My Bad Art Habit

I have this bad habit of taking on lots of creative projects and then having no interest/motivation/desire to start them.  It’s pretty bad.   However, I am now trying with renewed effort (and some meds because apparently I’m sick and that’s why I’ve been sleeping so much).  It began with rampant cleaning and organizing.  The bed is made, the desk is nearly free of clutter, you can see the pictures on top of the dresser again and the easel is no longer a clothing rack. After all this cleaning I was left to stare at this:

Two lovely stretchers and my favorite shoes.  Favorites for many reasons, but mostly because they remind me of these:

Drawing? What’s that?

Wow it’s been long since I’ve posted anything.  I guess that’s what happens when you start a full time job that happens to be overnights and you’ve spent the past few months adjusting to having almost no social life and having to sleep while the sun is up…

Anyways, I’m jumping back in and hoping to keep it up since I’ve now had plenty of time to adjust to my new schedule.  I decided to best place to start up again would be by drawing.  I recently received two wonderful books as gifts from my amazing fiancee.  Figure Drawing for All it’s Worth and Drawing the Head & Hands both by Andrew Loomis.  I decided to start with the head and hands so that when I moved onto the figure the head and hands would not be as intimidating.  I’m not that far in, but I have created some useful tools to help me understand the physical structure of the head (and they’re pretty funny looking, too!).

Here’s a photo of Drawing the Head & Hands and the two new drawing tools I’ve made:

Invisible Productivity!

Well, I did a lot of work today, but most of it was planning and file making for my annual family calendar, which means there isn’t really a picture of it.  However, I did make this lovely finger-painting with Ryan’s iPad:

Sailing Back to Work!

After a small break I am back to creating!  I got some work done on the Call of Cthulhu GM Screen.  It now features a tiny sailboat so you can understand the scale and size of Cthulhu.

Nerd Canvas EXPLOSION!

Some time last week I posted about a handful of 4″x6″ canvases I had purchased.  I originally intended to make one large collage with all the canvases, but 15 canvases was just too much.  This idea brewed a bit longer in my head and became much bigger.

Now there are going to be four collages with seven canvases per collage and each collage with have a theme.  The themes are: Games, Books, Cartoons, and Space Travel.  Today I worked on the Games collage which will include a D20, a Portal gun, a Super Mario Bros. fire flower, a Bioshock EVE Hypo and Adam extractor, a World of Warcraft Horde symbol banner, a Minecraft creeper, and a Diablo 2 Horadric Cube!  Here’s my current placement for the canvas:

Obviously I have not painted yet, but all the images are sketched out. The D20 is actually painted, but it was upstairs when I took this picture.  I can’t wait to start painting.

 

Remember When I Used To Want to be an Art Teacher?

Way back in early 2008 I was student teaching and I was required to make a professional portfolio.  I made a book with lots of colorful paper and used it as a student teaching scrapbook.  My professor said it was great, but not as a professional portfolio.  Later that year I brought it to my only job interview for a teaching position – and I got the job! I think my amazingly creative and handmade book helped. Anyways, after my two months as a leave replacement teacher I decided I never want to teach again and I should avoid it at all costs.  Because of this I am currently quite poor and not too long ago I carefully removed all the pages I had used in this handmade book.  There were still many more unused pages and I wanted to re-use the book.  Today’s project was to add new pages.

Ooops…

It’s been a long weekend.  So long in fact, that it is now Tuesday.  My original plan for the weekends was to only post on Saturday and to write a feature article about an older, finished creation.  Since I failed to deliver this past Saturday I intend to deliver now.

I made this painting for my aunt and uncle as a 40th anniversary present.  I love them both very much and being a starving artist meant I could not afford to buy them something great.

The Blanket

Way back in the fall of 2010 I started crocheting a blanket for Ryan.  His mom had started a blanket that would match the new couch and, after watching her crochet, I asked her to teach me.  It was pretty easy considering I had previously had almost no experience crocheting.  She taught me the/an afghan stitch (I’m not sure if there’s more that one kind of afghan stitch).  Ryan picked out the colors to match his room; black, white, gray, and red.  I made many squares with a yarn that changed colors between black, white and gray.  We decided each square would get a border of red before all the squares were attached.  To learn to make the border I asked Ryan’s mom and she taught me because she’s awesome like that!  After making 49 bordered squares I attached them all in a large 7 x7 square blanket.  It was lovely, but it was not as large as we had hoped it would be.

And that is why I have gone back to making and bordering squares in my spare time.  In the past couple weeks I’ve completed 9 squares and I only need 6 more.

Here’s what it looks like:

Cthulhu Screen is Nearly Half Finished.

Today’s art adventure involved the Cthulhu GM Screen.   The second to last layer of oil paint is on and it looks like water. The player’s view side now only needs the tiny boat for size comparison.  On the far right is the GM side of the front panel, it has the resistance table on it.  It got a blue border and will eventually get chart labels.

Ok, so it’s not the best picture, but florescent lights are not good for photographing shiny surfaces.  Small boat, labels and better pictures to come.

Dune Prep Sketches!

Having learned far more information than any person ought to know about the Starspen Galaxy, and specifically the Canopus system, I feel much more prepared to sketch some layout ideas for my Arrakis painting.   I now know what Canopus, Canopus B, Seban, Menaris, Arrakis, Krelln, and Arvon look like.  To most people that probably sounds like a bizarre list of made-up words, but to a Dune-loving nerd there is an all-too-clear understanding of fictional space!  Vielen Dank to http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Arrakis for all the essential  information, it is greatly appreciated!

The problem I face now is with positioning.  Do I want to show all of Arrakis or just part of it so I can include everything between it and Canopus?  Do I even want to include Canopus, Seban and Menaris or should I just paint Arrakis with its moons? Here are the thumbnails and planning page thus far: