Evening Watercolors

Our baby tends to need a feeding in the middle of the night--3 am or thereabouts. I've done a few experiments with sketching her in watercolor during these times. At first I was going about it in a more realistic way...

(That adorable moment when she's done eating but her mouth is still gaping open for a while...)

 ...but it has been much more fun to let the low light and the sleepy brain take the sketches in more abstract directions.

I may not do a lot more of these at this juncture, since it squiggs me out a bit to have the paint supplies out in the same time and space as feeding time. Rule #1--don't eat paint. We learned that quite clearly from Van Gogh already.

 But this has been a lovely excuse to bust out the beautiful travel sketchbook that my aunt Lois made for me. (Parenthood is a type of voyage, isn't it?) If you're reading this, Lois, I think the choice of watercolor palette is dead-on awesome and the whole unit works like a charm!

Baby Hands

Through a combination of innate reflexes and personal style, a baby's hands and arms can be very bold and expressive.

I haven't yet been able to capture the fleeting "jazz hands" reflex when our little peanut is startled, but I do have plenty of chances to draw how she drinks milk with her pinky up, as if sipping tea with royalty.

There is so much personality in those tightly-closed fists, too.

If it weren't for the chilly winter weather, I'd likely be sketching her tiny baby toes as well--but for now, warm socks are the priority. (A project for spring?)

Baby Face (Part Two)

As a new parent, there's a lot of data to gather about the tiny critter that's burst onto the scene. For the first weeks, I was keeping careful track of when she last ate, how many diapers she blasted through during the course of a day, etc in order to make sure all is good and healthy.

Thus, my pocket notebooks have become a strange medley of charts diagramming milk in/milk out, with elaborate baby doodles in the margins.

Not to mention the fact that, when struggling to stay alert for lengthy late-night feedings, sketching on any handy scrap of paper can keep my brain from shutting down entirely. (Sleep deprivation is a great way to loosen up the linework of one's sketches, as it turns out).

 

Whether it's studying her face as she nurses...

 

...or just trying to stay awake in the doctor's waiting room, I've been very grateful to have pen and paper on hand.

Baby Face (Part One)

I gave birth to a baby girl on Halloween morning, and was sketching her right from day one. (I actually packed my watercolor kit and a good squirrel mop brush in my hospital bag--laughable to see me pondering what brush is best for the occasion!--but have nonetheless only done pen sketches of her so far.)

Sketching helps me wrap my head around this momentous event. Who is this tiny human? What does she look like, how does she move?

A baby's face is such an odd thing--familiar in structure, yet with such different proportions than an adult face.

Simultaneously adorable and surreal, bizarre.

It it that it's rounder, taller, wider...? Still can't pin down the exact dynamics that makes a baby's face distinct.

But good job, evolution, on making baby faces absolutely fascinating.

The Belly

A co-worker at the water cooler yesterday suddenly blurted out, "Wait--are you expecting?" And yes indeed, this little baby girl's due date is just one month away now. Every time I get out of bed or stand up from a chair, I have to re-learn how my body is moving nowadays; and every time I pass by a mirror, I try to wrap my head around how differently-shaped I am as well.

About a month ago, I started doing quick sketches of myself. You can see that in the first sketch, I am completely flabbergasted and confused by what I look like. As the series continues, I think I've been getting a better grip on these big rounded shapes...

It's an amusing exercise, and since the camera is packed somewhere in the go-to-hospital bags, these sketches might end up being the most convenient way to document these last few weeks!

Mushroom Festival Poster!

Oh my goodness, October is whooshing by so fast. I should probably post how the Mushroom Festival poster turned out, since they are now peppered all over the Eugene and Springfield areas in anticipation of the grand event!

My previous post talked about how I was experimenting with the composition. Having nailed that down, I went into make-it-so-mode. I started off with a fast loose sketch to serve as guidelines...

 Then started settling in on the colors that would go into each area (again, fast and loose).

At this point, I realized that my birds were out of whack! I was so fascinated with the strange morphology and brilliant coloration of the turkey heads that they had become too big for their bodies. It's nice to be able to catch these things before a lot of final detail goes into place. So I went back to my reference photos and started getting serious about those turkey details.

Ah yes. Big birds with tiny pin-heads. Now we are talking.

Now that the pesky heads were figured out, started tackling the turkey-tail mushrooms themselves. The fungi are the stars of the show, after all!

And here we have the final shiny rendering.

Which was then popped into the final event poster! (You can see a nice big version of it on the Mount Pisgah Arboretum website.) Fun!

Turkey Dioramas

As I worked on the Mushroom Festival poster this year, I found myself wresting with the relative scale of things. Turkeytail mushrooms are about 7 cm wide, while a wild turkey is at least a meter long. How best to show them both in one image, knowing that the smaller mushrooms need to be the center of attention?

I took a sheet of foam core and cut out a tree branch and a turkey approximately to scale, and then covered the tree branch with paper mushrooms. Then it was diorama time in the front yard!

 

Even with crude, out-of-focus photos, this exercise helped me a lot with my experiments in composition. From there, I did a few very rough color mock-ups of possible poster layouts in Photoshop.

Sending these rough ideas to the festival committee, the response was overwhelmingly positive for the three-turkey parade in the distant background of the tree branch. Hurrah! Next post, I'll go into the details of how I took that crude scribble and turned it into the final poster art.