Celebration! Happy 1st Birthday!

My blog is 1 year old today and I have finished my website, so I want to celebrate by giving away a gift. Please enter a comment in order to have your name put into a hat. I will have my son draw a name this Saturday, May 16. The winner will receive a 5x7 matted photo chosen from the photography section on my website. The winner will pick the photo. Good Luck to you all!

I cannot believe it has been a year already. My blog got off to a slow start, but after I joined a fantastic group of artists (Everyday Matters Yahoo group) my blog began to take on a shape that I am proud of. I have been working more at my art and that makes me happy.

I have not drawn much lately but I have been working on taking more photos. Another activity I have been working hard at is getting my website built and uploaded. It is finally done and online! I will tweak it and add more art work to it, but for now it is done. You can see it at:

http://www.thephilosopherartist.com/

Now I am off to work on more portraits, photography and writing. Oh, and I am back to schooling my boys. My 9 yo ds has just started year 4 and so that takes a bit of time, but well worth it.

Do not forget to leave a comment so you can be entered in the drawing.

Working on the Computer

I have been playing around on the computer all week. Scanning in photos of my daughter that I took of her a few years ago. She loves to wear vintage clothes and posing for the camera. After scanning the negatives I had to do some touch ups. It is hard to have a clean environment when one has animals and kids in the house. No matter how hard I tried there was always dust spots on the photos. However, we live in a time where photo programs have a cloning tool. I love the cloning tool. All the photos turned out pretty great and what matters is that my daughter is happy with them.

My other computer project was to create more kaleidoscope pictures with my tulip photos. These are the photos that were taken last year because the tulips in our yard have just budded out and will be blooming soon. I will be out there taking their little photos. Not sure if I will do anymore kaleidoscopes because I created over thirteen this week. They did turn out really well and were quite fun to do. Many of them contained hearts which was strange or perhaps part of the kaleidoscope effect. I uploaded them to Walmart Photo 1hr and then pasted them in my journal.

My journal has gone through another phase. It now contains more than just drawing. To be honest I am secretly trying to fill it up so that I can say that I filled an art journal and then it will be okay for me to order a new fancy Moleskine or a Hand*Book journal. Anyway, I pasted the photos of my kaleidoscopes and copies of work I have done outside of the journal. After pasting it all in then I go back and explain what is going on in the photos plus my feelings about them. During the week when I journal I will write in the leftover areas of the page. I will have to scan a page or two so that you can see what I am talking about.

I made this page for an Artist Date challenge on Milliande's ning page. The page was also made it as a 'Photo of the Day', which was a nice surprise.

That is pretty much what I have been doing lately instead of drawing in my journal I am working/playing on the computer.

Tulip Kaleidoscope Project

I have started a new Spring project using my photos of tulips and the kaleidoscope effect in Corel Paint Shop Pro X. The project began with the sub-group Artist Dates April challenges of Milliande's Creative Community for Women Artist*. The first two weeks we were given the challenge of creating a piece of art with the theme of flower/s. The white kaleidoscope is from a tulip photo I took last year and the red piece is from a photo of the bouquet of tulips my husband gave me for Easter. I had to use these photos because my tulips that are planted in my yard are not blooming yet (you can see their beginnings on my nature blog: http://thephilosopherartistsnaturejournal.blogspot.com/ )

I am looking forward to taking many more photos of the various colored tulips that grow in my yard. It has been a long time since I have seen them that I cannot remember all the colors they are. It is snowing today and it is a good thing the tulips are not up yet. I do love it when the tulips do bloom early and then we get snow which looks interesting up against the colors of tulips and other flowers.

After I take more photos I want to continue turning them into kaleidoscopes. The way the colors and patterns turn out intrigues me and it is a lot of fun manipulating the photos.

(*My white kaleidoscope was picked as a Featured Artwork on Milliande's site ;-) this sure helps keep that inner critic away)

Portrait Project Continued

Okay, I reworked Auggie's portrait and while it is better than the first try, I am not satisfied with it (see below) . I went ahead and started a portrait of his big brother, Gabe. This final of Gabe is much better than the final of Auggie. I still have much to learn about doing eyes. The problem I have with these two portraits is that I did them using a pastel pencil on the rough side of the paper. That gave the drawings a strange texture up close but far away they are okay. The next portrait that I do will be on the smooth side and that may help with the eyes a bit. My goal is to really get my abilities of drawing portraits down so that I can do them for others and charge a fee. I know that I have much to learn, but having that goal helps me to continue on.
My little grandson, Auggie saw his portrait and said, "Hi, baby!" Now that is a critic I can live with;-)

(Final Auggie)

(First Auggie)

Encaustic Painting

Hi all, I have been playing in my studio again;-) The other night as I was falling asleep I was thinking that it would be fun to do an encaustic painting using Crayola Crayons. I have always wanted to do this type of painting but the materials to do it are just too expensive. Besides, I always have crayons around that I am constantly stepping on or picking up and a bucket of crayons that have lost their own boxes. After five kids there are plenty of lonely crayons to experiment with.

I used a piece of watercolor paper about 9in x 12in, Crayola Crayons (the other cheaper brands did not work as well), and a small iron that was meant to be used in order to iron small parts of clothing such as collars (it looks like a wood burning iron only white and has a clover head on it).

What I learned from my little experiment? Well, as I have mentioned, the cheaper brand of crayons do not melt so well and that it was fun, fun, fun melting crayons. I know next time to put more crayon down before trying to make trees, or use dark paper under the wax and to add more white to the trees. I also learned not to turn the iron up too high because the crayons can smoke and to always save those broken pieces of crayon.

My boys wanted to try so next time I get the material out I will let them have a go at it. After I was done I asked them if they could think of any thing else I could use to make art with (I have asked them this before because I do altered art;-) They went screaming towards their playroom to protect those Legos that always seem to be on the floor and when I step on them they manage to hit on the worst part of the foot, the arch. Ouch!!! Hey, it would be cool to melt a whole bunch of them together to make a sculpture;-) (my oldest said that I could buy my own Mega Blocks and melt them;-)

Well, I am off to work on a portrait and to celebrate my 9 yo son's last day of Year 3!

My Newest ATC/ACEO Drawings

I am so excited about working in this small form (2.5 in x 3.5 in) that I went online and found free photos to use. I know what you are going to say, "but, aren't you a photographer?" The answer is yes I am and I have a lot of photos to draw from but what happened was that I was not in the physical frame to go downstairs to my studio to find a photo to use (and the other part was that I was being lazy;-) My goal for this month is to organize my photos into groups of 'to draw' and 'to sell', etc.

I am enjoying being an artist again and seeing how my skills develop. Some day I wish to sell my art, but for now I am having fun creating it.

I created the horse, my first horse by the way, using graphite pencils in 2&3b. As I look at the horse I drew it seems a bit off. I think that it is the nose, it may be too short. Once again, practice makes perfect. (I downloaded the photos from this site: http://freeartisticphotos.com/?cat=3 )

I created the sunflower using Prismacolor colored pencils. For some reason the scan makes it look duller than the original. Both drawings were done on Bristol paper. (I got the flower photo from this site: http://freeartisticphotos.com/?cat=6 )


I am off to create another masterpiece ;-) and will of course share it here with all who stop by my little blog.

My Work for the Week & EDM 216

I found another wonderful group of artists on the internet. It is a community of women artists run by the artist Milliande: http://milliande.ning.com/ (Sorry fellows it is just for women, do check the web for a guy artist only site) There are many talented women on this site and a lot of art to look at. On the site I found out that there are sub-groups to join, such as photography, groups from certain countries, and so forth. I joined the Milliande's Artist Dates. Each week she posts a challenge or activity to do and then post to the website. Others can then comment on your work if they wish.
I decided to do week one and four. Week one was to create a work that included a postage stamp and week four was a piece using the colors yellow and blue.
Wow! Once I got started I could not stop, because instead of drawing my EDM#216, "draw your inner critic" I created a collage of me overpowering that critic. My yellow and blue collage is one devoted to affirming my artist /person. In some ways the two collages are a set, even though I created the EDM piece after the yellow and blue collage.
I have them both up in my living room where I do most of my drawing so that I can be reminded of my artist self.

I AM AN ARTIST!!! I CAN HEAR MY MUSE!!! I AM DEAF to my inner critic.........