and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous, than absolutely boring.”I’ve been seeing quite a bit of Marilyn on the news-stands lately.. It’s the 50th anniversary of her death. Since she was on my mind, I did these sketches in bed the other night. I kinda like them, but I have this masochistic tendency to draw in pen without sketching things out in pencil first, forcing myself to live with/work with my mistakes. I like to think it’s a small act of bravery, and not just psychological torture. It’s good to learn to let go. I’ve heard Jesse Reno say something to this effect many times: how can you be brave in life, if you can’t even take a risk on a piece of paper? So true.
Marilyn Monroe was one of my biggest childhood idols. She, and Juliet Capulet (of Romeo and Juliet). Yes, I idolized two suicidal women… And Darth Vader. I really wasn’t a dark child though, I swear! Perhaps it was their headstrong-ness…
I loved watching Marilyn’s films on late-night t.v. with my grandmother, while eating popcorn doused in butter, and hard candies. We both adored her. Marilyn was funny, talented and smart. And a deep and thoughtful person, who didn’t want to be dehumanized by fame.
What’s not to love?
Well, once again it is almost midnight and I am just now getting to my Monday post, but better late than never! These two are recent doodles from my sketchbook, scanned and then filtered with Snapseed.
By the way, I finished my Alice in Wonderland street piano! Yay! I’ll try to post some pictures of the finished piece later this week. Blogging is a bit more difficult in the summer, with my children at home. 🙂 Can’t wait to share it with you!
If you haven’t seen the work in progress, you can check it out here:
Alice in Wonderland Street Piano Progress 1
Alice in Wonderland Street Piano Progress 2
Alice in Wonderland Mad Hatter Doodles
Alice in Wonderland Brainstorming Doodles
Well, so much for sketchy Monday… as it’s almost midnight now! Thought I’d share a few sketches from my recent trip to New York City. The two at the end of this post were done on a rather turbulent plane, one with pen. I know… the crazy risks I take with art. 😉
I love all the stuff on top of the buildings in nyc. BTW, if you haven’t noticed, sometimes I like to add a filter to my sketchbook images….
I don’t sleep much there. at all. nope.
Wonder when I’ll be back.
I did this sketch Saturday night while hanging out in bed and watching a show – whew, the wild life I live! I’m only posting the one sketch, as I’m caring for my daughter today, who has had incredibly high fevers for 5 days. Heading to the doctor soon…
Thursday, I went to the Open House for my new show at Shoreline City Hall. I’d like to say we had a huge turn out, but most people I know are still at work at 5pm, and not so close to Shoreline either. 😦 But… I had a good time anyway, and it was great to see my work up on the walls! Here’s some of the work. It’s up until the end of July.
There was a small piece in The Weekly Herald (05/25/12) about our show, and they printed one of my paintings for the article. It was quite a surprise!
I did this last week, while drawing with my 7-year-old. She asked me to write a diary entry from an animal. We also did some collaborative drawings - fun!!!
I’m bummed that I never got a second post out last week. I’ve been so busy! Tuesday I’ll be dropping off 10 paintings for another show. Hope to share the details with you on Wednesday.
As promised, here are this week’s picks from my sketchbooks.
Business Socks…
This is based on a very old horror comic. I made this for my dorm room door my freshman year of college. I found it folded up in one of my books...
I love potato trees…
I’m really enjoying having a blog, even if I only manage to post once a week. I spent this week working on my Artist’s Statement and refining digital images of my work for one of my upcoming shows.
So… I thought I’d share with you a few recent pages from one of my sketchbooks. I played around with them a tiny bit using Snapseed. (A great app for polishing up photos and adding filters/frames.) I am really interested in the possibilities of manipulating non-digital art on the computer. It’s something I’d like to explore in the future.
The iPad is a valuable tool for artists. I often bring mine to the studio when I paint. As a result, several of the women that I paint with own them too. The iPad is great as a portable image library. But it offers so much more than that. I will do a few blog posts on the applications that I like best.
Today, I’m going to tell you about Penultimate, an app that I love for its simplicity. Penultimate is a sketchbook application with a limited palette of colors and pen thicknesses. It can be used for handwritten notes, but I like it for doodling. It is not a painting program; its toolbox is limited. This keeps things loose and free. I draw with my finger, sometimes with my left hand. I love the rawness of drawing with my non-dominant hand. Often I draw in the dark, while waiting to sneak out of my 3-year-old son’s room at night. Some doodles may turn into inspiration for a painting, but it’s also just play and discovery. The images can be imported into other art programs and manipulated further. (Another blog post…) I’m just starting to learn about digital art and I think that the iPad provides a very inviting way to explore some complex art programs.
If you have an iPad and haven’t explored its artistic side, I recommend checking out Penultimate. It’s $0.99. The pages look like a moleskin sketchbook. (Cute!) You can create multiple sketchbooks and they are very easy to flip through. They’ve recently added a few features that I haven’t fully explored yet. Such as, adding photos to a page, cutting and moving parts of your drawing, and new colors, including a yummy eggplant purple.
I took screenshots of some of my zillion doodles for you to see. Normally when I export them, they appear just on a blank white background. (Something to discuss with the guys at Penultimate. It would be awesome if the exported image looked like a sketchbook page…)
P.S. The sketches with “L.H.” on them were done with my left hand. I added color to the sketches at the bottom using Sketchbook Pro on the iPad.
When I was in my mid-twenties, I started lamenting that I didn’t keep a sketchbook. It seemed like a good way to keep my artistic interests alive, while spending my days working for mr. big corporation. So one day I bought a really pretty sketchbook with grandiose plans to fill it up. As it turned out, all those smooth, bright white pages were really intimidating, despite having done lots of drawing up through my teen years. The book felt too precious – I couldn’t bring myself to sully the pages and start sketching.
So it sat on a shelf, until one day, I started to notice the zillions of doodles I had scribbled on post-its, and notes from work meetings and massage school, on envelopes and scraps of paper. Brandishing a glue-stick, I decided to compile all these little bursts of creative energy in my sketchbook that was gathering dust. These were far from masterpieces, mind you. To give the book a little more cohesiveness, I took a hint from my childhood sticker collection, organizing them by subject. Alas, there were no unicorns, but there were lots of fancy goldfish, people dying of boredom, and even the documentation of a breakup. The pages started to fill up, and before I knew it, I felt ready to tackle the real thing. Doodles, the gateway drug to sketching.
I now have several sketchbooks of various sizes, filled to varying degrees, and they have become my most precious belongings, as they hold those fleeting ideas – the ones that are gone in a second if you don’t write them down… all just waiting to become paintings. They contain brainstorming sessions, and all styles of drawing. They offer inspiration when I need it most. Do you keep a sketchbook or art journal? I’d love to see a page from your book, you can attach a link in the comments (at least I think you can…).
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