EDM #97-Draw a Present I've Received

What a sweet present. I loved it when my kids would bring home things they made for us. Mike made this little clay bowl in grade school. Now they are young adults....time sure flies by!

EDM #89-Draw a Button

I have a lot of old buttons to choose from for a drawing like this. I love to attend auctions and estate sales and buy vintage buttons and trims. I really did do this drawing today....despite the date. Sometimes I still find myself putting the wrong year on checks too.

Setting up for success

I decided to go through the challenge list and label the next several pages....commit.

Everyday Matters #105

I need to cut out the procrastinating, and catch up on those challenges! If I just trim a few of these surfing minutes I'd be doing a lot more drawing. Then I would be getting more creative time and I would be a lot less snippy with everyone!

Baa Baa

These sheep belong to Sandy Ryan. She bought something from me on Etsy and through email, I discovered her wonderful business Homestead Farm. She and her husband have lots animals including sheep....and they sell the most beautiful wool from their sheep. Many of their animals are rescued animals and they are lucky to live out their lives at Homestead Farm. If you knit or craft with wool you will want to check out their site.

Yesterday, I started drawing from photos on their site. I started with Mina, the large sheep in the center. As I kept drawing more sheep, I think I started to get a better feel for capturing their sweet faces.

I think we'll call this one for Everyday Matters challenge #44:draw an animal.

EDM Challenge #61

Draw a grouping of similar objects. Well I don't know how similar, but they all measure or count things. Number of laps, number of hours, number of pounds. The 2 PITT pens I had ran out of ink so I found these in a drawer. Pilot Razor Point. Fun colors.

Artist Date: Starved Rock

Today was just a great day! My sister Jennifer and I drove to Starved Rock Park and met my hubby's Aunt Pat for a sketchcrawl. Remember Maggie, Joe's cousin featured a couple of posts ago? Well, Aunt Pat is her very talented grandmother.

This is Fox Canyon...one of many beautiful canyons in the park. You walk on a bridge spanning this to get to the lodge. It was pretty cold out today so we stayed by the fire. At home when the fire needs to be stirred I always wish we someone would come along and do it for me. At the lodge an employee comes along every 20 minutes or so and stirs it up and adds a log if needed. Ahhhh........
Jennifer sketching........there's another fireplace back to back to this one (behind those partitions) but that side was all set up for a wedding reception. Aunt Pat and Jennifer showing off our sketchbooks. About the time we were done we needed to move a bit because a couple getting ready to be married by the fire. Want a bite to eat? I love the old part of the lodge best...lots of huge logs and stone and wonderful rustic furniture made for the lodge. It was built in the 1930s.

Jennifer and I by the koi pond in the new part of the lodge.Aunt Pat shows Jennifer and I some of her new works. She is painting a series of images using ink she made from pokeweed berries that grow in her yard. She combines them with watercolors and ink drawings. The ink is the fushia color you see in the background of the first painting....and it is combined with orange to make the background in the second painting. This is my drawing for the day...I got caught up in the detail. The beams and such were very dark backlit by the light streaming in the windows, so it was hard to see details. I bet my ink is low in that pen after drawing all those dark shadowy areas! We had a great day. It's so fun to go with others who like to draw...they don't mind sitting and spending a while to sketch!

Christmas is Over...

But I'm just now getting around to drawing it. I have done practically no drawing this month. Oh, wait a minute... I did design and paint the scenery for the Christmas play at church. Yup, I'm going to count that too. Maybe I can even find a picture of it and post it.

As the journaling says, these are ornaments on my parents tree. I haven't a clue to get that great shiny look in a moleskine with watercolor pencils, but I still like it. I'll call this EDM challenge #98: draw anything you like.

Rearranging....

I was inspired by Lindsay's post to show you what I have been up to in my studio. I have been working on organizing stuff at our house. My studio was in a tiny bedroom and had turned into a storage space where I could not even work. If my computer had not crashed last week, you would be treated to an amazingly messy before shot. But our hard drive bit the dust and we lost some recent photos. Lucky you! I decided to move the studio into the room that was our exchange student's bedroom. I still did not get it all moved, but I am making progress.
We found this desk on sale at Office Max and I think I'm going to like it. In the middle of this project I could not resist starting to work on my son's high school scrapbook. He graduated in 2005, so you can see how long I've been putting this off!

Pinky: EDM Challenge #6

This little gal is Pinky. She is a much well loved object and favorite childhood toy of my favorite 5 year old. We gave Pinky to our nephew on his first Christmas and I just love seeing how "well-loved" she is! She might actually end up a real mouse....just like the velveteen rabbit!

Young Artist at Work

This is my husband's younger cousin, Maggie. She is in eighth grade and a wonderful artist. We were at a family party on Sunday, and she (like a true artist) brought her sketchbook with her. She is very in to sketching Manga characters of her own making, but before the day was over she was sketching from a portrait of the newest baby in our family.

As someone who only occasionally has my sketches of people turn out looking human, I was just blown away by her sketching. At the end of the day she gave the parents of little Jenna the sketch...aren't they lucky parents?!
Maggie, it was so inspiring and fun to talk with you on Sunday!

Happy Halloween!

Made another calendar this month. I really like making these because unlike my other calendars which show what is planned, this one shows some of what I actually did. At the end of the day I write a line about what happened that day.

When I started this one I tried freehanding the squares in...yikes, what a mess that was! Plus the squares were so small, I never would have been able to write in them. So I grabbed a sheet off a legal pad (I was at school) and folded it into the proper number of squares and glued it in over the mess I made. Then I took my black pen and used the folds as a guide for the squares. More highlighters...orange this time.

I you want to see some inspiring calendars check out Tracy's and Summer's! Now those are some awesome calendars!

Drawing at School

The last few days I have been substituting and this time I had quite a bit of time to draw while waiting for kids or while they worked. I had a photo of Louie tucked in the pocket of my sketchbook. This drawing of Louie turned out kind of goofy, but he really was smiling in the photo.
Just ruminating on what my dream job would be. I really only have vague ideas about what I'd like to do. I brought my ink pen and Moleskine but other than that had to use what I had at hand in the classroom....highlighters! Two things we all wish we had more of!

Vintage Treasures

In our family we are big into reusing old stuff. Not only is it great on the pocketbook, but you get a home that doesn't look straight out of a catalog page....more interesting in my opinion. Sometimes the stuff needs a little fixing up. My dad has to rewire almost every old lamp we find, and lots of times I end up waxing or painting something before I can use it. This drawing is of a couple of vintage treasures from my mom's living room and mine.

Challenge #83-Evergreen Lake

I did this earlier in the summer. My husband and son love to go mountain biking around this lake. It's all trails and wild. The whole lake is a no wake zone, so it's nice and quiet. One of my dreams is to someday live on a lake or quarry. There is nothing like being near the water all the time...heaven.

Autumn....

Autumn always makes me think about going back to school. Today I actually did...just for the day to pick up some records I needed. It was fun walking around campus though....seeing what has changed and what has not. The Union is a great building and changes very little through the years.
After I ran my errands, I sat in the Union and drew the windows along one wall. I used to love to sit in here or on the terrace just outside this room and study. It's even more fun to sit and draw....sometimes it's great to be out of school.
The last line says, "The Union looks today pretty much the way it did when I was here in the 80s and as it looked when my dad was here in the 50s....and probably as it did in the early 1900s. Sturdy and dignified."

Autumn was the September topic at The Art Blog Challenge.