pink hydrangea drawing

I signed up for Mary Ann Moss's Sketchbookery class, in the wild hopes of learning to sketch and watercolor just well enough to satisfy my own fairly low expectations. Unfortunately, I'm not really patient enough to go thru the drill of many blind contour drawings, many more semi-blind contour drawings, etc, etc.

I just wanna be able to draw. Now.

But that's not how it works. That's not how any of this works.    (how I love that commercial)

But I forged ahead and last night sat down with a will and a purpose - to draw and paint something recognizable. I went slowly (sooo difficult) and drew what I saw, not what I thought I saw.

Then I painted it, again going slowly and really looking at my subject, changing my paint colors little by little as I layered.

And a crazy thing happened. I drew and painted something I'm happy with.

Behold.

It's not a Monet but it's way the hell better than anything I've done before.

So thanks, Mary Ann! I may end up being able to sketch after this class.

garden journal

I signed up for Mary Ann Moss' Ticket To Venice class.

(I do believe I've mentioned that before, however in glancing back thru my posts, it appears that I haven't blogged about it yet. Is it just me or does anyone else have a tough time remembering whether they've put something on their blog but not on flickr yet? Or on flickr but not in the Yahoo group albums? Or in the Yahoo albums but not in the five other interest groups they belong to? ai yi yi. It's getting to where I need an Excel chart to keep track.) In the TTV class, she teaches a cool bookbinding stitch that she calls the Diamond X. I used it on my TTV journal, which I'll blog about later in the week, after I get some good pics, and also on a garden journal I made over the past week or so.

I love book making. Love putting together the papers for the signatures. Love picking our an old book cover for the covers. Love choosing fabric and thread for the spine. I even love the stitching, something that makes a lot of people nuts. Juggling all the signatures while getting the needle thru the next correct hole while keeping all the stitches nice and tight while trying to keep 8 feet of thread from knotting - I love it all even tho I swear my way thru some of it.

We had a great garden last year, and plan on having an even better one this year. I always keep the seed packets of whatever I grew but they lay around on the counter until I tuck them in the junk drawer where they spread seeds all over the place. I figured a journal would be perfect. I can record what grew well, what tasted good, etc, and tape all those seed packets in here and there.

Her samples have the stitches evenly placed but I changed it up
and did 4 holes toward the top and three at the bottom.

I used a wide variety of papers - everything from fragile old ledger pages to very sturdy 140lb watercolor paper plus calendar pages, old greeting cards, torn paper bags, wall paper scraps, scrapbooking paper, book pages, used envelopes. It all goes together just fine, and if there's a problem... well, that's why the craft gods made washi tape, I suppose.

The little tree stamp you see on a couple pages was carved by Maria of the Marvelous Studio. Hmmm... it appears I haven't blogged about that Sunday either. Anyhow, she graciously let me stamp away with it.

Enough yapping - here is my as-yet-unfilled 2013 garden journal, a la Mary Ann Moss.