Tindaisies

The Third Street Sisterhood of Lepidoptera Illlustrators Wash and Wear Bus Tour of Europe

Graphite, chalk pastel and old canceled postage stamps on paper. 8.5 x 11 inches

The sisters  opted for a wash and wear style that would adapt to any climate…. and luckily too, because it was to be a lengthy trip… and in no particular order.

They arrived home looking as fresh as the day they left!

Well, no, this isn’t a true story; this is a page from my sketchbook. Imagine how many butterfly illustrators there would be in one city in order to have a club  for just one street!

I have been spending a fair bit of time working in my sketch book, lately. I have a few sketchbooks, this drawing is in the one that I work out my ideas and problem solve in. This drawing was a rough idea that became more and more embellished.

I cut old cancelled postage stamps and collaged them into the drawing. They were from a rumpled old kraft envelope of doubles I had amassed during my childhood stamp collecting days. Sometimes being a pack rat is a good thing. It felt wrong to cut the stamps up, though… just like how you weren’t supposed to cut into National Geographic magazines or the set of Encyclopedia Britannicas for school projects.

Cracked

I’ve been having fun making found poetry this past week. It’s like collage only using words. The poem written in the above image reads:

cracked
found in the sand
between you and me
contents emptied
forgotten by now

Each line is from its own source, found as a complete phrase in some of my own creative writing, a recipe from a cook book and an instruction manual.

The doll head in the drawing is real. I found it in the garden two autumns ago while picking brussels sprouts. We live in an old farm house and the back of the property must have once been where a previous family  dumped things they no longer wanted. After heavy rains or wind, the soil shifts, revealing household remnants of china and glasss shards, buttons, rusty belt buckles, tarnished coins, tiny medicine bottles, marbles, wheels off toy cars…

The doll’s head was by far the coolest thing I have found yet. I wonder how long she stared at us walking by her before I discovered her. She would have been tiny,  her head is about an inch long; she is wearing a 1920’s flapper hat with a blue stripe on it. She has a mischievous smirk, she is not a classic beauty, but she is exquisite in her own right. I call her Betty.

Adaptation

Symbolic drawing of a bird with human characteristics in a nest made of bricks. Graphite pencil on Canson Mi-Tientes paper

Adapting and being flexible beyond our capabilities results in the loss of the essence of who we are to the point of impossibility.

This image began as two unrelated sketches on the same sheet of paper. I had drawn the sketch of the bird and at some point, I drew a human face on it out of curiosity and whim. The bricks were for another idea I had and suddenly, on my way into the kitchen to make coffee, this image flashed in my minds eye, for no seeming rhyme or reason. I love it when that happens because then all you have to do is put the image down on paper.

Here is the sheet of sketches:

Rough Sketches

Graphite pencil on bond paper

Pride Takes the Stage

Here stands pride.

This is a simple little drawing that is perhaps a bit too humble for its subject. What I should have done was to have paid enormous amounts of money to have it plastered on a billboard so I could go about puffed out with pride about my drawing and how everyone will get to see it as they drive by.

No? Well, everyone knows form should follow function… this could be life imitating art, see?

Anyway.

Pride is puffed with hot air.  It puts on its best show. It precariously perches on the edge of its stage, filled with pretention that belies its vulnerability. This is a pretty negative image of pride.

Is pride a sin or virtue? It can be both.  In it’s best light, pride is the reward for a job well done.  When it becomes inflated with unfounded self worth, it becomes irritatingly obvious to all but the one who is proud.

This is my drawing for the Illustration Friday prompt, “Theater”

Solomon Grundy

Where does the time go? Why does it seem the older we get, the faster time flies? The weeks zip by in a blink. I design a quarterly publication, three months pass by and before I know it, I am in meetings again.  I had my first meeting for the summer issue, today. As if that’s not enough, I’m staring at another approaching birthday in the upcoming week, in fact, I know a number of people whose birthdays are in April, but now I’m prattling – just practicing for my old age (which is how many quarterlies away)?

Solomon Grundy’s  entire life blows by in one short week.  The verse is  a 19th century nursery rhyme and each day represents the Seven Ages of Man. I admit, I like the Sesame Street version better:  poor Solomon Grundy washes a part of his left side each day and at the end of the week, only half of him is clean.

Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
That was the end
Of Solomon Grundy

This is my entry for this week’s Illustration Friday prompt “Fleeting”

Instinct

Charcoal, carbon and graphite pencil on BFK Rives

As it turns out, the crow’s penchant for bright, shiny objects isn’t to decorate its nest, but rather to stash them away, in case they are food. Crows just happen to notice bright shiny things, the same as we do.

I used this drawing as a means to experiment with texture by using different media. The silver objects were drawn with graphite because graphite has a metallic sheen. Contrast was added to darken the shiny objects with carbon pencil.  The  crow was drawn with lovely, velvety willow charcoal. Again I added graphite to the charcoal to create highlights in the feathers.

It was my intention to make the act of drawing – as well as the choice of media used -  apparent. The strings holding the objects together are unembellished pencil strokes. Oddly enough, those pencil strokes were the most difficult part of the drawing.

Beyond the pale

Chalk pastel and graphite on black Canson Mi-Tientes paper

This is a drawing for this week’s Illustration Friday topic, Pale. I loved this topic because pale has a few meanings I was able to play with in this image. For example, a pale is a fence stake, or picket, an enclosure or an area that is protected or privileged within it’s boundaries.

Should you dare to cross the boundaries of the fence and go beyond the pale it  may  involve a journey into the irrational and unknown – or it could get you into a lot of trouble, or you could wake up and discover it was only a dream.

Then one morning, there was a curious advertisement in the newspaper.

Mrs Spratch took her baby and the sock monkeys to 70 Prince Albert Road. She paused before climbing the stairs to apartment 19A. Strange exotic drawings had been scribbled on the walls and the building hinted of previous splendour.

Whoever L. Enza was, Mrs Spratch was steadfast in her resolve to find a cure for her baby’s Melancholy

This is another Spratch drawing,  you can see the other drawings in this series here.

When Lucy Spratch grew older, she discovered numerous sealed jars with small figures enclosed in them, hidden in the backyard shed. She pretended they were her friends. As she played, she discovered that instinctively she knew their names.

This is part of the series of Mrs Spratch drawings that I began a year ago. You can see the rest of the drawings HERE

In this drawing, Lucy Spratch is the inordinately heavy baby grown into a young child.

I’m the worst for projecting personalities onto inanimate objects. For this reason, it makes me sad to see a single mitten left in a snow bank. There’s a giant spruce tree in the front yard of our house and one day I noticed the bumps and cracks in the bark made a smirking face that stared at you when you stood in the right place in the window.

Unfortunately, a gale force wind blew up one winter afternoon about 4 years ago, snapping the tree in half and taking the face with it.

Which brings me to pies. The vents slashed in pastry have always reminded me of sleepy eyes. Next time you walk into a bakery and stand in front of the pies, look very closely to see if any of them are furtively sneaking a peek at you