stamp head postcards

Contrary to the lack of posts on this blog, I actually have been making some art lately. Got in a slump there for a while cause I had one good book after another and wanted to do nothing more than sit and read.

My mail art pal Connie made a batch of stamp head cards using images from a children's book that were cool and I remembered I had one also, prime for cutting up. It's a 1953 book of children's stories and poems. Some of them are a hoot, so politically incorrect and bordering on racist. I steered away from those and mostly just went thru the book looking for images that stamps went well with.

If you see one that blows your skirt up, email me and we'll swap!

it was that or nothing

Went to Oakland airport recently to pick up my stepson who lives in Africa. We were a bit early so parked in the cell phone waiting lot. Knowing we'd probably wait, I'd brought a book to read and my sketchbook. Didn't feel like reading so looked around for something to draw. Big boring buildings and lots of cars. <snore> By sitting sideways in my seat, I was able to see the hillside across the road. Still not terribly fascinating but it was that or nothing so I sketched it.

Took a photo of it before we left so that I could paint it later. Just got around to that this morning and once again, I'm pretty happy with it, considering it's a hillside devoid of flowers, with a guardrail along the top and pavement below. The yellow part coming down thru the grass is where they must have re-seeded or something. It was dry and scruffy looking, much like I painted it. As I said, little to choose from.

But yay for the continued sketching!

asemic writing

This was something I'd never heard of until Karen/MMSA announced the swap. Asemic writing is scribbles that look kinda like they might be words but really aren't. That's my half-assed definition, by the way, not an official one.

I flipped thru my ready to go postcard backgrounds and chose 4, then fiddled around finding images for them, and finally practiced my asemic writing on a piece of scrap paper before doing the actual cards. The people are from old magazines, 1941 Popular Science and 1946 American Home. The bottom one was a Drano ad.

I'm pretty pleased with them and will use this technique further, maybe some postcards that look like postcards that you can't read lol. Anybody wanna swap an asemic postcard? Can be any kind of art, just needs to have some asemic writing on it.

more dog park sketching

Hit the dog park again on Monday and while Maggie ran her legs off, I sketched the trees in front of my bench. Didn't have my paints with me so finished it off this evening using memory and artistic license.

I've realized that I'm a lazy sketcher. I don't wanna scribble in enough pine needles beneath the trees to make it actually look like pine needles. So after I did the tree on the left, I didn't even bother with the tree on the right, but it needs it so I may add them in.

My shadows need work too. It all needs work but I'm enjoying it and the more I do, the less I care about the small stuff like pine needles. And maybe shadows. 

So my work will prolly always look something like this and amazingly enough, I'm ok with that. Which is a huge step forward from where I was before Mary Ann's class.

I got impatient and painted over the letters before the ink was dry. <sigh>

you say face cloth, I say wash rag

Must be a my-generation mid-western thing but I grew up calling that piece of toweling that you scrub yourself with a wash rag. Sounds kinda tacky now that I'm older and have been exposed to more sophisticated terms, but I still think wash rag when I see one. Or maybe these are dish cloths.

Anyway, I store my knitting and crochet projects in small, handled gift bags. Lots of them. I had 10 or 12 several months ago, taking up space on my dresser. I whittled that down to 7 not long ago by unraveling things I knew I'd never finish, and moved them to the top of the dryer so they'd be more in my face. That got me to finish two scarves that I need to take pics of and blog about. Then a few days ago I grabbed the wash rag bag and finished one of the two half done ones.

That got me kinda back into it so I bought some more fun colors of cotton, dug thru my patterns and made a couple more. I gave them for Christmas one year and they were well received so may make another batch with that in mind.

The last one is a hodge podge of patterns that I just couldn't get my head around for some reason. I started one pattern, couldn't get the count right, winged it for a few rounds, then jumped into another pattern and manged to get the spiral pattern I'd been trying for in the first place. It's also the largest at close to 8" across. Love the colors.

Cotton yarn kills my hands and wrists cause it has no give at all, so I'm done for a few days at least, but the last two were each done in a day of crocheting at odd moments and short binges, so if I do one or two a week, I'll have a pile by Christmas.

Anybody wanna swap wash rags??

sketching at the dog park

So I signed up for Sketchbook Skool and wasn't super impressed with the first batch of videos, so signed up for Sketchbookery by Mary Ann Moss. Her goofy teaching methods are much more my style. And, throwing caution to the winds, I began to sketch willy nilly, not worrying about how straight my lines were, just kept going, as she instructed. I've posted a few things already, most of what I've done actually, and am really happy that somewhere along the way, I became pleased with what I was doing. Not too critical, like I usually am, just happy that my drawings looked enough like what they were to be recognizable, and that they had some character.

I'll do a more thorough review of both classes soon. Need to watch the last couple Sketchbook Skool classes to see if it got better. But for now, here's a quick sketch from the dog park. I had to take Maggie to the vet for shots and figured she needed a treat afterwards. I was sitting on a bench drawing while she ran around. The dog park isn't terribly interesting so I just drew the scene looking toward the back of the park.

It's in a small Moleskine sketchbook, so the spread is about 7"w x 5.5" tall. I water colored it after I got home. It got the most hearts on Instagram of any pic I ever posted.

friends & faux - who's next?

Friends & Faux has an ongoing wandering postcard project. I did one a month or two ago and Peggy recently sent me another. I drew a detail of a sunflower directly on the card, figuring if if I royally screwed it up, I could do something else and paste it over the top. But it came out fine. Used Pitt Artist pens and Copic markers.

Then Rhonda came down for an over-nighter and I talked her into doing one, so now I need to send it on to someone else. Any takers? No worries about having to make original art just for the card, you can isolate a scanned piece of art you made a while back and glue it down. Just has to be a neat little piece of art. And then you can mail it back to Friends & Faux, no need to find someone to take it next. Please reply to this post with a "yeah, me!" or email me at maugreall at gmail dot com.

The second from left in the top row was almost completely gone by the time it got to me. Really a shame cause it looked like a cool one. Hoping my drawn-right-on-the-card survives better.