Good news, everyone!

Things are a-brewin' here, chez Thiessen
With starting the business a few weeks ago, I've been getting my fingers into pies in more public ways.  One of those things is to start a YouTube channel of my very own.

If you've known us for any length of time, you'll know that our boys make films very regularly - and have almost 100 posted to their channel on the ubiquitous Tube.

There's no way I'll ever compete with THAT. And with the new biz, I thought a distinct identity from the humour of teenage boys would be, well, prudent (much as I love their movies and watch them).

So.  To make a long story short, my video experiments can be seen HERE

This is a little taste of what I've been up to:

Well, I'd better get back to the drawing board.

;)

Lisa

I've been home for a week now with the kind of flu that reminds a person how amazing it is that we have modern medicine...I'm sure that 200 years ago I would have coughed myself to death, or at least into some secondary infection that would take ages to recover from.  Thanks to a trip to my doc yesterday and a mittful of modern meds, I had my first full night's sleep in several days.

It's weird to have been away from work this long while classes are in session.  School board work often means chunks of time off, but it's pretty much always the same chunks of time for staff and students alike.

The last few days have left me in long stretches of low-energy consciousness...not so energetic that I could, say, do the laundry, but with enough percolation to sit and fiddle.

Of course, the foremost thing in my mind right now is the Sketchbook Project.

With a couple of drawings/paintings already ready to go for the Project, it was time to experiment with a bit of binding to see what is going to be useful and long-term functional for something that will be moved, opened, closed, shelved, packed, moved, flipped through again, etc.  I used a modified (mostly due to the size of my paper) version of Teesha Moore's Journal. My final book is pretty small, and the fold-flap pages are a bit abbreviated compared to Teesha's, but it was more about experimenting with the ideas than perfection.  Also wanted to answer some questions I had about how this particular paper would react to being heavily water coloured on both sides, and whether or not the markers would bleed (or if paint would want to creep through the stitching holes).

I used 3 pieces of paper, torn to approximate what Teesha did with her one large sheet.  My book has deckled edges on the top and bottom of each page, cover included.  The deckled edge allows for the handmade feel of the book, and those torn edges react to the paint differently, creating a natural border when the work runs all the way to the edges.

I used a waxed Egyptian cotton (not linen) thread to do the stitching, and found that I couldn't get it as tight as I wanted. It's because of this that I glued the pieces of mulberry paper to both the outside spine (as shown on the photos of the outside cover) and on the inmost signature.  They were fun, too, to play against with the paint, seeing how/if they would absorb the pigments in the same way as the rag papers, or not.  I was really quite happy with the way that the two papers complement each other.

Also, to play and experiment, I pre-painted all of the pages in random colours - just quick glazes, motley and spontaneous.  Having not painted in layers in quite this way before, it was interesting to see how the paint colour would suggest different subject matter.  The first page, with the portrait face, was pretty tricky, really.  It was my first time drawing on a surface that had nothing to do with the subject matter, and it took a lot of concentration.  All in all, I'm pretty happy with the outcome.  

The page that I did this morning shows two handmade things that are precious gifts given me by friends over the Christmas holidays.  The page colour suggested this as topic, as the plate and the background colour have the same rare yellow/green hue to them.  It was painted so that the yellow/green could glow through the  over painting and give some cohesiveness to the whole picture.

The paper held up well, and you can plainly see in the pictures the bit of bleed-through at the stitch holes on the signature, but all in all it was more successful than expected.  I'll probably bind a couple more little wee books like this to get the stitching tension ironed out better, then jump in and do the actual book for submission.

The whole thing leaves me wondering...if I weren't me, what would I do with all this time on my hands?  What do other people do when they're at home sick for long stretches? I caught up on all of my website work, wrote the rough draft of my proposal for a work thing, hammered through a bunch of email that was waiting to be dealt with, read 3 books and watched 4 movies (oh, find time to watch 'Mary and Max', especially if you have Netflix). That, and managed to sleep long chunks of time away here and there, including all of last weekend. 

Oh, and for the people in the audience who love that technical stuff, the paper is some bottom rung 100 lb rag paper, the paint is Koi, the markers are Pitt and Staedtler, and the pencil is one of those ones made of recycled Chinese newspapers.  

In better health,

Lisa

A little experiment

I've been playing a bit here, on this sunny Canada Day morning.

Yesterday was the last day of work for me at school. True to form - I'm sick.  It would seem that every time we come up to a school holiday for the past two years I take the opportunity to grab whatever airborne bugs are out there and offer them a home in my upper respiratory system! I've had no voice since Tuesday, and now have a cough as well.

The last few weeks have been exceptionally busy with school ending for both boys and for me, and all the other things that seem to happen at this time of year.  Soccer ended (temporarily - it starts again in the fall).  Each of the boys and I all had different end-of-school activities (mostly field trips of one kind and another).

We had lovely company for a few days, with DH's sister and brother in law coming from Oman.  It was pretty special for us for them to come at this particular time of year and be part of all our different celebrations. They live so far away these days that we rarely get to share our milestones with them.  We not only got to do the big, important things (like see Youngest complete Elementary School), but little day to day things (like eating together, playing cards, hiking, visiting).  All in all, a really sweet time.

This morning found me up with nothing in particular on my agenda for the first time in a very long time.  I sat down with my little water colour set and played with painting a couple of special things that we've received as gifts over last year.  The table runner is indigo dyed (from Japan originally) given us by my Mom-in-Law last year at Christmas.  It seemed the perfect backdrop for the Koran stand that Sister-and-Brother-in-Law gave us last year when they visited from Oman.

I've wanted to try to paint or draw the stand for a long time, as it has such wonderful texture.  Each of the individual tool marks show on the carved part of the stand.  I love being able to see the actions of the artist in the art!  I had a drawing teacher once, years ago, who said we should only take photos of things no one would believe if they saw them in drawing form...and I have to say, that stuck with me.  There are many times that I take photos for reference for drawing only to sit down and discover that the photos cannot be interpreted that way.  There are places both for photos to record what we can not draw, and a place for drawing to record all the rest of what we see.  Sometimes the actions of the artist would obscure the art - then it is always better to simply take a picture.

The second half of the experiment was to try to use Gimp to edit my photo for posting.  I'm new to Gimp, but wanted to give it a whirl after all I've been reading about it.  It's open source, which seems to be the direction that I'm heading with all the programs in my life.  I missed using PhotoImpact10 (simply because I've used it for years and it's like second nature to me anymore), but it's not available in the form it used to be - maybe it's becoming obsolete?  Hmmm.  Gotta try to stay current, whether it's easy or not!

Here's to summer, here's to family, here's to time to play and learn.

Happy Canada Day, everyone!
Lisa

Dusty...but not

 All right.  So it's not actually a good response to the 'Dusty' challenge, but it was a challenge to do - and filled my quota for the number of drawings I need to get done in order to stay with my resolution! 

I think I did anthropomorphize this ewe, though...it's her wool that is soaking in the tub and on the drying rack right now.  That hint of a smile is probably a little projection of how I feel about playing with fibre, and how grateful I am to my neighbour and this sheep for the opportunity.

As I've been following the Sketchbook Challenge blog since the beginning of the year, I thought I'd include a progress photo.

Many of the people formally participating in that challenge not only share finished drawings, but much of the messy stuff that leads up to them.

When I know I'm going to be doing a 'finished' style drawing, I will do a bit of a line map before drawing in earnest.  If you click on the drawing at left you'll see some thin, spidery lines here and there that are my visual code to guide the light, shadow, proportion and different 'planes' of the drawing.  I tend to think of the object I'm drawing (even from photos) in all three dimensions...mapping out the planes helps me to keep foreshortening, light and shadow all in the right places. 

In the case of the sheep, it was also about dividing the space between the different textures - there is a substantial amount of space on the sheep's face that has straight hair.  Part of the challenge in this drawing was to create different textures between the different types of coat, the horns, and the eye area.  As you can see in the progress photo, I'll often jump straight to the details that I think best characterize the subject once the initial mapping is done.  If I can get the eye area (often the part of a drawing that we will focus on right away) right along with any other important characterization, the rest of the drawing really only needs to be hinted at in order to be successful.  The viewer's eye will SEE the parts that are tight, drawn to describe the subject, then their mind will FILL IN all the other details.  My favorite drawings are certainly audience participation in nature - and I believe these are also the ones that hold the widest appeal.

So now to go back and rinse out more of these lovely black locks, and to think about my challenge word for this coming week...'Surrender'. 

Happy Friday,

Lisa

Chicken (and skating!)

 

Better late than never - right?  It's my contribution to Illustration Friday's challenge, 'chicken'.  The last couple of weeks have been silly busy with life and skating.  This is the first chance I've had to get myself across the street to photograph some chickens at our neighbour's house - so my challenge entry is two weeks late.  Does this still count for keeping my resolution to draw more?  I hope so.  

Now to do 'Dusty' (last week's challenge) and 'Surrender' (which was in my inbox this morning).

It's going to be tough to focus on the drawing today as my neighbour sent me home with another one of his fleeces - black this time - and I'm looking forward to knitting his daughter a beret with part of it!

Last weekend I was not drawing on Saturday morning because I was here:

 

...at Nelson's first Speed Skating Comp. Our club hosted, and the day was fun and friendly.  We each skated 5 different races, the distances based on our age categories.  Both of our boys skated, too, and DH was an official timer.  It took all of the available parents, grandparents and friends of the club to make this happen - would the world still spin on its axis without volunteers to power it?

:)

 The boys and I combed through the 200 or so photos that were taken of us all out on the ice to analyze for body position, weight distribution and technical form.  It was fun to go through them and enlightening to see, with a critical eye, what we are ACTUALLY doing on the ice vs. what we THINK we are doing on the ice.  For myself, I know that I need to get lower and not allow my upper body to move as much...

Now - off I go to rinse out the soaking fleece, then figure out what I'm going to draw for 'Dusty'.  Hmm.  I have some lovely pictures of sheep here, maybe I want to draw one of them??

:)
Lisa

Begin....

A gift recently got me going on something that I've wanted to get back to for a while now: journaling.

I spent a little quality time (in between working on the papers that are due this weekend) painting up the first pages. I find it's hardest to start, and I really didn't have a direction for this page until I got really going. It seems to reflect a lot of things that I have going on right now:
my work, the academic work, and the learning I've done in the last years about myself. Every day I have to remind myself to begin, not to avoid.
I've also recently had an opportunity to do a little illustration, which makes my heart happy. The little detail photo below is from a doodle I did during some quiet minutes at work yesterday - while thinking about the illustration op.




The piece ended up being about starting the new journal (and ending the old one), but also about many other starts...the commencement of learning to read or count, the start of the day, the movement forward, the taking of risks.

From a technical point of view, there's a lot more I could play with (and perhaps will, over the next day or so). The space in the final piece does not quite seem to be effectively used, and I would love to have a sepia toned pen with which to fill in more of the background. Perhaps the art supply store is not yet closed......?

Cheers,

Lisa