A Flock of Butterflies

Working on the poster art for the Wildflower Festival at Mount Pisgah Arboretum. Amused by the flock of butterflies on the screen, as reference photos.

I'm trying out the spring-loaded nib for my Wacom tablet for part of the line work. It started out feeling much more fluid to draw with, but as the night creeps on, the responsiveness of the nib seems to be amplifying my wriggly-handed exhaustion. To bed, then, with visions of butterflies dancing in my head.

Postcards from an Equinox Campout

The vernal equinox is always a nice time to have a little adventure. We biked out to a local state park, rented a cabin to keep the rain off our heads, and had a mini-campout for the equinox. Much of the fun was making food on the tiny portable stove...even simple meals become amazingly tasty when cooked outdoors.

I've been playing with simple postcards lately, very loosely based on the Japanese folk art of etegami, where quick drawings of everyday things are accompanied by a simple written phrase. My captions are perhaps not as witty or philosophical as they could be in this set, but I still think they capture some of the fun of camping out and cooking in the pouring rain. (Click on images below to enlarge.)

I stumbled upon the drawing tools for this little sketching niche quite by accident, actually. Was at a coffee shop digging through a bag of pens and paints and brushes that I had packed will-nilly for some other project, and thought I'd try the big old brush pen that had somehow ended up in the mix. (It must have been something I picked up from my grandma's collection, because I didn't recognize it, nor even knew if the ink would be black, or blue, or gray...) Much to my delight, poking at it with a water-brush revealed that the black ink was water-soluble, dissolving into some very pretty shades of gray when you paint over a line with just plain-old water. Of course, that means that stray raindrops also create creative shading...but that's part of the joy of a spontaneous sketch, isn't it? 

Hooray for more paper mail, and more excuses to doodle everyday stuff. (Note to self: make sure that the camping gear earns that label of "everyday stuff," it was good to be spending time outdoors!)

Read more about etegami:
http://www.nihonsun.com/2009/06/26/japanese-folk-art-etegami/
http://www.dailyonigiri.com/2009/10/etegami-japanese-picture-letters/
http://www.mirochi.com/mirochi/Etegami.html
http://etegamibydosankodebbie.blogspot.com/

Wooden Sculptures

Visited the Portland Art Museum recently, and was impressed by the carved wooden figurines by John Frame. Originally designed as stop-motion figurines for a film, they are astoundingly intricate objects independently of the film project.

The magic, for me, is in the details. The figures are fairly small--maybe a foot high?--but they have astonishingly detailed joints carved in the wooden hands. The facial expressions carved into the wood are also astonishing in their subtlety and power. I gawked, I really did.

But these beautiful and distinctly surreal figures are even more amazing when you catch a glimpse of how they are animated for Frame's film. Tiny glass eyeballs, like you would see in dolls or taxidermy projects, are already pretty fascinating when they are sewed into this character's overcoat. (I was torn when I saw this--I simultaneously really want to make myself a coat covered with glass eyes, and really don't want to, because it's just too creepy!)

But, in the film, not only do the long thin wooden dowels sticking out of this character's head give its own eyeballs the power to move...but the eyes sewn into the cloth of its coat will nonchalantly blink throughout the scene. Yes. It is the most beautiful, and also the most deeply unnerving, thing I've seen in a long time.

There's a snippet of the blinking eyeball coat here. All I can say is, wow. (And, isn't it interesting that both of my recent visits to PAM have left me obsessed with the sewing technique wherein you slash open the outer layer of a jacket so the lining can show through?)

Kitties, from the master

Working on an amusing sewing project, thought it would be fun to add a cat silhouette to the project. Who could be a better reference for expressive cat postures than Theophile Steinlen? That man knows knew cats!

Sunny Day at the Zoo

Well, the rains are back this morning, but this past weekend was full of glorious sunshine. I headed to the Oregon Zoo for the first time, and had a lovey afternoon drawing the various critters basking in the rare winter sunshine.

Car Guts

Last week I took a work field trip to a local automotive collision center. I couldn't help doing some speed-sketching on my little steno pad! Generally speaking, I'm not that interested in cars, but the interior structures remind me enough of the elaborate shapes and hollow spaces that you'd find in a bird skull, that I really enjoyed seeing the inner workings of the mechanical beasts. We had a newspaper reporter along with the group, and the photographer was very entertained by my efforts--we'll see if any these messy doodles make it into the paper?

Dog Show

A few weekends ago I went with a friend to the local dog show. It was my first time attending that kind of event, and I was surprised by how fun it was. So much prancing! And, it turned out to be a fun challenge for sketching, as well. Here's what I came up with (apologies for the meh image quality; scanner still kaput so using the webcam on the laptop to take photos.)