Mid-February

Wow!  It is hard for me to believe how quickly this month is flying by!  This past week was a busy one and I found very little time to work on my artwork a day collages.  I started off on Monday with "Thinking About It".  I copied an old photograph of my grandmother to incorporate in this one along with stamps and torn envelopes.  They were placed on a black board on which I had stamped designs.  It's not one of my favorites, but I guess that's par for the course.

On Tuesday night I went with my friend, Joan, and her friend, Laura to a life drawing session at Stu's studio.  It was at 35th Avenue and Clarendon, the drawing session was from 6:30 to 9:30 pm.  Kind of a late night for me, but I really did enjoy myself.  There were about 10 artists working.  The music being played was pretty good, so I didn't even have to pull out my i-pod and headphones.  The model was Craig; I had drawn him previously when I was taking a night class at Paradise Valley Community College.  We started with some quick gesture poses and then did a series of different 20 minute poses.  This example is a charcoal drawing on blue charcoal paper.

He did one pose in which he sat on a bicycle.  It was a very intimidating pose because of the complexity of the bicycle.  In spite of that, I felt as if I managed to capture both Craig and the bicycle fairly decently.  This one was also charcoal on blue charcoal paper.  There was another drawing I did, it was graphite pencil on Bristol board.  I didn't get it finished.  I actually plan to come back in and shatter the image into geometric shapes and the finish it with hatching and crosshatching.  It will take me a while to finish.

I did manage to complete a second 6" x 6" artwork a day collage.  For this one, I started with strips of a centennial newspaper I got from Aunt Dolores.  I then glued in a vase from an old Shell gasoline add that I got from one of my old magazines.  I added an assortment of round objects and stamped a few round circles to balance out the image.  This one, titled "Centennial", turned out quite well.

This morning, I spent about 20 minutes on another artwork a day; this one a self-portrait.  I had previously painted a 6" x 6" board with an orangish color of acrylic paint. This morning I worked with watercolor crayon to paint my self-portrait.  Stu was using this technique at the life drawing session, and I was wanting to try it out.  It was a bit more difficult to manipulate the watercolor than I thought it would be.  I enjoyed the process none the less.
Today in my studio I have prepped a couple of surfaces with collaged torn magazine pieces.  I think I am ready now to work on the page in my book featuring Mom and/or Dad.  Guess I will get to it now.