I belong to a group on Facebook where artists share their work. Also, the group assigns different projects every fortnight for members to take part in. The current project is to do a portrait of another group member. This is Sean from the internet. 🙂 He has crazy hair. We have never met.
While I could mean that metaphorically, in this case, I don’t. I really do paint in a prison, well, ex-prison. Once a week, I paint with a wonderful group of artists on a former military base. The room we paint in has prison cells along its perimeter. When I started painting there, there was still a cot, sink and toilet in every cell, but curtains instead of bars.
It’s a good reminder that I am free to paint what I want, and that even if I’m feeling stuck… well, I’m not as stuck as I could be!!!
The painting above is a work in progress. I am missing Alice in Wonderland, now that I’ve finished my piano. Just working on a bunch of small, fun pieces now – trying to get back in the groove after weeks of not having time to paint!
The studio is really quite cheery, as long as you don’t ponder its history… 😛
When I want inspiration for a really dark piece, I’ll go sit in here awhile…
Well, that’s all for now. I’m in a two person show, coming up in a few weeks. More on that soon. I have an art page on Facebook now too, stop on by!
My head is swimming right now. In late winter, my children constantly pass cold viruses back and forth. So all bets are off. I cannot count on having any time for myself. Even at 3 a.m. At times like these, I am thankful for all of the artist-moms that I have met in the last few years that prove it can be done. The mutual kvetching doesn’t hurt either.
I have three gallery shows coming up. Two of them begin at the end of April. That’s right. They overlap. So I am in total panic mode at the moment. One of the galleries doesn’t take racy or macabre works, so my two shows will be quite different – presuming the other gallery will hang my edgier works. It is actually being debated at Shoreline City Hall. (A story for another day…)
So today, I thought I’d share my works in progress. There are a lot of them, many still in the underpainting stage. I’d appreciate any feedback.
I’d like this to remain an abstract piece when finished – 2’x3′
inspired by my daughter
i want to put her in some striped socks! 😛
gorilla and the egg man. this one might be done…
hearing the universe… she will have headphones on…
I see a child in the middle of this one. Do you?
wondering where this will go…
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.
HeatherUnderground 