The week of birthday and a boo!
By Penny | August 26, 2008
Caran D’Ache just released a new colored pencil, called Luminance. They are wax based but do not get wax bloom and have a tremendous range of colors well suited to landscape (lots of great earthy colors.) That’s just what I read about over at Scribble Talk, where one of the regulars actually tested them and some of her art is in the brochure (Nicole Caulfield aka Caulfield.) The range is currently 76 colors.
Why the boo? Sadly, the open stock UK price was 2.47 pounds each ($5-6.00) and Dick Blick lists the set at $249.00. Yeah, you read right! $249.00 for 76 pencils! What are they thinking? Even Lyras, which are very hard to find and can be pricey, will only run about $85 for a set of 72-76 pencils. One hope the price will drop when they don’t sell or have been on the market a year or two. I know that people who use Prismacolors, with their bad cedar wood, wax bloom, and off-centered pencils might be willing to pay a premiun to stay with wax, but I don’t think it is worth paying triple the price for pencils.
I got an early birthday gift this week from my best friend was a DBG class for Colored Pencil I! I am so excited! We had gone out to take a break and grab ice cream at Glacier, which is pretty close to my house. Afterward she had come over to help me try and match the green of the Douglas Fir cone, as I was feeling trapped. She snuck a card onto my bed when I was in the other room. The best part is I had already scheduled and arranged with my boss to make up the work time and be out of the buildings Monday mornings so I could attend this class!
I’m already plotting next semester’s classes. I think I will try and knock out as many of the watercolor classes as I can over winter, just to get the three required finished. That will leave me just botany, pen and ink I & II, Pencil II, perspective, composition, and 100 hours of electives to finish. If I stay at this pace I could finish next winter, and once watercolor I is done I can go into almost any elective, including the microscopy ones, which I think might be my favorite.
/Happy Dance!
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DBG Student Show angst
By Penny | August 24, 2008
I might have bit off more than I can chew (so what else is new?) I signed up for a graphite of a Golden Chinese Rain Tree seed pod, and a colored pencil texture study. Both are due, framed and wired, Friday. Hmmmm.
I started way too big. A bazillion x a bazillion squares of texture that lacked any cohesiveness or direction.
I scrapped it today and went 2 x 4 2″ squares with 1/4th inch between them. I decided to use only pine cones and honey locust pods, which fascinate me (probably because the first one I ever saw drawn were by a friend in colored pencil.) It’s more manageable. These aren’t done yet. I sat in the park by my house drawing pods and did start on one immature Douglas Fir cone:
The other pine cones will be an immature Lodgepole Pine, a Spruce, and a mature Douglas Fire cone. The last Honey Locust, which will be bottom right, has two crossed tips sketched in, with colors indicated, but it is too faint to show up.
This is far more orderly, a specific and useful study. The top right locust was cool, it resembled wood and was paper thin. People were in and out all day, it was just way more productive to sit in the park with the bare essentials and draw under a tree. I do like to locust movement from side to side, I think I did that okay.
Amy, a former student, was visiting last night and today. She is best friend’s with my housemates’ son, who is heading back to NYU film school this week. She is heading to London for her junior year of college to continue her study of fine art. I gave her a silver rod and we talked silverpoint drawing and grounds, as well as watercolor. (She was drooling over the set the Evil Twin sent me. I gave her the largest block my sister sent, since it is too big for botanicals.. or for me at any rate.) Last night we sat on the glider, talked a little art, whilst she ate my leftover pesto from a ziplock bag.
Once this is finished, I’ll be signing up for Colored Pencil I on Friday. Then I plan on splitting free time between drawing and getting back into Greek. My brain feels flabby, I am studying nothing that demands neurons explode from a profusion of data and a maelstrom of information and structure. I barely started it and my brain froze over declensions (the idea of “conjugating” a noun, and seven tenses, just caused my brain to explode.) Greek is just over the top between tenses, declensions, to say nothing of conjugating verbs. I hated the fact that anything could be anywhere in a sentence, but now, after watching Iphigenia, I feel inspired. (It was all in modern Greek and I read the subtitles.)
Life is good! Listening to Pachebel’s Canon in D Major. Downloaded the version done in the 70s, very slow and stately and no bloody Harpiscord/double bass for the Alto Clef! This is nice and somber. Strange to listen to so much of it un-slurred and with so little vibrato. My teacher said the original was mainly un-slurred articulated bowing, and it was a showcase of violinist skill to manage that on the runs of 32nd notes. When my shoulder is healed I’m back to the Canon and Vivaldi!
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Lollermouse
By Penny | August 22, 2008
Saw this at Spark/Core Gallery in Denver tonight. The artist is Lisa Michot.
Note Bene: the mouse has an ipod in it’s furry paw.
Most of the show was okay, except my teacher of course. Her work was great. Those cool Polaroid transfers with colored pencil over them. Five native flowers in color and one invasive non-native weed, in graphite. I didn’t get it and she had to explain it to me. (I am really bad at visual allegory/metaphors.)
And I ran into J, a student who graduated a few years ago and is heading to Columbia to do art therapy with traumatized children. He made it into the show, so I was very happy for him and proud of him. He promised to come see me before he heads south.
For the DNC starting Sunday Denver was a ghost town excepting the Broncos game. Bumper to bumper traffic heading in, took almost an hour.
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Evolution
By Penny | August 21, 2008
I received a box of goodies from The Evil One. Inside were blocks of Arches watercolor paper, an Arches watercolor sketchbook, two baggies of half-pans and tube paint, and the gem of the box: the Windsor Newton 175th anniversary rosewood box, with twelve half-pans and Series 7 Kolinksy sable brushes. When they announced that box I searched high and low for it for her for Christmas one year. I finally had to buy it from Devon, England, and once I sold a kidney to cover the airmail surcharges and VAT, I held it in my greedy hands. Although I didn’t paint in watercolor I wanted it for its sleek and cheeky grace. It was with supreme sacrifice I mailed it to her as I intended. Except, I didn’t know she had stopped painting in watercolors. Now with me having to take 3-5 watercolor classes she mailed it back to me! YUM! (Now if she sends back the Schminke’s I bought in the late 80s, in Flensburg Germany I’ll have two sets!)
Inside one of the watercolor blocks were three amazing drawings: one colored pencil, one graphite and white chalk, and one charcoal. Breathtaking!
Anyway, I was thinking about her movement as an artist. I remember her rather vivid first complete opus: a stick figure family, a tree, and a house. Also there was a cat or a dog in front, that was purple, although we didn’t have a dog or cat. The grass was bright crayola green, the people were purple, the house was red, the sun was a sickly orange. We were five at the time and had just learned the mysteries of caryolas at a summer camp in Aberdeen, MD.
Looking at her blog and a post made this week, Recent Work, I am frankly astonished and amazed. As an adult she did drawings and watercolors. Mostly her style might be called sketcherly, if that’s a word (which spell check is insisting it is not!) When she started taking oil painting classes when she lived out this way. I didn’t see any of her studies or painting at that point. When she put up her blog and started studying with Robert Liberace I was just floored. How the hell did she get that good that fast?
I used to think I was a bit better that she was, art-wise only, but that is no longer the case. I don’t feel envy, just a great deal of pride in her and her work. Me, I am a happy amateur that is content to draw and paint in my sandlot backyard, but she has evolved far beyond that status, and I am fastening my seatbelt to enjoy the ride.
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Student Show
By Penny | August 17, 2008
Spent the day helping to map and identify trees, then drawing for the student show down at Denver Botanic Gardens. I finally settled on the pods from a Golden Chinese Rain Tree. They are very papery, tri-lobed little factories with 3-5 oval seeds inside. They resemble paper lanterns in texture e, are a very bright green with an overlay of reddish-violet.
Yesterday was not fun. Woke up to water leaking in the roof at 6:15 a.m., not fun. We went from 98-105 degrees to 50 and pouring rain. It rained like crazy for two days, making up for six weeks of drought in forty-eight hours. I was running around in sweats freezing. Slogged into work to get some junk taken care of then home again to battle drips.
My housemate’s father passed away on Thursday. He died of pneumonia, which might not sound like a good thing but it was, as it was brought on by untreatable leukemia. Pneumonia was a far easier death than what was waiting for him. So I am tending a dog and cat, watching Mr Poopyhead boss everyone around. It’s funny but when he is cuddled up with me, and the dog gets to close, he goes out of his way to get up and hiss like crazy at him.
I’m re-reading Gilead again, and want to start re-reading the earlier Rilke poems, book one, from The Book of Hours. Something about both of them force you to stop, to slow down, and observe your own life and the direction it takes, the choices you make.
About the only “fun” thing for the pure sake of fun was experimenting to come up with a good Cabonara recipe, which I think I managed to do with the help of good smoked bacon. Tasty fun is good fun!
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DBG - Color Layering
By Penny | August 13, 2008
This class is amazing, as is the instructor Susan Rubin. So many of the things we’ve done seem almost counter-inuitive, yet we nail the color we’re after. And color mixing with colored pencils is about as far from easy as it gets. I’ve learned a great deal, and am at a crossroads. I don’t know whether to go straight into colored pencil I or head back to graphite and finish Pencil II.
Over the winter I plan on finishing out the three required watercolor classes, since I really hate watercolor. I could change my mind, but I always thing large “juicy” washes and the ilk with that medium, and that’s so not me. I like tightly rendered and tighly controlled work, hence my perchance for metalpoint. Someone told me watercolor there, and in botanic illustration is very tightly contolled dry brush, which sounds more like egg tempera and something I might enjoy. If I can knock out five classes per semester, I could possibly finish in two years.
Why am I doing the certification course when I don’t plan a career change? Personal enrichment, personal challenge maybe as well. Something is so demanding about it and I’ve been intriqued with scientific illustration since I was a teenager and had applied to an internship in it at a local hospital. (I didn’t get selected, they wanted an adult with a bio degree, of course, but I was a plucky 17 year old.)
I’m looking forward to the last class, where we start working with creating form through shading, highlights, lowlights etc with color. And also conversely unhappy that the class will be over, I enjoyed it so much.
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acorn
By Penny | August 3, 2008
So here is the goldpoint version of the acorn and hazelnut. Sorry the image quality is so bad, its taken with a phone as I still haven’t found my digital camera after the move.
Apparently the Evil One (my twin sister) is getting famous. Her blog, Skating at the Edge of Infinity, has suddenly skyrocketed with hits and bells and whistles.
Why do I call her the Evil Twin? Allow me to tell you a story:
Once upon a time, when I just started working at my current high school, my twin sister came to visit. We were going to take a mini-vacation to Aspen and spend a week doing some serious hardcore fly fishing on the Fryingpan, Crystal and Roaring Fork rivers, then slowly fish our way back to Boulder. I picked up my twin at DIA and headed to work, so she could meet my colleagues and check out my AO. We had planned to drive to Aspen the following day.
Now my boss holds a Ph.D from Yale in Econ, and we all know these three terms: Yale, PhD and Economics, doesn’t create silly or jocular people (although she has a great sense of humor, I didn’t know her very well then.) Enter the Evil Twin. I’m introducing her around and my boss pops out of her office to met her.
My boss said something nice like “We love your sister, she’s great.” They shake hands.
What does the Queen of Evil do? She smiles sweetly (and I am thinking, oh my god.. here it comes.) And replies “You don’t know how relieved I am to hear that. She was so unlovable as a child we had to tie a pork chop bone around her neck just to get the dog to play with her.”
Everyone froze.
And that is why she is the Evil Twin Sister.
It’s the one year anniversary of meeting my best friend today. What a year it has been. Hope we get to do something special and fun today!
Topics: Art, Fly fishing, Metalpoint Drawing, Work | 3 Comments »
Pencil I at Denver Botanic
By Penny | August 2, 2008
So I thought I would go into some detail about this class. The class started promptly at 9 a.m., and the first day we covered the very basics of line control and contours, basically teaching us to properly visualize the form of a specimen. To give you an idea, here is an apple I drew, as homework, from my backyard. If I had to do it again I would, of course, change the way the lines shaped the apple, making them vertical vs horizontal (what was I thinking?)
The second day we started on tone to establish both form and volume. You start with exercises to control the pressure of the pencil, things like giving volume to squares, spheres, and the like. Very classical in approach but we used fruit instead of plaster casts.
The third day we covered perspective and using then refining gesture sketches into a “cartoon” (in the fresco sense of the word.) This final clean drawing is the basis for work in any medium, and its usually done on tracing paper.
This is the cartoon I made of an iris as one of the final steps to a drawing.
Theoretically I should have cleaned this up so only my major lines showed. But I decided I didn’t like this pose and went back and drew it again. Once I shortened it and changed the viewing angle, I did a value study on a piece of tracing paper that was taped to the cartoon. I didn’t trace the outline of the cartoon, just shaded, indicated highlights etc. (Sorry it looks very dark in these images.)
Karla pulled out a box of goodies the last day and I grabbed a hazelnut and acorn cap, arranged them on a piece of foamcore and got busy. The first image is the set up itself, the second the catoon with the value study taped on top of it.
When I got home I decided I was too disgruntled to do this in graphite since I felt like I did not have enough control of it to properly render shadow/form, so I switched to goldpoint. When I finish it I will post it as an addendum to this post.
Anyway, what I enjoyed most about this class was the classical approach to drawing. I think you could grab any Renaissance artist and they would have been comfortable seeing us apprentices struggle with shading, form, perspective, and light in such a traditional way. (I’m a Neo-Realist, and I freely admit that bias, art of colors and squares and other things that have become so symbolized that the originating visual metaphor is obscured without a thesis on the artist’s life and times is too much work for me!)
On The History of God: I’m now a third of the way through and into the second chapter of Islam. I have learned a lot but I also can’t help but wonder if her Islamic historical theology is as sketchy as the Christian one was. (It also makes me wonder about the Jewish one as well. One can only make so many extrapolations based on conflicting biblical texts and extant exegesis before you are weaving threads of air together and calling it wool.)
I found the texts she quotes rather beautiful, and although I knew a tiny bit about Islam — typical of Westerners I suppose — there was much that surprised me (such as the prophet having folks originally bow to Jerusalem, not Mecca, in a demonstration of kinship with Judaism and Christianity. And how incredibly tolerant the religion was, embracing all prior prophets and their message, with its main focus being social justice. I think like most Americans who lost friends in 9-11, I struggle with the intellectual knowledge that the Qur’an preached peace and compassionate tolerance versus what it is today and how I was personally affected (I waited nine days to find out my twin sister was not killed in the Pentagon attack. Nine brutal days of terrible fear and grief.) Yet I think some Muslims a thousand years ago, must have endured the same confused uncertainty of conflicts between their knowledge of the early Christian church and the butchery of the Crusades.
As Dante noted, Theological Historians have their own special ring of Hell =)
Topics: Art, Currently reading, Metalpoint Drawing | No Comments »
Go go NEC! Lolz!
By Penny | August 2, 2008
NEC, manufacturer of windows boxes, was at the Denver Botanic Gardens for something called Technology Today. At the front gate was this large shady display table, with a laptop powering two plasma displays. All very nice. Except the latop was an Apple Powerbook. I almost fell off the bench I was laughing so hard. I did snag a picture. Says a lot about the power of windows laptops doesn’t it? Says even more about NEC. Look under the display to see the silvery shiney and happy mac! The mac powerbook is right below the display. LOLZ!
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Denver Botanic Gardens
By Penny | August 1, 2008
I finished up my first class at Denver Botanic Gardens. The instructor, Karla Beatty, was rather amazing. I watched her take people that couldn’t draw a straight line and she had them on irises and gourds by the last day of class. Very inspiring and I feel I learned a great deal. I’ve always been one of those art slackers that grabs a pencil and starts without proper studies etc. In that class I learned to properly visually measure a specimen, capture the very gesture of each petal and leaf, and get a solid grip on tone control.
Next week I have an all day class, once a week for the next three weeks, which I am taking with my best friend. Fun to do art together and have someone to grind through the long commute with.
Work started up this week, all the admin staff came back. I missed lunch at our house because of the traffic, although I did get to see and hug everyone before they left. Its so funny, before the kids come back we all look so happy, serene, and well rested. In three weeks that will be replaced by harried looks and grinding teeth.
The book I am currently reading I borrowed from my friend Walt, A History of God, by Karen Armstrong. I have to say its well researched but she seems to make a few unsupported leaps early on. I am not the most or least well read on theology, but she had me blinking a time or two. Her preface states we’ll not be engaged in any of the eastern religions, etc, for a number of reasons; however, we took a long-winded tour of the development of Bhuddism in the first two chapters. (I find that incredibly irritating, don’t say we won’t cover xyz, then turn around and cover it as a parallel social developement!) I’m only a third of the way in and find some of it dubious. Right now I’m reading, what I feel, is a sketchy account of the issues and events surrounding the Council of Nicaea. No matter how one feels about the product of that — The Nicaean Creed — it was, in my oppinion vastly important as it created orthodoxy for the first time in the Christian faith. A couple of pages seems skimpy especially in light of the unscheduled romp through India. Bah.
Okay off to make pesto for dinner.
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