Happy Halloween



Happy Halloween!  This year after some extensive costume and prop production we went to the Trunk-or-Treat at the church.  The kids had a great time with their friends and I had a fun time decorating the car.  We have attended this event for several years, but this is the first time we have actually decorated the car and passed out candy.  My Girl got in on the candy passing with her friends after she had collected a fair share of her own of course.

 

 For costumes we had a My Little Pony Rainbow Dash Equestria girl.  A lot of work went in to this one.  It's amazing what you can come up with out of craft store t-shirts and felt.  We even painted the shoes blue when we couldn't find the right shoes in the right color.  This is the look we were going for and I think we did really well.

 

Buddy Boy was a Terrarian, a character from one of his favorite games.  It was and easy costume to do once we found the coat online.  Hooray for military surplus!  He wasn't very recognizable because the characters are customizable.  So not many people knew who he was, but he liked it anyway.  He absolutely loves the coat.  He may just wear it all winter long. 

The props were the tricky bit.  He wanted a minishark, but a big one.  When you play the game the props are huge relative to the characters and he wanted to have that look, so we made a really big minishark out of foam board and painted it.  He wanted it to look a little more realistic rather than pixilated.  It looks good.

 

 

 

The kids who came around had to reach in to the monster's mouth to get their candy.  Some of the smaller kids weren't so sure about that.  I told them that if they tickled his nose he wouldn't bite.  I really like how it turned out.  I may just have to save it to use next year.

 

First Day of School

The first day of school!  It was a great, fun, relaxing summer and now the craziness begins again.  The kids are looking forward to school, especially seeing their friends.  For me this means the beginning of early mornings and busy busy busy.

 

Buddy Boys is starting 5th grade, his last in elementary.  My Girl is starting 2nd.  When did they get so big?  I feel like they both grew inches over the summer.

 

Buddy Boy was glad to go back, but I think he enjoyed the leisurely pace of summer.

My Girl was SO excited.  She woke up well before she needed and was positively vibrating with excitement.

The second graders get desks instead of just shared tables.  The girls were so excited about the desks.  It's all they talked about as they were lining up to go into the classroom.

The second day I managed to get a couple more photos of Buddy Boy.  He starts 20 minutes before My Girl so if we are running late he has to pay the price. 

The night before school started I felt like I was in the starting blocks of a race looking ahead to all of the things we will have going on this fall.  It isn't always easy for me or the kids to shift gears.  Over the summer we were staying up late and taking it easy.  My Girl starts soccer along with school.  Add that to music lessons and scouts and our after school hours are full. 

I have a few weeks before I start teaching again.  Once that gets going my days will be full as well.  I will be teaching two 4 hour classes back to back.  It is going to be a long day, but it is just one day and I don't have to teach Saturdays.  I will have my Saturdays back.  My other days are filled with volunteering at the kids' school and art.  I have my regular painting class and I am also trying to get in to the intermediate drawing class.  I'm on the wait list so we'll see.  I took beginning drawing last winter and really want to do more.  I just hope it isn't all too much.

I'm sure that once I get going it will all fall in to place.  I just need to pick up the pace a bit.

Shaela's cows

Here is my latest.  I really have been doing more this summer than just painting, but this is the most fun for me.  I may get around to posting the other things later.

I did this one from a photo of my friend's cows.  The cows were backlit from an early morning or late afternoon sun.  It was cold so you could see their misty breath.  There was also some kind of refraction that put the funny colors into the photo.  I just took it and ran with it.

Shaela's cows 15" x 22"

The original photo

 

I think this is one of my favorites so far.  I like that it isn't very realistic.  I like the unexpected color and the softness of the wet in wet painting.  It's cows, but it works as an abstract painting as well.  I was so excited to see how it turned out.  One exciting thing is that one of my classmates wanted to buy it.  She grew up on a ranch in New Mexico (I think) and loved the cows.  Her brother still lives and works on a ranch.  I don't know how old her brother is.  My classmate could be 80.  I like her a lot.  She has travelled the world and lived a full life, but she is still a ranch girl at heart.

 

I'm getting better.  I hope I can continue to make progress.  I am still a beginner, so it is especially fun to have someone want your work.



One face three times

 

 

 

Sometimes there is a face you just need to draw.  I saw a photo portrait on Wet Canvas that I thought was really interesting.  It was of a Belizean man standing in the jungle looking off into the distance.  I liked the expression and the reflected colors in his face.

 

 

The first time I attempted this was as part of my sketch book for my drawing class.  I did it in charcoal on tan paper.  There were some things I liked, the hat and the smirky musculature at the corner of his mouth.  There were things that weren't quite right, his eyes and lips.  But, I liked it enough that I framed it and it was accepted into the student art show this spring.

 

Belezean, charcoal on paper 9" x 12"

The next attempt was in watercolor.  Not bad, but not that good either.  The colors were a little flat and the eyes weren't right again.

watercolor on paper 9" x 12"

This time I cropped it close to focus on the facial features and skin colors.  You wouldn't believe how many colors I put into that skin and the eyes, green, yellow, blue, hot pink, purple.  Making the eyes bigger helped me get them right.  Much, much better.  I think this is one the best paintings I've done so far.

The yard

We are in the fourth year of a severe drought so the water district has been offering rebates if you take out your front yard and replace it with low water plants.  So we did it.  The yard looked pretty bad before so wouldn't be hard to improve it.  The grass was close to dead since I'd quit watering it the year before.  We had a couple of weird bushed and a tree I hated.  It had been planted too close to the house and grew out at a 45 degree angle. 

We had a crew come in with sod cutters and take out what was left of the grass and the bushes.  The tree was already gone.  Next came tilling and putting the pipes in place for a drip irrigation system.

We brought in 6 cubic yards of path sand.  Grandpa was here the week we worked on this so he did a lot of the heavy lifting moving dirt and putting the sand in place.  Even after taking out the sod I was surprised at how much dirt we needed to take out so that we had room for the sand wood chips.  Luckily our neighbor needed some.  Thank you Grandpa!

It was penguin week AND dirt moving week.  I hope my parents come back.  I'll come up with easier projects next time.

Next came the wood chips.  We called up a tree company and they delivered a whole truck load of chips for free.  I like the free part.  As a bonus this load came from a bay laurel tree so it smells wonderful.  Imagine your yard full of the bay leaves you use in soups.  The smells has mostly dissipated now, but I still get a whiff of it now and then when I'm watering.  Moving the wood chips took days.  The pile was 4-5 feet high and filled the drive way.  That's a lot of wood chips.  Fortunately they aren't as heavy as sand and dirt.  I worked in the morning and evening at the same time the neighbors were out for their walks.  It was fun to meet neighbors I'd never talked to before.

The finished product doesn't look like much right now.  I could take a year or two or more for the plants to start growing in.  This is really the worst time to plant.  Fall or early spring would have been much better for the plants.  I planted a low creeping ceanothus (Yankee point), santolina, a grey leafed plant with cute yellow pom pom flowers, gazania and euryops which both have yellow daisy-like flowers, a lantana that is both purple and gold, Mexican primrose, yellow yarrow, osteopermum (African daisy), and cape plumbago, stonecrop sedum which blooms red in the fall.  I also brought some bearded irises from the back yard.  I know wrong time of year to dig up irises, but they needed to be in place for the inspection.

I'll do more as I watch this grow in and see what needs to be done.  I want to add more irises, clumps of daffodils, and some California poppies.  It has been a lot of work, but I've mostly enjoyed the process.  When I'd get paralyzed by ignorance I'd just tell myself, "It's only plants.  You can dig them up if you don't like it."  I had to look at is at a work in progress rather than a finished thing to keep my sanity.  I learned a lot.

In the back we replaced all of the sprinkler heads for more efficient ones.  Of course it wasn't just a matter of twisting out the old ones and twisting on the new ones.  The old heads were 4 inches tall.  The new ones are 8 inches tall.  So this involved digging with shovels and an auger and flexy tubing risers.  More of a job than I wanted.  I never want to do that again.  We still haven't put in the drip system in the front so more irrigation stuff is in my future, but this time it won't involve digging through rocks.

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.