12 Days of Christmas

I did 12 little illustrations of the 12 Days of Christmas for my buddy Mandy of Gourmet Mom on the Go.

Guess what? She made these images are FREE to download. What a classy broad. See her post with instructions and free download here! She made them into cookies with an edible image printer. So cute! (if I do say so myself...) You could also make them into gift tags or ornaments or a little Christmas mobile. Have at it and let me know what you do with them!

You Had Me at Vespa

Don't worry, Mom. Your Friday picture is coming.

But first!

Watch soon for items like this one in the shop:
My illustrations, ready to be emailed to you in high resolution digital format,
for to you print and use as you wish!
Yowzas.
and this little image also fits into the alphabet series that I plan on plugging along with.
Collect all 26!
Ha!

Sketch Journaling

When we're on our trip next week, I won't be taking my camera. I'm bummed but it's too risky. Like what am I supposed to do with it when I'm in the water? Just leave it on my stolen cruise ship towel on the shore? So I'm going to be keeping a sketch journal of images I don't want to forget. (Enter Nude-Beach-Joke here.) I've done this on trips before and I'm always so glad I take the time to do it; those little quick sketches take me right back. I went looking through the dusty archives of this four-year old blog (p.s.-I used to be a lot funnier when I only had 2 kids) because I had sworn I had posted some of them but I think I chickened out, not wanting to appear like I was starved for attention concerning my artwork or something. Picture me wearing my Vote for Pedro T-shirt because that's, like, SO 2004. Or I did it and I just can't find that post, in which case, you've seen most of these before. Well, either way, I love to see other people's sketches so I figure you'd like to see mine. Do I really need to be explaining this at the point we're at in the blogosphere? I mean, really.
Here are some from when we went to San Fransisco (do you hear my thumping heart?) for 5 (of some of the best days of my life) in March of 2006.

Airport sketches

I found this page while skimming through one of my old sketchbooks today.

These were the faces of some of the people sitting near me while we all waited for our delayed flight out of Chicago O'Hare. The year was 2003, I'm quite sure.

It's always awkward when someone realizes you're sketching them so I did these at lightening speed in case I ended up sitting next to any of them.

"You were drawing me, weren't you?" I had imagined any one of my subjects saying.

"Yah," I would have replied sheepishly.

Then they would have demanded to see it and I would have shown them.

And then they would have turned indignant. "My nose isn't that big!"

"Uhhhh...yah it is. Sorry."

Grandma Margaret

My Dad's mom, Grandma Margaret, aka "Grandma Love It."

2010 Project

Instead of resolutions this year,
I'm doing a big project I want finished by December 31, 2010:
a family tree consisting of illustrated portraits.

I've completed the first one--Go's Papa, Bob Callister.

I'm excited about this.

Three Things for Today

1. The powers that be command that every town here in Central PA have their Trick or Treat Night on a different night--never actually on October 31st. Some townships trick-or-treat up to a week earlier. Lame. This irritates me every year and not just because it means I have to have their costumes done earlier. It's just dumb.

...aaaaaaand this is where you're supposed to view a supremely adorable image of my three girls all in their flower costumes, which Ruby cleverly donned as "The Olive Garden." I had a photoshoot right before trick-or-treating and by the time that wrapped up and I had uploaded my images to the computer, my camera battery was like "Peace!" So accept this illustration I did a couple of years ago of some trick-or-treaters instead. And you can look forward to seeing my girls as flowers next year...Mom.


2. I purchased some brussel sprouts at the grocery store today. I've never had brussel sprouts and will be following Ina Garten's technique--just roasting them with olive oil, salt and pepper. I'm a big Ina fan so I have high hopes. I know people have strong feelings against brussel sprouts and recall a scene in Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (the children's book not the horrid movie) where at a birthday party, the sky serves brussel sprouts and peanut butter with mayonnaise. The children look less than enthused. Why does this particular food get a bad rap? I'm ready to find out.

3. My brother sent me these two links this morning and it made my day. John just probably thought I'd like the song/performance because it was both really good and odd which is always a winning combination but it ended up really speaking to me in a way a song/performance hasn't in a long time. It's hard to explain but for me, it personified what being in love is like, specifically my relationship with Go. The song, the lyrics, the energy, the driving beat, the ebb and flow, the melody, the interchanging major and minor chords. And I'm particularly glad that the song I felt "fit" us happened to be an awesome one and not Who Let The Dogs Out.

Same song. Two different performances. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. "Home."

May's Landscape

There are very few things in life that bring me more joy than a child's art work. Especially my own children's art.

Back this summer while in Irvine, the girls and I had lunch with my Mom at Rubio's in the food court at the Spectrum. Since they had already eaten their own hot dog lunch at Target, they kept busy by drawing on the paper tray liners.
On one side of her liner, May drew about six charming circular figures holding onto balloons. On the other side, she drew where they lived.
I loved this little landscape--the line quality, the variety, the silhouette, the movement she created. She was upset she didn't get to finish it--the vertical lines in the middle--I had told her she could later, folded it up and put in the pocket of my diaper bag. I tried looking for it when we got home but never found it and was mourning its loss . Tonight as I was packing for our excursion to DC, I found it!
I'd like to do something with it. Maybe make it into an embroidery with subtle color variations. I just think it's so beautiful.

Fun Activity Idea To Do Instead of Sleeping At Night #3

Look at images on the internet done by artists and illustrators who you love and cry a little!

Ramon Casas

Jon J. Muth

Modigliani
Arthur Rackham

Chuck Close

Lisbeth Zwerger


N.C. Wyeth
Gustav Klimt
Robert Sabuda

David Wiesner

Ruth Christian Gannett
Maxfield Parrish

Lauren Child

Howard Pyle

Ian Falconer

Lane Smith

William Joyce

This Morning's Thoughts

Having just one kid at home all day (8:30 am - 4 pm--have you ever heard of a kindergarten day as long as this one?) is weird. And when I say "weird" what I really mean to say is easy. It's easy because it's May. She's quiet, except when she decides to talk, then she yells whatever she's saying. It's not her fault--she has tonsils the size of pomegranates and has to force a lot of air our to get any sound past those things. But for the most part, she just sort of tweedles around the house and amuses herself. The other day she played with playdough for an hour. AN HOUR. This is a foreign concept to my oldest child who I love beyond words but who has an attention span of three minutes and completely wears me out. Ruby sticks to me like crazy glue, follows me around and asks me questions, most of which I either cannot answer or the explanation takes a long time and only leads to more questions. If I give her a task or an activity to distract her from the incessant questioning, I know I only have 3 minutes to try to subside the ringing in my ears. I love Ruby. I love that she's this way. I'm just saying it's tiring. If Ruby would have been there the day May played with playdough for an hour, Ruby would have rolled out one snake and then it would have been "Hey, Mom. Why do snakes have so many bones? Why do they shed their skin like that? Why don't people shed their skin like that? I want a snake. Can we have a snake? Daddy had a snake when he was little. Why did Grandma Tena let Daddy have a snake? He also had a dog. I want a dog. Why can't we have a dog? Why do dogs breathe out of their mouths like this "heh-heh-heh-heh" and then sometimes they drool. Bobby used to drool. I miss Bobby. When can I see Bobby again? When I die? When will I die? Do you think Bobby will remember me? What do you think he's doing right now? Playing with other dogs in heaven? Do they eat dog food in heaven? Daddy ate dog food once. That's gross. Can we have dog food for dinner some time?" This all would have been said in about one breath. Maybe two. So this why it's weird/easy to be home without Ruby's voice as my daily soundtrack and just with May who is content to sit on the ground and sing to a flip-slop and a mangled Little Mermaid eraser.

So far I've made good use of this new found time I've had. I organized my art studio, which was badly needed. It's located off of the kitchen behind sliding glass doors, so whenever people come over, they like to peek behind the curtains and see my disgusting mess. I usually wave my hand and say oh-so-casually "Yah, it's really messy right now," and shrug like "I'm an artist. It's just my nature." I also cleaned out the basement, which was also badly needed and went through all of the toys down there and threw away a huge black garbage bag filled with crap like fast food toys and things that were broken. Go, who has a hard time throwing anything away, was like "You threw away toys?! You should have given them to someone!" No way. If someone gave me a garbage bag filled with broken fast-food toys, our friendship would have ended there. I have a couple of other hot spots I'd like to get to but then what? I have the answer.

It's time to jump back on the art train. It's time to put stuff in the Etsy shop I've had sitting empty for months and months. I'm kind of scared if you want to know the truth.

My New Artistic Strategy

After this happened, I decided that in order to vastly improve my artwork, I needed to have more conversations with kids.

Yesterday morning after the girls woke up we piled into May's bed, still in our pajammies, and were snuggling and chatting.

Me: May, what do you want to do today?
May: Mm...wide owna beg joowahf!

Which meant:

Ride on a big giraffe!

Zap!

This could be the start of something good.

Birds! Continued

Here's the bird painting.

I did the bottom layer in acrylics and then went in with oils on top in parts. I like some of it. Like with every painting I do, there are a bunch of things that bug me. Take my initials down in the corner. I never sign my stuff because I feel like it takes away from the images but this time, I decided to just do it but now I regret it, so I might just paint over my initials down there in the right hand corner--like I needed to tell you where they were. You really can't miss them. Once I paint over my initials and that's dry, I need to decide where to put it in my house. It's like 18"x24" I think. For those of you who have been in my house, I'm open to suggestions.

So I made 5 of these last night, all different sorts of bird silhouettes.

When I went to peel off my masked off areas this morning, a bunch of paint came off with it, making the bird have a weird, fat beak and deformed legs. A total bust. I might try to touch them up, though. Or I might just throw them in the trash. Hmph.

Envy is Ugly

I have exactly two battles of jealousy that I constantly fight, which is no fun because as I've already stated with the title of this post, jealousy = ugliness and who wants to be ugly?

Here they are:

1. Anyone who lives in Southern California. I don't care what your living situation is: huge freakin mansion, apartment, cardboard box, air mattress in your parent's laundry room, if you live within a 100 mile radius of Irvine, hello. My name is Jealous. Nice to meet you.

2. This guy:

His name is Jeff Hein.




Here are two of his paintings (not my favorite ones but they were the only ones that I could easily find that I could actually cut and paste):

Seriously, just check out his site and you will be blown away. If you are pressed for time, just look at the contemporary stuff. They bring me to my knees.

He was in our ward back in SLC when we lived there for about 5 seconds. He was probably the best Sunday School teacher I've ever had and just a really nice guy, which makes me feel even worse for being so jealous of him, his talent, his well-deserved success. He does paintings for the church, though those aren't my favorites. Anyway, I've been jealous every stinking minute of my entire life since the day I first laid eyes on one of his paintings. And now that I've laid eyes on his studio, I am getting uglier by the minute. By the end of this day, I will have turned into the love child of the witch from Snow White and Nick Nolte.

Must close. Jeff Hein. Site window...Horns. Are growing out of. My skull...Boils. Snaggle teeth. Hairs sprouting from moles. Must close it. Before it's too...late. I'm melting...melting...ahhhhhhkkkllmmmmnnpppkkkk.

A Long Story That You Really Don't Need to Read, So If You Want To Just Skip To The Last Paragraph, You'll Get The General Idea and I'll Never Know

I have a lot of artistic interests but have a very short attention span. But something that I must do, that I feel like is the basis of all of these things/phases I go in and out and back into (Oil painting! Jewelry making! Watercolor! Origami! Inks! Photography! Knitting! BOOKBINDING!) is drawing.

Artistically, I'd say I had a rough time in college. This is something I briefly wrote about in my .justloveit. article for .lovelife. magazine this month. In high school, I was known as a good artist. I won contests and awards, I had artsy jobs, my binder was covered in drawings, along with several pairs of my shoes and sometimes my arms or the arms of people that sat next to me in class, etc. And I thought I was the bomb when I got accepted to The BYU's competitive art program and hey! You guys are even giving me a scholarship? Dude! I'm the best artist in the world. Needless to say, I was a bit puffed up by the time I got to Provo but my ego balloon was quickly punctured. I was small potatoes compared to most of the other students in the program. I struggled in my classes and quickly lost motivation and just sort of floated through the rest of my time there, barely keeping my head above water, never stretching myself to produce greatness and never accomplishing anything.

The very last semester something happened, though. I was sitting in the HFAC (the art building on campus for all you non-zoobies), looking around at the pieces on the walls and the gallery in the middle of the building and hating myself for never putting in the effort it took to produce the level of artwork that everyone else in my program had. I was just sitting there, in the total depths of despair and quickly becoming hysterical, which wouldn't have turned too many heads since we shared the building with the drama department. Just another girl sobbing in the corner, that's all. I felt completely defeated and thought/prayed "Did I just completely waste the past 4 years of my life? Is this what I really should have done?" And then I looked up and walking across the floor not 20 feet away from me was a former illustration teacher of mine who happened to also be an art student with my mom back in the day. It was like BOOM. That's my answer. So I got up, wiped the snot from my face and went over to her. I blurted out everything I was feeling and said something "I know I was supposed to bump into you today." She agreed and told me she never came to the HFAC, as her building (the illustration building - the Brimhall) was clear across campus but she decided to take a stroll on a whim and wasn't that a funny coincidence? And why don't I start meeting with her once a week in her office? A total answer to my prayer and thus, a miracle in my life that I have never viewed as small. So over the next couple of months, I started meeting with her and I learned more from those meetings than I did in all of my four years there. The advice she gave me that rings in my head every day but I have been completely bad, bad, bad in following was that I need to draw in my sketchbook. Every. Single. Day. To make my sketchbook an integral part of my daily life.

I have been thinking about her and what she did for me a lot lately. She gave me along with an Italian cookbook, a Lisbeth Zwerger book as a wedding present - The Wizard of Oz. The last illustration, with the poppies--that's the cover. During those meetings, she taught me how to oil paint. She opened my eyes to different styles. To artists, to designers, to illustrators. To Arthur Rackham. She shared her snacks with me. She put her phone on speaker so I could hear her husband's hilarious stream of semi-swear words after he stubbed his toe. She shared similar feelings of failure but also her successes with me. She gave me her home phone number. She showed me her work. She asked my opinion. She gave me assignments. She was exactly what I needed.

I've felt very crafty lately and I don't like feeling crafty. I am an artist and I need to get back to my roots, so I'm going to try to sketch everyday. And I'm going to (gasp!) post them. There, I just made myself accountable. I'm not going take too much time on them or the task will seem too daunting and this will just be another passing phase instead of the habit I want it to become; 10 minutes a day is all. So I'm going to start with letters of the alphabet, like an "A is for ___" type thing, every day a different letter. This feels good.

They Speak To Me

The illustrations of Austrian illustrator Lisbeth Zwerger:

.LOVELIFE. magazine

So I was asked to be apart of what I think will be a very fun project.  I am now the "art appreciation" columnist for .LOVELIFE., a new online magazine.  It's for women; there are all kinds of topics: fashion, food, books, art (me!), projects, parenthood, relationships, movies, etc. I know a lot of the contributors and they are quality girls.  So take a look:  .LOVELIFE. online magazine or my column.  And if you're a man, well, I guess you can read it if you want...get some tips on how to tastefully wear fishnets and what not.

Also, (raise your hand if you can hear my horn tooting) I did two logos for it:  

For the mag homepage:

And for my own column:

Take a peeky-peeky!  

Art is not a crime.

This is a picture Ruby drew the other day.  On the left side of the page is a monkey swinging on a vine above a tree.  A very tall flower is in the middle.  On the right side of the page is a road, drawn with perspective in mind, though I've never taught her about this particular art element, she came up with that all on her own.  She wanted her picture to have "texture", another element I've never gone over with her, so she cut fringe all around the sides.  Art just seems to come to her naturally.  By the way, her upcoming show is this Saturday night.  I'll be the one wearing a tux, passing around salmon puffs and brie.

I do what I can to encourage this particular talent, so I keep out all kinds of art supplies, everything stuck in glasses and kept on a serving tray as the centerpiece on the kitchen table, an idea I stole from Jessie.  It's been a lifesaver for the both of us.  It lets me have a few moments of peace without her literal non-stop talking, resulting in me not duct taping her mouth shut and keeping her out of the custody of child protective services.  Thanks again, Jess!

Daffodils cover

According to Ruby's story, I'm never given the oppurtunity to draw these cows in swim garb, so I did it for the cover! My ancient scanner cut off my funny pointy cow hooves. But you get the idea.

More to come! And not necessarily in the correct order. But maybe.

Daffodils

Brandon's mom started a great tradition in their family. Around the time each of her kids turned 4, she would have them tell her a story, she would illustrate it and bind it into a book. His was about a little guy named Mr. Nose Pose (she drew a nose with a face on it, arms and legs. It was awesome.) and some dancing wolves that came from Outer Space.

This morning I had Ruby tell me a story and I'm so excited to illustrate it. Four years old is the perfect age for this. They are young enough to be imaginative and old enough to weave a tale. She gave me some great images to work with--I'm going to keep it simple; black ink lines, just a couple of colors, simple backgrounds.
Here is the story I get to draw pictures of:

"Daffodils"

Once upon a time there were two cows that got married, named Bella and Karate. They liked to stand in meadows and eat daffodils.
Then they got a cow child named Shrella. She liked to eat daffodils, too.
One day they decided to leave the farm and go to the beach. They went to the beach with all kinds of socks on their heads.
When they got to the ocean, they threw their socks into the water. Sharks came and ate all of the socks.
The cows were hungry, too, so they picked some fruit off some trees and ate it for breakfast.
The beach was cold, so they found some people's clothes on the sand, put them on and left.
They decided to sneak into a grocery store and pretended they were people. They bought a bunch of stuff.
Then they took all of their groceries home to the farm and gave the food to the other animals. They passed around valentines and had a big party on the farm.
The cows just ate daffodils.

I'll post some illustrations when I get some done.

Barn Painting: Check.

I finally finished my 24"x36" barn painting. I'm pretty happy with it. Now I need to make a frame for it - a simple, gallery type frame. We'll see how it turns out.

Next up, a painting for my friend who was Ruby's preschool teacher last year for free. To show our gratitude, I offered to paint her a picture of anything she wanted, whatever size she wanted. She chose a 24"x36" oil painting of her two daughters walking down a wooded, shady pathway. I've done the photography part, now comes the initial drawings, which I'll start on next week. The painting will be a challenge but I'm up for it. She was a great teacher and did it out of the kindness of her heart, so her wish is my command.