One From Column A and One From Column B (Part 1)

Just recently I took a gander at my blog posts from 2014 so that I could bring you up to date on my art adventures. I was aghast to see that after only one or two posts summing up 2013, I had failed to post any art last year, and that I hadn't even shared all my travels! What gives? Have I gone lazy? Well, actually just the opposite: madly busily creative! There is no way to show it ALL now, so I have decided on a two part journey of summation, traveling through some of my favorite moments. This post I will cover Danny Gregory's new online teaching venture: Sketchbook Skool, a nod at Teesha and Tracy Moore's Artstronaut's Club, my first ever painting class which is also my first time with new online teacher, Tracy Verdugo in Paint Mojo, and finally an epic stitched "painting" with my favorite art stitcher, Arlee Barr.

For years Danny Gregory, of "Creative License" and "Everyday Matters" fame has inspired those of us new to drawing and journaling our lives to "just do it". Trouble was, many of us needed direct inspiration and a class. So last spring Sketchbook Skool opened it's online doors for the first of three six week "semesters": Beginnings, Seeing, and Storytelling. Each program includes the lessons of six different professional sketchers of widely varied styles, a smorgasbord with something to inspire every one. A new class will be offered in March, and each of the others is being repeated over time.

Here are some of my favorite page spreads from the three classes.

Danny's "Drawing Toast"

Danny's "Fast and Slow"

Andrea Joseph: Drawing an object with only ballpoint pen

Andrea Joseph: drawing a collection

Andrea teaches us some interesting handwriting

Jane LaFazio: ink and watercolor laid out in a grid (in progress)

Koosje Koene: drawing with colored pencil

Tommy Kane: epic detail!

Koosje: a selfie a day

All throughout the year I can always go to the inspiration of "The Artstronaut's Club" run by Teesha and Tracy Moore. The Moore's and guest artists post video lessons, collage sheets to print out, and just generally share inspiration for artistic growth. Much fun! (And quite reasonably priced.)

Here I took Teesha's lesson on "wormhole doodling" and added it to a journal page in a round robin which had been inspired in turn by a painted textile, THEN re-inspired, I began the task of duplicating the doodling in embroidery on the original painted textile! And the wheel goes round.

I had been vaguely aware of Australian artist, Tracy Verdugo in my travels about the net, but until she braved her first online adventure last autumn, her talent and my interest weren't going to meet. Luckily she was able to put together an outstanding e-class based on her weekend workshops, called "Paint Mojo". Tracy has an amazing persona that reaches out through the camera and into your heart. Her class was so jam packed full of love and learning that I was only able to complete about half the assignments. Luckily I will have access for a while yet to return to watch the videos and continue. The one thing I made it my business to keep up with was the focal assignment: a six week layered canvas of personal symbolism and imagery. Tracy is running her class again mid February, so run over and check it out!

The class begins with finding inspiration around the house and creating thumbnail "mash ups" to create a print plate and prints.

Here is a collage of six different prints I made from the hippo design. A seventh one, not shown here, was over painted in a folk art style.

My very favorite side project involved learning to use dripping inks to advantage to create dream catcher paintings. (This is a cropped image of the full painting.)

After completing the first larger dream catcher, we created a sheet of four more "beginnings" with four different ways to compete. Here is my dream maiden.

One of our weekly inspirations for the imagination was called "Palettes of Possibility" and involved taking the paper palette used in painting the other assignments and using it as the base of another painting. Here is the free play on a palette with a little extra ink drawing and fingerprinting.

Here is the same palette after the addition of collage and paint, pulling a story out of the random shapes and lines above. Incoming! Get off the runway!

Our major project was to paint a large canvas (mine was 30x30 inches), the first time I had ever done so. Each week we watched Tracy paint along with us, demonstrating her special techniques for inspiration, use of materials, and freedom of application. It was a glorious experience.

After making a worksheet of favorite symbols, they are added (according to a bit of a formula) to the divided canvas. Throughout the layers, the predominant type of coloring media were Golden Fluid Acrylics and Daler Rowney Acrylic Ink, applied with unorthodox tools and often with the fingers.

Week 2: Fluid mediums in a sheer layer

Week 3: Expanding on the symbology (mine done with the assistance of a poem written during the first lesson)

Week 4: Unifying the canvas with color and design elements. At this point it could have been called finished, but then we wouldn't have been taking it to the limits!

Week 5: Looking for imagery to keep

Covering the extraneous design to highlight the imagery desired

Week 6: Refining the imagery and adding back color to unify the design

In most years of my life, my art and craft have revolved around textiles, and even though I am drawing and painting now, I am attempting to bring the two together with original textile art. I was fortunate to participate this past autumn in an e-course with Arlee Barr, eco fabric dyer and pioneering embroiderer. The course, "The Third Dimension" was intended to produce highly textural results with applique and embroidery telling a story.

Pulling fabrics from my stash to help design the tale of a cat and a blue moon.

The individual pieces of the cat have been embroidered and are ready for assembly.

The background fabrics are woven and embroidered to supplement the story.

Energy fields flow about the blue moon character in variegated cotton threads in satin stitch.

The cat's whiskers reach out to the cosmos.

A second face appears, the winds, blowing positive energy to fill a heart shape.

The nearly completed piece with a tryout of framing and backing.

Be back soon with part two: classes with Jane Davenport and Carla Sonheim.

Full Speed Ahead

Since last we spoke, the holidays came and went, the new year slipped in on little cat's feet (maybe not my cat, cause he usually enters howling), and the whirlwind of my plans and expectations for continuing at the "University of Cheryl and Her Internet" became a new semester.

We're paddling as fast as we can, fueled by enthusiasm and caffeine.

 In December I celebrated the shortest days by frequently photographing the night in it colorful raiment from the perspective of my cozy living room. I especially loved the beautiful sunsets framed by the icicle lights around my living room window. Sometimes I painted with the blur of their movement and I was sad to see them go back to storage so soon.

Dispensed with a tree this year and just added enough
 twinkly lights to warm the night.

White icicle lights are so passe!

Intentional blur is fun to do.

Let's not forget the most meaningful lights of the season.

 The weather has been unnaturally warm and clear to end and start the years, and it seems a sign that winter expects us to just continue with whatever we were doing before the distraction of spending and eating disturbed the creative flow. The last of these wreaked havoc all through 2011, as I quite forgot in the midst of my studies and practice of drawing and stitching that eating was not one of the skills I needed to learn anymore. In fact, moving enough and eating properly became my first refresher course of the New Year. Let's hope I get an "A" in that one.


Most of what drives me from waking to sleeping these days is ongoing from all I started in 2011. Once experienced it is hard to say "no!" to an interesting challenge. I may not be an athlete, but I am a team player in my Internet world of art, and so I've been completing some races, prepping for others, and standing in great expectation of the starting gun of the new challenges.


One of my long time real world commitments is to my local quilt guild. While I haven't been active with the monthly goings on for some time now, every two years I become immersed in the group show. I am working to finish quilts that may have been started last summer or as long ago as 1999!

Last summer I was still completing the embroidered ribbon.

Perseverance payed off. After a mere 12 years, the quilt is finished and hanging, and ready to be my star entry at the quilt show in March.

My association with Australian embroidery teacher extraordinaire, Sharon Boggon, has led me to join many hundreds of other fans worldwide to participate in a weekly lesson/challenge to learn or practice 52 different stitches and their variations this year. Everyone involved comes from a different background of skill and interest, so we are all completing our projects to suit our own needs. I am following the lead of a small group blog where members are doing color themed monthly pages to contain all the stitches from that month. At the end of the year, my pages will be sewn into a (hopefully) beautiful fabric reference book.

Two facing pages ready for the first week's challenge stitch. The completed size of each will be 9x12.

On the Aida cloth side I will be practicing a row of the four or five stitches in basic forms.

On the right side will be a collage of interesting fabrics to encourage stitch variation and exploration.

I am a newbie to any kind of drawn and painted art, but last year I was especially taken by the fun of mixed media explorations. I took a class with Jane LaFazio in mixed media for textile arts, and I also participated in two of the Strathmore Online Workshops. Currently we are in week two of the four free lessons with artist, Traci Bautista. Having spent last year collecting many drawing and painting supplies, I am having a ball learning to actually use them effectively. What I am loving about this workshop is that there is no pressure to do anything but have fun, and that is why I am in this game at all!

The first layer of media set up basic lines and forms to work with by using liquid acrylics sprayed over stencils and other resists.

This is the left side of the page as seen above. I stopped layering the media and designs after the paint layers.

This is the right side. Here I continued with several more layers of markers and inks.

In my ongoing lessons with fiber artist, Jude Hill, I am currently playing catch up with a course she taught in 2010, before I knew how wonderful it was to learn this way. So I am working at my own pace to learn to develop story with characters of my own design in her Patchwork Beasts class.

This photo collage (not to scale) shows the various bases I made in my first two lessons to use for the development of the beasts.

Finally, I am spending some time adding to my "Frankenstitch" class samplers from the fall, so that I will be up to speed when the advanced class begins this weekend. Can't wait to begin, since we will have the opportunity to create textile art for three dimensional formats.

In this photo of the buttonhole sampler you can see I have concentrated on the upper left quadrant, adding padding and woven stitches.

A closeup of the plain weave and raised buttonhole.

Encasing the padded ridges in buttonhole lace and a woven cap.

Have I tired you out yet? Not me. I'm just getting going. Let's see: which pile is calling me with the loudest voice this afternoon? Maybe lesson two of the mixed media (we're doing watercolor backgrounds this week), or my week two stitch for the January page? No, I think it's that hunky Beto Perez and my Zumba DVDs. After all, we have our priorities.

Scattered

Today's Forecast: Warming toward life, but chance of scattered brain activity.


The Man got called into work in the middle of the night last evening. For us, one a.m. is the middle, since he usually rises at 4. I was worried about this emergency, because I hate when he misses sleep, and there was a wind and rain "event" going on outside where he had to drive and also face the "crisis." Finally asleep again, I was awakened by his alarm at 4. This time a pill to help me under, and when finally resurfacing this morning, way past my usual rising time, of course there was dizziness and discombobulation of brain waves. I tell you all of this to illustrate my general state of mind lately. I'm the one who has the good fortune to go back to bed, yet I am the one who always seems out of focus.


Part of this loss of a direct path to goals lately is due to the usual up and down of the change of seasons. One week above normal, one below. Autumn this year had been a see-saw from summer to winter temps. I even caught the newscasters on the Chicago station saying that we were expecting the first storm of winter. Well, not really! It's hardly winter yet! But I can see I am not alone in my confusion.

The slightly out of focus view of my busy breakfast space. (The CD cover is actually in focus.)

Yesterday, David brought in two gorgeous purple clematis blooms that thought spring had arrived. This morning I was dithering over sitting down to paint them, or to write the blog, or to return to crocheting a metal bead bracelet I have wanted for at least two years now, or maybe take up my promise to myself to work out indoors since the day is definitely not one for walking outside.

Of course, there is also the new stuff to study. In our household My Guy is generally the one to research and buy new mechanical and electronic gear, and I am usually the recipient who must learn how to use it. Often these things arrive before I am ready to study them. Take for example the new car I got last May. It replaced the same type of car I had, but came with all the updated features that seven years of development will bring. Sure, I can drive it, but can I run it's computer system? Heck no! I got a smart phone almost a year ago, and that too, is still a mystery to me most days. Everything we purchase these days is a computer unto itself, only it wants to connect to all our other computers and they don't necessarily play nicely together. I hit the wrong button on my steering wheel the other day and the car told me it couldn't find my phone! I didn't want my car using my phone. Who was it going to call, the Camaro down the block?

The new Sony camera, pictured above, is another example. I haven't even taken the tag off the carrying case. David is one of the most excellent price shoppers you will find. He has a knack for finding the "returned but never used," and "display model ready to be changed out," and getting them at a fraction of their current retail price. I treasure all this opportunity to have updated technology, and yet, again, there is that manual to study, that system to learn. I think I will be giving up on ever learning how to use my "older" digital SLR. Why bother? This one pretty much does the same thing, but better.

There's also the Paul Simon CD I bought two weeks ago, loaded on the computer and pod, that I haven't listened to. When I was a kid, my brain was such a busy place that if I didn't distract some part of it with music all the time, I couldn't concentrate on reading and studying. Now I pretty much need total quiet to pay attention to really creative pursuits.

Meanwhile, I think the statute of limitations has run out on telling you about my summer vacation. I had planned to go into some more detail about our trip around my favorite Oregon places, but for now I just want to share these two journal ink and watercolor sketches from our stay at TuTuTun Lodge. It's the most beautiful and relaxing corner of "nowhere" I can imagine.

I have been somewhat preoccupied with fabric and stitching lately, but I did complete three pages in the last month, sort of closing up summer and beginning autumn.

Playing with greys and using a selective sprig to represent the entire plant in the planter of her head.

Sheer layering of the vine over the arbor. Again, just a detail of a very large and dense growth.

One day after shopping at Costco, this little leaf was waiting on my car door for a ride. I took it home, painted it, then sat in my garage and painted the reflections on the car door and handle. A lot fun to do.

A friend who admired my Junk Mail book wanted me to show her how to transform junk into drawing paper. I used the "good" gouache paints I bought nearly a year ago, and got some beautiful results. Can't wait to draw a second book.

I am currently taking a class in embroidery with a favorite textile artist, Arlee Barr. Her class is called "Frankenstitch," and she is teaching us how to work big, bold, and chunky, to achieve texture and tell a story through simple embroidery stitches stretched to their creative limits. It is very freeing, and fits my "design as you go" personality. I have no plan or pre-design. I am making what I am calling samplers, although they have potential to be finished pieces.

Here is an example of running stitch gone interesting.

This piece is using various silks I have dyed, dye-painted or stencilled with a strip off a "boro-class" weaving. It will be an all buttonhole stitch sampler.

Here is a little sample of "Frankenstiched" buttonhole as I got started.

One of my creative friends called me this week to say she wanted to stop by with a gift of Indian Corn she had grown this year that took on a creative twist of its own. Some of the ears had gone all "rainbowy" with soft pastels of every hue. In all her years of farming she had never seen this happen. It was a fun surprise, and I think I will make a simple wreath out it for the front porch.

Of course, I could paint it while it's still in the warm house. Nah, I'd better read that car manual first, before my "MAXI" starts dating behind my back. Who said she could use my phone!