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.

Waiting

Abstract, symbolic drawing. Willow charcoal, graphite, chalk pastel, conte, red ink, rubber stamp ink and collaged papers on Canson Mi-Teintes paper

Waiting to hear important news, whether good or bad and the patience it takes, can be difficult. We listen for the phone, check email …

If the news is very significant, the day’s main thrust becomes weakened. For me, I shoot off in other directions, rather than attempt a solid day’s work. Sometimes even the off shoots don’t see completion. As a result, dishes may be half done in the sink, but the computer is totally defragged, disk checked, updated, scanned for viruses and spyware and backed up. Yet more new ideas for bodies of drawings become sketched and written about until the ideas are flogged to death. Small freelance jobs are completed slowly, punctuated by wandering over to peer out the window and musing to myself.

So, pockets of little tasks get  done, more or less, while skirting around the perimeter of waiting. You have no idea how long the waiting will extend, when you are in the middle of it. And the little pockets of tasks become mish-mashed together where there is room for them.

The little arrows around the black mass of waiting are cut from a 1930’s United Church Hymnary that I stumbled across last month. On each of the arrows is the word “Missions.”  I liked the typeface of the word “Missions” and in multiples, the noun became an action, almost like animation.

In case you’re wondering, by the time I completed this drawing I was no longer waiting

Cinnamon Buns

Chalk pastel, graphite and Conte  pencils on Winsor and Newton 90 lb hot press watercolour paper

It began last Sunday after I baked a pan of cinnamon buns. I’m always amused at the willy nilly spirals that form from the dough and the over all effect when they are bunched together in the pan.
Then, on Thursday, I read in the news about an Artist fined over inflatable artwork that killed 2. As tragic as that was, the story got me thinking about monumental art work such as that of Christo and Jeanne-Claude and then Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.

I was back to spirals. It got me thinking about cinnamon buns again. No, I didn’t bake another pan, I drew pictures instead:

Spirals - To each their own

Chalk pastel and graphite on Canson Mi-Tientes paper

Eddies - Chain of events

Chalk pastel and graphite on Canson Mi-Tientes paper

Jetties - Cause and effect

Chalk pastel and graphite on Canson Mi-Tientes paper

Resolve

Charcoal, hard pastel, graphite and prismacolor pencils on Murano paper

This drawing began as a curvy zigzag down the sheet of paper, the black “wings” came next and then followed the keys. I was thinking about balance as I worked. The balance of the elements in mobiles and scales,  balance in weighing good against bad, the balance of a saving grace within a bad situation, and of course the compositional balance of the shapes and lines I was drawing.

As I worked on this study, I paid attention to the dynamics happening on the page and questions came into play, how did the elements in the composition make me feel? Well, I really liked the black wings on the left, they were powerful although the right side was empty, blank, weak:  the effect was disconcerting.

So, in order to make myself more comfortable, I began to work the right side, it needed to be the opposite, yet balance the left in some way that I could live with. The drawing began to meet in the middle, and it ocurred to me that I wasn’t sure if both sides were coming together… or splitting apart.

An exercise in resolving a compositional problem, I discovered that the drawing itself was about resolve. Don’t ask me why the bird motif happened…

Keeping a Secret

Abstract, symbolic drawing. Vine charcoal, chalk pastel and graphite pencil on BFK Rives cream paper.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep secrets from climbing out of the dark little place you keep them, like the evils from Pandora’s box. This drawing is my interpretation for this week’s Illustration Friday prompt “Climbing”

Sensing the Moment

Abstract Drawing. Chalk pastel, Conte, graphite pencil, carbon pencil, charcoal and vine charcoal on Canson Mi-Tientes paper

This morning, I closed my eyes in order to still my mind. I wanted to clear it to let the creative process begin, however as I tried I couldn’t empty my mind,  so I began to pay notice to the sensations within and surrounding my body.

I had been reading a book in an armchair, with a cup of hot coffee in my left hand. The coffee cup was hot and caused my fingers to tingle with the pain of the heat, as well as with the comforting warmth.

Swirls and blobs of colour danced across the insides of my eyelids.

The book and its cold glossy pages weighed acoss my lap and I was aware of the groundedness of my body in the chair and of the groundedness of the chair on the floor.

My breathing was soft and rhythmic but it was funny because it seemed to me similar to the way children draw skies at the top of the page and I don’t understand why it felt this way because the source was from my body, rippling upwards into the air like radiating waves. Maybe it was like this because  my breathing was shallow (time to get back into yoga, I guess)

The furnace rumbled deeply in the basement below me and I could feel the vibration.

A computer hard drive hummed across the top of the soft sounds of my breathing and the deep rumble of the furnace.

Homage to Muffin

Contour drawing, graphite, pastel, coloured pencil and conte on Murano paper.

Three muffins on a plate:  lemon cranberry,  chocolate chip and raisin.

This drawing is for Inspire Me Thursday’s prompt, breakfast. Unfortunately I was late for breakfast as the prompt was for last week… but I did bring muffins.

This is a simple contour drawing. My intention was to draw this in one continuous line, without lifting the pencil, but I added the background later, so I cheated.

So out of the three, what’s your favourite? Mine is raisin.

Memory Machine

Abstract mixed media drawing. Pastel, Conte, acrylic paint, typewriter ink, graphite, carbon, Graphitint pencil, coloured pencil, on Winsor & Newton 90 lb hot press watercolour paper.

This is another experiment, albeit the Memory Machine was an idea I had before I started drawing. As a result, I began to feel precious about the image, having started with drawing the machine itself. I wanted to keep the process fairly loose but didn’t want to ruin what I had already put down on paper as I am slowly weaning myself off the Ctrl Z function I have grown to know, love and rely on with digital imagery.

I layered the background alternating between Prismacolour, Graphitint and graphite pencil and washes of acrylic paint. Looking at it now, I am happy with the loose quality of the image, but it was a chore to keep myself from polishing and smoothing.

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.