Week 4 Black And White 365 Challenge

Day 22 Tree Fern

Day 23 Interior Painting

The undercoat is on the walls and I thought I'd shoot it while waiting for the paint to dry. Better than watching it I guess :) 

Hubby and I decided to go against the norm this week. We moved out of our 'master bedroom' (above pic) and once we had finished painting we moved our daughter in there instead. Our daughter's room always seemed cluttered and messy and her stuff was in all the rooms all over the house. She only had a single wardrobe in her room so there was never much room to store more than her clothes in there. Moving her into the largest bedroom with the best storage seemed like a good idea. It's not like hubby and I were holding regular gymnastics competitions and dance parties in there with lots of other friends like she does. Now all of her toys and things have a space in her room and she has room to move. We also have a much clearer idea of what things she has now that everything's in one place. Which is making things easier to sort through. The room also has lots of natural light and lovely winter sunshine. Perfect for someone that spends a lot of daylight hours in their room, not so much for those of us that only see it in the dark as we stumble to bed lol.

This has had a flow on effect throughout the house. The lounge is now less cluttered. The messy office that was just off the lounge is now moving into my daughter's old room. Which gives us plenty of space for two desks and I'll even have room for some shelving for files that I didn't have before. So that's sorted out another storage problem too. There's also the added bonus of being able to close the door on the office and know we've finished for the day. No more sneaking in a bit more work before bed because we can see the work beckoning us from across the lounge.

Hubby and I are happy with the smaller room, all our stuff fits fine and we still have a large wardrobe space so we haven't really lost anything out of the move, though to be fair, all the upstairs bedrooms can comfortably fit a kingsize bed so it's not like we moved into a closet.

It's been a win, win, win all round!

Day 24 Wood Texture

Day 25 Monarch Butterfly

Day 26 Sparrow

Day 27 Palm Shadows

Day 28 Busy Bee

I guess that's it for another busy week.

Have a great week :)

Week 24 of 365 Challenge "Your Season" Week

Mmmm Summer! Hot and sticky weather that I hate but full of fun and beauty too. Since the kids are on holiday we had a day at the beach and fun days in the pool. The flowers in the garden are beautiful at the moment and Grandad's budgies had had babies. A fun week all round! 

Next week is Yellow week.

Have a great week!

Letting your inner child out to play

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities."

Dr Seuss

I haven't posted here for a couple of weeks. I kind of lost track of time and I'm not sure where the time went. I guess most of it disappeared into family stuff, school visits, etc. Next week will be the first week of a two week school holiday for the kids, between terms, so I thought I'd better post something now while I've got some peace. It can be quite funny proofreading something I've written while I was also talking to the kids about something else but it doubles the work really :)

For the past two weeks I've been reading through a few mixed media and drawing books from my local library, taking notes and trying out some of the exercises. Quite formal exercises. Today I was going to do the same thing but I just couldn't get into it. I wanted to paint something more fun and less lesson like instead. Luckily I borrowed an excellent book called "Drawing Lab for mixed media artists" by Carla Sonheim with the other books. It's a great little book filled with quick exercises to get your creative juices flowing. I'd spotted a fun sounding exercise in it and today seemed like the right time to give it a try. This is a link to the book.

http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Lab-Mixed-Media-Artists-Exercises/dp/1592536131

The exercise was to help release your inner Dr Seuss. The idea is to flick through a few of his books to get a feel for his style and then draw something of your own in that sort of style. It was a lot of fun and I drew a few houses in our street. My house is the pink one with the dangerous looking stairs (I broke my foot on them back in February this year). My neighbor's house is the blue one down the hill and so on. The spiky trees are our cabbage trees that grow here in New Zealand. I totally had fun with this and was feeling pretty happy with it when my son walked in from school and said "Dr Seuss, mmm looks good" and my daughter agreed. I started to have second thoughts though when my husband walked through and asked if it was from SpongeBob Squarepants. You can't please everyone I guess :)

I've decided to draw more of this type of image when I'm feeling tired of the normal work, to relax and have fun and perhaps I'll develop my own style in time.  I've also been toying with the idea of creating a little story using fingerprint characters. Miss 7 would love that too :)

Autumn Collage Fun

Autumn Leaves

Golden and red,

spinning,whirling, dancing

in circles to the music of the wind.

The trees shake off their autumn coat

to dance naked in the winter chill.

The ephemeral mists silkily

caressing their limbs,

before abandoning them to

sway in gentle rhythm

to Mother Natures music.

- Carolyne MacMillan (me)

About two weeks ago Miss 7 and I collected lots of autumn leaves from our garden and pressed them for a week. The Liquid Amber leaves were particularly lovely shades of pink and red. Yesterday we decided to collage with some of them. Miss 7 also used some of the other paper collage items we had lying around. I also found a packet of skeleton leaves I didn't remember we had and we started to create. The images were to represent our vision of Autumn. 

It turned out to be an interesting exercise in patience for Miss 7 who had trouble with everything sticking to her fingers and not to the paper. Dried leaves are very fragile and for a while I thought she might give up but after a lot of effort though she got everything where she wanted it and started drawing with felt pen within her collage. In the end she decided that it needed to dry out before she could do any more and we packed up for the afternoon. I was pleased when she asked could we do this again next weekend, I wasn't sure she had enjoyed this exercise as much as some of the others we have shared. So hopefully she will finish her collage next weekend and I can add a picture here.

Autumn is my favorite time of year. I love the colors all pinks, reds, oranges and shades of brown and the misty cool mornings. I think it's the best season for early morning walks with my camera. Winter is a close second for me though. We don't get snow here but crunching through icy grass on a cold morning is fun and I love the stark tree shapes half hidden in the mist. It's a great time to be alive.

You can keep my Spring though, too rainy and it spoils the flowers and Summer is just too hot to bother with really. 

The photo above was taken by me back in 2009. It's taken on a walkway around one of our local lakes and our families favorite place to go for walks. I never have to ask twice if anyone wants to go for a walk around the lake :) 

My collage is a mixture of acrylic paint and leaves.

The child and the messy room

"Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk before it stops snowing" - Phyllis Diller

I don't know whether it's my daughter's age, she's seven, or just the way she naturally works, but my daughter's room always looks like a tornado passed through it. My son is now thirteen and I don't remember him being that messy at seven but who knows maybe my memory is going.

Anyway today we had the "you need to clean up your room or I'll go through it with a rubbish bag" talk. Miss seven whined a bit and said it was too hard to do on her own but I told her she was getting older now and that I trusted her judgement on what she wanted to keep and what should go out. So Miss seven went into her room and started to tidy up. I checked on her after five minutes and things did seem to be improving so I made the mistake of wandering off to do something else and promptly forgot all about the mess. After about an hour Miss seven proudly came through to tell me she had finished tidying and could she do something else now. Feeling very pleased with her maturity I followed her through to see what she had done.

Well, what can I say?

The room looked worse, if that's possible, than it had when she had started! Instead of going through all her artwork that was scattered all over the room and floor she had created new drawings and pulled out boxes of toys to hide them all behind and under. It was really hard not to laugh at her ingenuity.

Anyway she won and I helped her go through her artwork, storing the good pieces safely and binning the rest. We also went through the toys and sorted out some she had grown out of to donate. On the plus side we had lots of fun and even found three pairs of socks and some other clothes she thought she had lost.

This week I've been learning to draw human body parts. Realistic and cartoon hands and eyes. Hands are difficult and I need much more practice. I like the expressions you can get with just eyes though. Today's sketch is just eye expressions made with a black pen.

A Piggy Tale

"Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves" - William Lowndes

Wow what a week!

A sick child at home with a tummy bug and then an allergic reaction caused by the same illness and also Hubby home with a swollen infected leg. As you can imagine life has been a little busy and distracting so I've only managed one journal entry this week. 

It's that time of the year again when the IRD send you strange nonsensical letters about your taxes just to scare you before they tell you they made a mistake and they owe you money, fingers crossed anyway :D 

It's also council rates time grrr, so not really my favorite month.

Anyway I spotted our terracotta piggy bank high up on a shelf in the kitchen and thought "mmm I wonder if there's anything in there?". 

Short answer "No".

This got me to thinking about how many other empty piggy banks could be languishing in the back of people's cupboards and shelves around the world in this time of global financial unrest. Could the cute little piggy bank soon become nothing more than an empty ornament as governments gradually drop small value coins as prices go up or as we eftpos everything and therefore never handle money? Could our children end up with nothing to jingle in their little piggies?

What a horrible thought....

While working on this with some new black pens I discovered that they weren't as permanent as I thought they were. I suppose I should learn to test these sorts of things out before I start a drawing? Anyway this opened up a whole different way of shading as I just added water with a brush to see what they would do. Then I just finished with some burnt sienna watercolor paint and a brown colored pencil.

I also discovered something weird, when I started trying to draw this pig with pencil I just couldn't get it right. I erased bits here and there, redrew the pig twice and in the end chucked the pencil and picked up a pen. It came out pretty much how I wanted it straight away. No erasing, no second chances. It's like my brain said "Right, this is it, no chance to fix anything so get it right!" And it worked! The scooter from the next post was drawn straight off with a pen too. I think I might just lose the pencil for a while and see how things go ;)

Why is everything brown?

"I advise students on the subject of color as follows: If it looks good enough to eat, use it." - Abe Ajay

I had a very fun day today helping my seven year old daughter learn about colors. It all started with a simple enough question, "Why is every color I make brown?".

 "Brown?" I asked, "What do you mean every color is brown?"

 "Well," she said, "everytime I try to make a color it comes out a different brown"

 "Sounds like we need a lesson on mixing colors" I said.

 "Humph" grunted my teenage son, "I know all that already". So he wandered off to his dark pit and left us in peace. :D

So the two of us happily spent our time making two color wheels, one to hang on the wall above the painting area and one in my journal just in case the wall one goes missing. Of course it would have been easier to just buy other colors of paint but I think a valuable lesson would have been missed and time spent together having fun is always worth the effort don't you think?