a look back at the christmas just past - part 4

OK, one last x-mas update then into the new year!

My family plays a Gift Exchange Game every year. It's the one where everyone gets a number and can take a present from the pile or steal a gift from someone else. The price limit is $20 but I think some people cheat. Bottles of alcohol do VERY well in this game!

Bucking corporate conventionality and not wanting to aid in the alcoholism of my young nephews and nieces, I went off to the thrift store to see what I could find.

Pleased with my previous Wayne-White-Rip-Off-Effort (see part 3 in this series), when I found a print featuring a wild seascape, I decided to do up another rip-off for the family game.

This time I painted the old nautical saying "Huzzah".

It went over pretty well and it even got stolen a few a times. My brother ended up with it.

This is the only picture I got - right after I finished painting it.

The other thing I put in the game was a Bossons head of a "Sea Captain". They are collectible but this one was beat up and I found it at the thrift store. It is actually a likeness of Norman Rockwell!!!

These creepy Bossons heads go way back in my family's history so I thought people might enjoy the nostalgia of it... but I was the only one apparently... I picked my own gift (tacky, I know) and no one ever stole it from me... but I'm happy because this is the kind of junk I enjoy...

He had some scuffs and dings but I patched him up real good.

I also found another bowling pin the same day... so now I have two of each. Merry Christmas to me!

Collections, they just happen to me... I can't help it.

So the Life-Boat-Man and the Sea-Captain now hang in the most water-related room of the house, the bathroom. I enjoy greeting Norman Rockwell every morning but my husband is a bit creeped out because Norm's sort of looking right at his wang...

...and on that note, a merry christmas to all and to this subject, good night!

a look back at the christmas just past - part 3

Christmas Crafting, a.k.a. my Wayne White Rip Off

El Husbandino has been doing a lot of traveling and job-interviewing of late and the other day he called from a faraway land to request a "pep talk". It was then that I realized I am kind of horrible at pep-talking. He is really great at it and has pepped me up many times over the years so I felt sad I couldn't reciprocate.

That's what inspired this little project...

I came up with the idea of trying to make a "motivational poster" for Husband as a permanent pep-talk he can hang on the wall - since I'm not very good at the verbal sort.

I found the paint-by-number at a thrift-store and I've always wanted to do the thing where you paint on old paintings. Even though it's been done to death, I still like the idea.

I'm a fan of Wayne White and his typographic paintings and I decided to basically rip off his style since this was just something that would be staying in the house and I will never start doing this as art to sell and frankly I'm not creative enough to come up with my own thing.

...but I was happy with my choice of old painting and cheesy phrase and the outcome of the project so I decided to show it on this blog that hardly anyone reads...

But credit where credit is due, I DID NOT COME UP WITH THE IDEA OF PAINTING TEXT ON AN OLD PAINTING!!

My main inspirations were Wayne White and Whilhelm Staehle but umpteen other artists have also done the "painting on old paintings thing"... I'm most attracted to these two because they use text so well.

There.

Moving on, here's what I did:

I tried painting first but I don't have oil paint and acrylic over old oil really doesn't really work.

Also, the paint-by-number was really warped so painting neat, straight lines was really hard.

Later I found an old tv-dinner-table out by a local dumpster and scavenged the top of it to make a hard base for the painting. I nailed the painting on to the board. This made things much easier to work with... plus I think the nails make it look "rustic"...

Sketching:

When my painting skills failed, I decided to screen print using the freezer paper method... which meant cutting everything out and limited detail (hence the choice of very blocky letters) (I was also up against a Christmas-day-deadline)...

The screen wasn't wide enough so I had to add the N and Ss later...

I eventually got all the letters screened on there. Because the printing ink was also acrylic, the letters all crackled a bit but again, I think it adds to the rustic feel of the thing. I sprayed it with fixative to hold it in place.

Next, I got our super-cool-building-super, Bill, to take his table saw to it and cut down the edges.

And voila!

That Y is a bit wonky and the Ss are too big but "oh well"... overall, I'm happy with it.

By the way, I wasn't trying to belittle mountains and all their glory in any way! haha!

I chose the phrase because the picture had mountains in it and my husband really IS very good at tackling big projects and making them look easy... like it's no big deal, no drama. He does the exact opposite of making molehills into mountains.

Side view:

Oh! and without even asking, Super-Bill went and made a nice little hanging hole too! He really is a swell guy!

In-situ... until Husband figures out where to hang it:

a look back at the christmas just past - part 2

The ginger-bread challenge:

A friend hosted a ginger-bread-building competition. There was no theme, you could do whatever you wanted. Somehow we (me and husband) settled on the age-old wonder of Freemasonry for our theme. Pyramids are surprisingly hard to construct out of gingerbread by the way! Next time I need to build a GB pyramid (which will probably be never) I will build an up-side-down "form" for it to harden up in... instead of doing it ground-up as I did (also, there is nothing inside of this holding it up, which was silly).

Gingerbread-Freemasons holding Masonic symbols:

And then another day I made some chocolate cookies that looked so much like poop but ended up tasting very good indeed!

a look back at the christmas just past - part 1

we decked this wall instead of a hall...

... and hung our homemade garlands and stockings with care on another wall, for lack of a mantle...

... and I fashioned this stole out of the fur of an old coat-collar to feel festive and sassy and fashion-forward all at once (or is fur fashion-backward?!? I just know all the kids are wearing it on the blogs I stalk...)

last life drawing session (back in january)

A few excerpts from last night's life-drawing session (the last before the holidays).

Yesterday I felt like everything was wrong with my drawing but today I feel a bit better about it... I'm glad I'm at least trying...

I forget whether this was a one or two minute gesture.

Tried to draw with some weird charcoal pencil I had in my stash of supplies. I think this was 25 minutes. I like the floaty shape.

The people next to me said it looked like Stephen Harper (the model did NOT look like Stephen Harper - except for maybe his hair...) which makes me laugh when I look at it now.

This was a 30 minutes section of a 50 minute pose (I ditched the first attempt). I managed to avoid excessively-small-head-syndrome with this one! (You're probably wondering if his head was extremely large in real life to allow me to draw it normal-sized... well, it was "large-ish" but not freakishly so.)

A nice thing about living in a city with a university Fine Arts program is that you find lots of cool art books at the thrift store! I found a book of Paul Davies' Portraits the other day. A few of them stopped me in my tracks.

I really like this one. It's a Russian poet whose name I didn't recognize and can't remember off the top pf my head. The photo doesn't do it justice.

december already?

It seems like we move every other year (still in the unsettled-post-grad stage of life... which may prove to be permanent) and every time we move, it's on January 1st. Luckily, this is NOT a moving year so I can do fun December things like building gingerbread creations and practicing M&M segregation while I'm at it.

I can not unveil the gingerbread thing just yet...

Moving on...

I've become a bit embarrassed at my posting of thrift-store finds because by now you must be wondering how much space I could possibly have left in my apartment (answer: not much) and also because I've had a line in my head for a few weeks now about "mistaking shopping for creativity" (from Douglas Coupland's Massey Lectures on CBC awhile back).

I think I make that mistake a lot. Thrift-store shopping gives me a little high - like I've just gone out and done some hunting-n-gathering. I think it feels more "creative" than shopping at the mall because you have to be able to see the potential in a object... and then of course there's a certain self-righteousness involved.

... but ultimately, it's time spent shopping when I should be working/practicing.

My thrift-shopping time usually happens when I'm feeling too lazy or scared to get down to the job of making art.

That said, here are a few totally awesome recent scores:

A cool, old easel.

I've wanted an easel for a long time and this one is... well... cool and old.

And how could I resist these puppy-dog eyes? Have I ever mentioned that almost every piece of ceramic I'm attracted to turns out to be Japanese? True story.

A bowling-trophy-lamp to go with my bowling pin. It's just the thing I never knew I needed!

Lastly, after all that shopping I made something.

I've wanted a bedside-shelf for awhile (to clean up the bedside pile o' junk on the floor) but I needed something with very particular dimensions and shape. I finally had some time to make the right thing.

I'm proud of it not because I think it's a beautiful piece of craftsmanship but because it's totally good enough to live with aesthetically, it does precisely what I need it to do, and I made it for free with junk wood, odds-n-ends, and the few tools I have in my possession (a saw and a cordless drill).

I know it looks crude but it's pretty good given the resources used. I'm feeling pretty smug and clever about it actually... but I'm still excited for the days when I'm old and rich and have a shop full of proper tools for making nicer things.

Anyway, making this made me feel all resourceful and junk.

last night's pose

Last night was a special Life Drawing session where we did one long pose for 3 hours (with tea & cookie breaks of course!)

Frankly, I was very intimidated by the prospect and maybe that's why I conveniently forgot to bring any good quality paper. I couldn't commit to the effort of drawing one drawing for 3 hours. Thinking back to art school, I can't even remember doing poses that long... though I'm sure we probably did. I've just blocked it out.

Anyway, I did remember to bring some ink so I used part of the time to experiment with that. This was 30 minutes.

This was the last 30 minute chunk of time. Another small head! She was a very tiny person in real life but I turned her into a mountain... though maybe this reflects her personality a bit. She seemed strong and confident.

Life Drawing Catch-Up Part 2: Various Views of 3 More Ladies

I have this one hanging up because I like it a lot and sometimes I can't believe I drew it... though she is much curvier on paper than she was in real life.

Same lady. Longer pose (maybe 35 mins?) Hard to photograph this one due to the pencil drawing. It's cooler in real life. But I like that I got her face to look pretty. Faces, hands, and feet of course are the hardest for me to pull off... which is why I often focus on them to the exclusion of the rest of the body.

Different week, different lady. 10 minutes but it was going well and I really wish it had been longer. I'm a painfully slow drawer - I look around the room and other people will have drawn whole bodies, classically beautiful and delicate. Meanwhile I'll only have a few heavy-handed scratches down...

Close-up face in a 40 minutes drawing.

Small head. My heads are always so small... am I over-compensating for my own very large head? Is it because I minimize the importance of the brain? Because I only possess a dinosaur-like-pea-brain myself?

She looks like a giantess here but in real life she was very very small.

Next lady, from last week.

My favourite-though-headless gesture of the night:

A 10-minute Rubens (she didn't have a perfectly flat head. That is just where my paper ended due to previous pages being flipped over the top of pad of newsprint) :

Life Drawing Catch-Up Part 1

I been remiss about posting my Life-Drawing progress (and regress) so here are my favourites from the last several weeks. Of course, I'm only postings the ones I have any sort of fondness for. The complete and total bombs are already lining the worm-bin.

1 minute gesture:

5 minutes:

5 minutes (I think, can't remember):

20 or 30 Minutes? I can't remember... but I do know it got a bit weird... but that's a good thing... I wish I could loosen up even more... I'm always torn between trying to make very classic, well-done, correct figure drawings (which is very hard for me) and going totally crazy (also hard). I usually end up in this mid-way, half-assed zone you see below.

This might have been a 40 minute one where I got bored and started drawing the plastic flowers nearby:

title: untitled

Kind of a gloomy day outside my window, luckily I can distract my gaze with this cool little trinket instead of focusing on the rain. It's just some old key chain from a Dutch bank but I like the horse and anchor logo.

I've been a little obsessive about Gord Downie lately. His solo albums and the latest Tragically Hip album (We Are the Same) were the soundtrack of my summer and I find him really inspiring as a hard-working-artist-type.

Anyway, I like going to shows but I'm not usually a groupie... but this changed when GD and The Country of Miracles played a small hall in my little hometown recently. I hung around to get a picture and a signature from the man himself - it just seemed appropriate to shake the hand of the man whose voice has been in my subconscious for over 2 decades IN the town where I did much of my growing up.

The group of four that I attended the concert with were all there because one guy happened to see a write-up for the poorly advertised gig in the local rag (which he says he normally never looks at). He took care of getting the tickets too because the rest of us don't live in that town anymore. Before heading to the venue the ticket-getter, who is a pilot, told us a story of seeing Gord many years ago at an airshow and the obscure thing Gord said... a plan began to hatch in my brain.

After the show, I waited to meet Gord Downie, not just because I wanted to meet him but to get an autograph for our pilot-friend.

And since pilot-friend doesn't have a lot of art on his walls, I decided to make a little collage-y, shadow-box thing to commemorate the magical evening.

There is a map of Ontario for the backdrop and you can see Kingston just below the moon (that's where both Gord and myself were born). The poems are from GD's book of poetry, both pertaining to flight. They're both typed out on old Airmail envelopes. There's a ticket and the autograph (appropriately flight-themed) written on the envelope that contained the tickets. In the lower-left is the picture of me and Gordo (with speech-bubble and the original, funny quote that inspired this whole adventure). Some stars, clouds, and a moon to go along with the motifs of the poems. And my favourite part, a little airplane hanging on strings so it can fly a little bit.

You can click on the picture to zoom in and read stuff if you like:

It's a little "scrap-booky" but I like it... I always liked making scrap-books... even though "scrapbooking" is a dirty word for most artsy-types...

It will be awhile before I use glitter again though. As a comedian once said (I can't remember who it was), "glitter is the Herpes of crafting"... that shit is EVERYWHERE now! Even my cats have caught this CTD (craft-transmitted-disease).

weekend acquisitions

A Jacob's Ladder toy covered in Gary Taxali characters and a cool old metal box.

I always loved and marveled at Jacob's Ladders when I was little. Nice to see them making a comeback, especially in such nice colours. That light teal colour is the same shade of my current nail polish (courtesy of Joe Fresh dontcha know).

The box has a plastic insert which I'll be throwing out. I think it was for holding slides judging by the size of the slots - though it seems like an ultra-heavy-duty way to carry slides around.

Close up:

Action shot:

I'm not exactly sure why Blogger won't let me change my font. I'll have to look at the code someday. argh.