Dan teaches me drawing

I had not done a lot this past week, art-wise, since a number of things came up that prevented me to showing up at the - what - drawing board? I guess so. I made significant progress on knitting my Sunwheel mitten - which isn't technically art but it scratches a creative itch. Given that I'm working on a complex pattern, people are super impressed when they see what I'm working on.

There is a thrift store chain in Salt Lake City called Deseret Industries, or "DI" for short. I go there quite regularly, probably twice a month, and I often check out the area that has picture frames, mirrors, and paintings. So far I have come home with a few small canvases with ugly paintings on them, the DI sells them for $1. I knew I could paint over them and start from scratch, so I had a tidy collection of them that I finally got to tonight.

Dan already has a good collection of acrylic paints and brushes, but tonight what I needed was a large volume of white to make a clean slate, so to speak. Soon into this very simple act of covering up old paintings with white, I realized that I needed a painting smock. Dan leaped out of his chair, he had just the thing! And quickly fished out a lab coat he used when he worked at a distillery. It's very big on me, but perfect for my purpose.

He's been bugging me for a while about gesture drawing. He wanted to teach me gesture drawing. I did a drawing exercise with my weekly art planner that I mentioned last week, and he basically said okay when you are finished what you are doing, we'll do some gesture drawing together. As luck would have it, all three kitties were in the living room and available to be subjects for drawing. So we started there.

With manila paper and charcoal, we drew a few things. Feiminn. Djarfur. The IKEA watering can that they use to drink water out of. And the cat tree we assembled on New Year's Eve. (There were a few other things too but they are not worth sharing). Dan gave me encouragement and praise for my technique, and instructed me for what to do next time. He's been to several art schools, and has thousands of hours of drawing logged himself, and he also happens to be a great teacher.

Feiminn

Djarfur, cleaning himself

It turns out I like gesture drawing better than I like line drawing. At least for now. I think that will help me develop confidence.

I started a drawing class

I am the forever student. I am always learning something and have so many interests so always want to learn much more than I realistically have time for. I have been studying Danish for almost a year now (according to Duolingo, I am 67% fluent, though I have yet to converse with a native speaker). Near the end of 2017, I decided to declare 2018 my year of Art Exploration.

My husband is an artist, part of a larger family of artists. His youngest sister is at a fancy art school in Ireland right now. His mother has been painting for 30+ years and is having a show this spring. I have no art at all in my family history, I have only dabbled here and there with things. Of course, you can count my multiple knitted sculpture as art (and I do), but those days are long behind me now as I have not had time to knit since before immigrating to the United States (almost five years ago!).

A thing I do sometimes is go to Salt Lake City's largest thrift store chain, Deseret Industries, and buy secondhand paintings on canvases. Not because I like the subjects (I really don't need a painting of a temple or of 'Marissa' (?)) but I've heard a thing that painters do sometimes is paint over an old painting. For $1 a canvas, how could I go wrong?

However, people keep telling me that you must learn to draw before you can paint.

I have drawn things in the past, mostly stick figure cartoons or goofy animals (mostly cats and sheep, duh), and one year for Christmas I drew caricatures of my husband's family as matryoshka - in lieu of gift tags. But I am only familiar with pencils and colored pencils.

Last week I started a drawing class at a local art store. The supply list was awfully long (!) and I doubt I'll ever be interested in using graphite sticks regularly, but I now have all the things I need going forward to explore different drawing techniques.

I have also started listening to some art podcasts. The first one is the Thriving Artist, and I think I've only listened to one or two of those. The topic was about the business of being an artist, that is, making a living doing it. Very interesting. I just got promoted in my research job last month and have a shiny career ahead of me, so I don't have any plans to be a career artist any time soon, but you never know where life will take you. The other podcast I found is the Savvy Painter - that one comes out every week and it's been very interesting learning how people manage their lives around their painting.

I'm not sure if I'll stick with the drawing class I'm enrolled in - I don't 100% love it, but I'll finish out the month I paid for and go from there. Dan has offered to draw with me (he's taken tons of drawing classes, has been to three art schools) so I think we may take that up. There are other things I want to explore too - such as painting, ceramics, fiber arts, and maybe some other sculpture. We have three kitties now, so whatever I end up making has to be cat-proof, but I think I'm up for the challenge. I do think I have the discipline for self-study though. After training for a half-marathon in 2016 and learning a second language using an app on my phone, I know I can persist if something really catches my interest. So I will explore.

I plan to use all the learning tools available to me. We have a fantastic library system in Salt Lake City with a massive art collection. There is also the Internet. I even have some artists in my life here that I could hang around. I'm not sure about posting pictures of my progress and projects, we'll see how happy I am with them. I'm not interested in being "good" - I'm too whimsical for that. I just want to make things that I like to look at. I joined Instagram a couple of months ago and that will help with inspiration.

If you, dear reader, have any recommendations what so ever - books, videos, podcasts, IG accounts - please throw them my way! I'd love to hear from you and get exposed to things I have not yet seen.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy this year-long journey with me!

me, redrawn

I would love to have skills with drawing and illustrating. Once I had big plans to make an illustrated history of my family. Skills require practice though, and I have only ever dabbled in drawing, so no great skill. Thus, whenever I have drawn myself, I have always drawn me as a stick figure.

Stacey as stick figure

 In mid January, I decided it was time, suddenly to cut off all my hair. Part of it is that I was not interested in maintaining the artificial colour anymore, and part of it was that I had always wanted to experience really short hair, possibly a shaved head. I was telling Toni about this over breakfast and then, that morning, I felt so compelled to cut it off that I could think of nothing else until I got out the scissors.

Stacey with scissors

Scissors and hand mirror

So I went at it. I have been cutting my own hair for a very long time and have gotten rather handy with scissors, hand mirrors and angles. Here I go!

I looked down and saw all my hair on the floor. 

I discovered the real reason people give themselves Mohawk haircuts. It's because even if they can do a fine job on the sides, getting the middle and especially the back is hard. 

In this process, I made a couple of important discoveries. Discovery the first: I have big ears. 

Discovery the second: with not much to weigh this hair down, its natural inclination is to stick straight up! This will not do. 

I made a wonderful discovery after this. For Christmas I received a most excellent running cap, and not only does it warm my head and protect against the rain, but it also squishes my spiky hair down into a smooth flat mane. 

 As a knitter, I was excited to have more excuses to wear hats (short hair = cold head!) Below is a triumphant me wearing my favorite hand-knit hat, my Brattleboro hat made of Malabrigo Worsted.
 

Something bad happened. When Dan was here, and I was doing laundry one day, somehow my beloved hat made it into the laundry and I shrunk my Brattleboro hat! It went from fitting my 22 1/2 inch head to having only a 15 inch circumference, suitable only for newborns. This sure made me sad! I still have the pattern and once I get some replacement yarn I will knit another one. 

But the real dilemma, and the point of this post, was that of how to draw myself when I have short hair? What am I going to do? I spent a fair bit of time drawing different incarnations of myself with different hair, some of it quite imaginative. Me as a stick person with short hair itself is not very interesting so I think I will actually knit a headband with a feature like this to wear around until my hair grows out a bit. I should also probably knit (or sew?) a bunch of triangle-shaped dresses to make sure my stick person persona matches the reality! 

Matroyshka themed Christmas

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a sudden and intense interest in researching my Russian heritage. I don't actually know if I have Russian heritage or if my relatives were true Volga Deutsch - was my great grandmother a Russian who married a German? Or were they both German?

I have big-ish rather unfeminine hands, and I have always referred to them as my "Russian working woman's hands". This is not a slight to myself, because they are also strong and competent hands (if I do say so myself).

At any rate, each year when I'm thinking about what to do for the family for Christmas, I have quite a few creative stages. In the first few years I did one really big thing for one family member (as in knit a super-involved thing). Then it got to two, I think, unintentionally. This year, as mentioned in a previous post, I didn't think I would have time/money to knit something for everyone. What could I do to channel my creativity that wouldn't cost very much, that I could put together quickly, that the whole family would appreciate?

Once I figured out what everyone was getting, I hit upon an idea: I would wrap the presents matroyshka style and I would draw each family member to indicate who would get the next present. 

 Sketches of the family - early version

These, I might add, are very accurate depictions of my family members. 

Younger niece

Dan's older sister

Dan's step-sister

Dan's youngest sister

Dan's older sister's husband

Dan's stepbrother (a story about the monkey that says OVERDUE on the tail: one morning while I was staying at the Stately, Thor came downstairs after having had a dream where he had borrowed a monkey from the library and it was overdue, woke up in distress because he didn't know where the monkey was). 

Dan's stepfather. Now remember that everyone in the family has a 'thing', and John's thing is toast. 

Oldest niece turned 16 a few days before Christmas and got her 'L'. For those of you not in British Columbia, this is the first step in a graduated-licensing program for people who want to drive. You get your L for a while, and you have to put this big magnet on the back of the vehicle you are driving to tell the world that you are LEARNING to drive. After a determined amount of time (a year? I don't actually know) then you can take the road test and get your N, which is a different magnet, to tell the world that you are NEW at driving. There are certain restrictions around this, like you can't drive after dark, there have to be people in the car who also have valid driver's licenses, etc. It's dumb, and I'm glad I grew up in a time where I didn't have to go through this rigamarole. But there it is. 

My mother in law.  Her thing is chickens. This drawing of a chicken here is from the kitchen table which she painted, and the model she uses is of a chicken sculpture somewhere in the Stately.

Wrapping begins. I didn't (remember to) take photos of every step, but you get the idea.

Getting bigger and bigger

By the very last wrap I had run out of paper. I had this done four full days before Christmas, which is unheard of for me.

On Christmas morning, I walked into the house with just the one big present. Everyone wanted to know what the one big thing was and who it was for. Dan's mum saw the drawing on the big one (for her) and knew that all the others were nested inside. It was great and appreciated. And tons of fun for me! I've had a few bursts of creativity lately so I already have the next two Christmases planned out for the family. It's a good thing because each year someone tells me "you've outdone yourself". (Just what my ego needs, more praise. I mean thank you!)

The reason I go to so much effort is because it's fun. Christmas with my family of origin was never really fun, not even as a kid. We held the German tradition of opening gifts on Christmas eve. I think Santa brought presents for Christmas morning, but we were pretty young when we figured Santa out and after that I don't think we even had stockings. Christmas was just about seeing family, eating, and just being together. With Dan's family it is so much more. We each of us exchange gifts, and with nine other people that can seem a daunting task. But this family specializes and revels in things handmade. It's wonderful. I found a recipe for some Spice Almonds on the Internet, gave that to Thor in a food storage container, and they were gone within two days. That's what Christmas is about - fun, thoughtful gifts and having fun with each other. I love it. I fit right in and I have a great time every year.