is growing up quickly.  Occasionally I get glimpses of who is becoming.  I just hope we can help him grow into his best self.  I want to protect him, but know he needs more and more independence.

The Penguin Project

Every once in awhile I take on something that ends up being a much bigger project than I anticipated.  I just don't always think it through.  This is what happened with the penguin project.

 

In first grade they do a big weeks long project studying penguins.  In the past they have made life sized penguins out of paper for their final project.  This year My Girl's teacher thought it would be fun to make them out of fabric.  She doesn't sew.  I said I would help because I like making stuffies out of fleece.  I wasn't thinking about how much work it would be to make 22 of them.

 

 

The class was divided into expert groups and each group came up with a drawing.  There were emperor penguins, king penguins, gentoo penguins, little blue penguins, and chin strap penguins.  For patterns I used drawings the kids had done.  I simplified and modified them just a bit in some areas, but it was basically the kids drawing.

Grandma and Grandpa were here during Penguin Week so Grandma came to school to help us help the kids cut out the front and back of their penguins.  Most of them did an OK job with this.  It was a lot of cutting for the bigger penguins.  I cut out the details for the front, sewed them onto the white front part then sewed the front to the black (or blue) back.

We then took them to school for the kids to stuff.  They got to watch me sew the bottom up and dew on the button eye.  Most of them had never seen a sewing machine before.

All I can say is that it was a good project to have finished.  I don't regret doing it, but it isn't something that needs to be repeated.  I told the teacher that the value for the amount of work was low.  I felt a little sorry for some of the parents.  A lot of us live in places that aren't that big and these birds take up a lot of room.  My husband even saw one emperor penguin being carried home by a parent on a bicycle.  That would have been quite the sight.

The kids loved them and made me some lovely thank you notes.  They told me what they named them and that they sleep with them.  One even went on vacation with its new family.

Thanks for the help Grandma!

Puppy Love

My friends dogs, Aggie and Hawkeye.  I painted this as a Christmas present for her.  I'm taking a little break from painting for a couple months.  I enrolled in a beginning drawing class at the community college where I teach.  The first class was today.  I think it will be great, but it was a little strange to be on the other side of things.  I think being a student again will help me be a better teacher.

Winged Victory

This is one of my favorite statues.  Possibly because I remember sitting in the Louvre on the side steps with my back to a massive pillar sketching it.  The whole scene is very impressive the way it sits up on a pedestal at the top of a grand staircase.

For this painting I chose a bit of a close up focusing on the torso and wing.  I wanted to do something colorful and quick after laboring for weeks and months on the watermelon picture.  I did this in a couple hours.  It isn't great, but it was fun to play.

 

I don't think the wing was very successful.  The rest is OK.  I actually rather like it cropped down.  That's a little better.  I may try another version, now that I have more of a sense of the lines and shadows, or maybe not.  If I try it again I'll use different colors and mix them to retain their clarity.  I have a lot of mud happening, or maybe it is just neutrals.  It was a fun little experiment.

 



Eatn' watermelon (c. 1952)

Every family has a few classic photos.  This is one of my Dad and his brothers and sister eating watermelon on the porch of their house.  It's fantastic in so many ways.

 

I thought I'd give it a try and paint it.  I decided to go big with a full sheet of watercolor paper (22" x 30")  It's taken me quite awhile to finish.  I learned a lot along the way.  There are some things that I can see need to be better, but overall I'm happy with it.  I'll crop a bit off the top and left side and flatten it out.  You can really see the wavy paper in this photo. 

 

 

As a painter, my favorite parts are not the faces, but the red striped dress and the wicker chair.  I'm learning to add more color.  The dress has a lot of orange and purple and the chair has a surprising amount of green and blue.  This is what makes it a painting and not just a colorized photo.

 



On to the next one.  I think I'll tackle something a little simpler, looser, and smaller for my next one.

Marshmallow Creeps

I really like marshmallow Peeps.  Especially when they are nice and old and rubbery.  It's even better if the outer layer has dried out enough for the sugar to get crunchy bits.  Mmmm Mmmm.  So, when Buddy Boy asked to make marshmallow Creeps, I was all in.  (Creepers are from his favorite game, Minecraft, in case you don't have a 9 year old boy around to translate these things.)

Here's the recipe transcribed from the video you can find here.

 

approx. 2 bags marshmallow

2 cups sugar

20 drops food coloring

1 cup cream

9 oz chocolate

 

If I were to do this again I'd use a smaller pan, maybe 8x8, for this many marshmallows.  Our creepers turned out a little thin.  You also don't need this much chocolate ganache to paint tiny little creeper faces and toes.  I used 2.25 oz chocolate and 1/4 cup cream.  It was oodles.

 



School House Rockn'

Buddy Boy really wanted to try the after school play this year.  He absolutely LOVES scout skits and being on stage so we gave it a try.  They did School House Rock.  It is more of a musical review of great songs loosely tied together with a weak plot so that you can call it a play.  I remember watching the videos on Saturday mornings and being ever so grateful for the Constitution song when I had to memorize the Preamble for High School American History.

We got a CD of the songs they were learning and played it constantly it seemed for months.

The experience with all of the practices run by a grumpy director and crazy narcissistic choreographer at the end of a long school day wasn't all that great, but overall he still had a good time.  It helped that one of his good friends was there with him.  I didn't get any good photos during the performance, but here are a few after shots along with the video of his favorite song.

Happy Halloween

Halloween has come and gone.  It is fun, but sometimes it seems like the never ending holiday.  I'm OK with a Christmas season, but do we really need a whole Halloween season?  Enough complaining.  Here are a few of the things we did.

 

Carving pumpkins is a must.  It is one of the things I like.  Buddy Boy decided to draw his face rather than carve it.  I don't think he wanted to have the pumpkin rot so quickly.

 



Leah and Herobrine.  Princess Leah is pretty recognizable, but Herobrine is only known to the Minecraft demographic.  For the past couple years Buddy Boy has chosen a costume where it is rather difficult to see.  It becomes problematic when we trick-or-treat.  I found a pdf file online of the head graphic and all we had to do was tape it to the right size box and find a plain blue shirt.  We put plastic canvas over the eyes so that they would look white and covered the whole thing with plastic wrap since rain was predicted for the exact time of the costume parade at school.  Luckily it held off until the afternoon, but there were a few drips that would have ruined the ink.

My Girl's costume was pretty simple.  I found a long sleeve hooded t-shirt, sewed a simple skirt, and made a belt with 2" black elastic and called it a day.  The toughest part she took care of.  She's been growing her hair out for months so that she could have nice buns on the sides and no bangs.  The bangs just barely made it.

I'm glad she didn't choose Elsa, the latest Disney princess.  At the school carnival there were so many Elsas a friend had a hard time keeping track of her daughter.

At the church Trunk or Treat there is one family that always goes all out on the costumes.  This year as they were getting out of the car it took me a minute to figure out this year's theme.  They are all captains! (Except Grandma, who is the witch on the end.)  Captain Moroni, Captain Morgan, Captain America, Captain James T. Kirk, Captain Jack Sparrow, and Cap'n Crunch.  Such a fun family.

Each year the teachers at school dress up for the costume parade.  This year they all dressed as idioms.  My Girl's teachers were "two peas in a pod".  There was a smart cookie, a drop in the bucket, raining cats and dogs, Smartie pants, kicking the bucket, hold your horses, and others.  It was fun to figure out what each one was.

 

There were plenty of Minecraft characters in the parade.  I described the different characters to a friend whose son is still a toddler, Steve, Herobrine, Enderman, Zombies, Zombie Pigmen, Skeletons and others.

 

There were several Jedis and Storm Troopers, but there was only one other Leah.

Once the festivities are finally over, what do you do with the decorations?  Feed them to Lucy of course.