One Last One

Here's the last one for Art 4 Shelter. I decided to paint from one of my recent bird pictures. 

Trumpeter Swan - Crex Meadows Wildlife Area 

Have I mentioned lately how much I love the Neocolor II crayons?

More Bird Pictures

Yesterday, I ventured out to Crex Meadows State Wildlife Area in Grantsburg Wisconsin with a friend to take bird photos. I got the chance to practice taking pictures of birds in flight. Obviously, I still need more practice since I barely captured either of these birds before they flew out of the frame.

These are the only photos I editing by cropping them. They looked slightly less ridiculous with some of the blank sky removed on the top, bottom and to the left of both birds. Although I will say that both photos do convey a sense of movement.

In truth, I did have a number of inflight pictures turn out and here are several of my favorites. 

We were not trying to disturb any of the birds and were always a fair distance away, so the 60x zoom camera was much needed. Even so, there were a bunch of times that we saw trumpeter swans in flight. The first time, I was looking to the south at a pair of sandhill cranes and I heard the movement of air behind me. It didn't sound like the wind and the sound wasn't that close, but the sound made me turn around to see a couple of trumpeter swans flying behind me. They flew in a large circle around and to the front of us. 

I took about 400 pictures yesterday. I am showing great restraint by not including a lot more of them.

I can't help myself. I have to point out that this next photo was post-coitus.

While there were also raptors, ducks, loons, and other birds, the swan pictures turned out the best overall. 

Urgh, Urgh, and URGH!!!

My April art project is to do a little prep work related to gestural figure drawing, so I can try to do 100 people in 5 (or 7 days) in May.  This has been a one-week challenge by some urban sketchers and I decided to use this idea as a way to push myself, but in my own timeframe since they did it in March. Their timing did not work for me given the pandemic, the weather here in March, and my skill level. 

I’ve been doing a lot of prep work and have been looking at the pages related to gesture drawing in the book “Figure Drawing Design and Invention” by Michael Hampton, looking at some videos on Proko.com and Artprof.org and finally working through a Craftsy class by Suhita Shirodkar.  

I purchased this Craftsy class and a lot of others in the past and I have never worked through them. For a long time I had this weird hang up that time spent on drawing or painting should be focused on the active doing part. That never left enough time for learning, unless I was taking a scheduled class.  The internal critic is a sneaky bastard which has a bunch of different ways to try and derail progress.  Things are going much better now that I frequently split up my art-making time between learning and doing.

In this Craftsy class, I just rewatched a video of how to quickly capture a gestural sketch of someone walking towards you. I had to stop the video, stand up, and, slowly, exaggerate the process of walking to have the placement of the shoulders, hips (especially the hips), and the front and back legs make sense with how the instructor drew them.  When I was doing this, it made sense, but I know I am going to have to go back and do this slow exaggerated walking a bunch more times to create the body awareness that will make it easier to actually see.

It’s both funny and extremely aggravating that I have to work so hard:

1. to see what is happening when I am trying very hard to look, and 
2. to recreate it in my own body when I’ve been walking around my whole life.

It’s kind of annoying to realize how little body awareness I have and to also have my brain go on overload when I am trying to process what’s happening in a video of someone walking at a normal speed towards me.  

Also, I’m finding it hard to be gestural. I’ve mostly been doing loose outlines, when I’m trying to be gestural.  I am barely starting to understand how to get more gestural and am very slowly making progress.

All of this may sound negative, but the flip side is that I am thrilled with deciding what I want to learn and pushing myself to do it. 

More About The Blanket

It turns out that I started this project on February 28, 2015. The overall blanket is 8 squares by 10 squares and, according to my notes in Ravelry, I finished the squares on April 12, 2015. Although I did pull the squares out to work in ends from time to time, this project sat untouched for the past 4 years.

As I was making progress on it, I thought that it would be nice to complete it in time for my second vaccine. I felt crummy for about 24 hours after my first shot, including feeling very cold at times. Assuming that same will happen with the second one, I thought it would be nice to have the new blanket.  I did not set it as a goal and I wasn't really pushing for that, since I make myself a bit crazy when I do. Although, somehow, the timing worked out so that I finished it last night and my shot is this afternoon, so maybe I'm just kidding myself that I didn't have a goal to finish.

So far, the blanket is a big hit with me and with the cats. The picture in the first post is Chandler, who jumped up on my lap last night right after I finished.

In these photos, Hammett is the cat model.

It's hard to get the entire thing in one picture, so here is most of it.

This is about half of it.

Here is most of the other half.

I really love it and I'm sort of fighting with myself at the moment. Occasionally, a project just does not end up being for me. This may sound a little strange, but I'll get this whisper that it's not mine. Sometimes it's clear who it is for, but most of the time it's not, initially.  I'm having a little of that with this one. I am going to use it and enjoy it post-vaccine and see what I think after that. I figure either the whisper will go away or it will get louder.

A Big Warm Hug

I finished the crocheted afghan blanket last night.  When it was done and I put it on my lap, it felt like a big warm hug. Even better, it attracted a cat.  More accurately, of course, it attracted a cat.

To counteract all of the ugliness taking place in my community, I wish I could offer a moment of peace and comfort to anyone who needs it.

The Universe Is Sending Good Opportunities My Way

Yesterday, the hubby and I took a walk down to the Mississippi river.  It was a relatively short walk, but we saw an eagle when we are on the Franklin Avenue bridge.  When we got down to the river, we saw several mallards and this little screech owl.  On the way home, we saw the neighborhood albino squirrel and we also stopped to see another neighbor's chickens.  

Today, a neighbor alerted me to a barred owl in Matthews Park, so I headed over and took several pictures.  As of last summer, I had never seen an owl in the wild before, so I am grateful for the opportunities that the universe has been sending my way.

(Added later in the afternoon) - - As the day has unfolded and as I became more aware of current events in Brooklyn Center and elsewhere in the metro, I debated a bit about whether I should remove or change this post.  I decided not to, since this was my experience and what I was feeling at the time that I posted it. 

Art 4 Shelter - The Cats In Knitted Hats Series

Today, I finished portrait #6 of a cat in a knitted hat and I think it might be the end of the cats in knitted hats project, at least for awhile or at least for Art 4 Shelter for this year. The first 3 were dropped off awhile ago, along with several other pieces. I will get the last 3 dropped off some time soon.

Although I posted about the project from the time it started back in January, I wanted one post where I can go back and look at all of them easily. Here they are in reverse order. The first two were 8" x 10".  The rest are 5" x 7".  

All of these, except for the first one were drawn from project photos on Ravelry. Looking up cats in knitted hats on Ravelry was a pleasant diversion during the pandemic and the people I reached out to kindly gave me permission to use their photos. I included each cat's name, even though the cats in question might have preferred to stay anonymous.

While it was fun working on these and I found that I adore the Neocolor crayons, it was also a good learning experience. I had to work on creating backgrounds, making minor to major adjustments from the source photos, and finally working a piece to completion. It also was a good challenge to mostly work on smaller pieces, since that's what Art 4 Shelter prefers.

Since I am adding some additional information to this post. I traded several messages with Sylvester's owner via Ravelry and it turns out that he was a rescue cat, actually a bottle-fed kitten rescued at 2 weeks old . It's nice that the (hoped for) sale of the art inspired by his cat-in-a-hat picture on Ravelry will support Simpson Housing Services in providing service to 1 person for 1 night at their shelter.  

#6 - Sylvester

#5 - Habibi

#4 - Kaki

#3 - Penny

#2 - Wolfie

Last, but not least, here is the cat who started it all. If Chandler was not such a sweetie and let me place my partially knitted brioche hat on top of his head and take a picture, none of this would have happened. Since that time, he has developed more sense and does not pose for hat-related pictures. 

#1 - Chandler

Who?

No, hoo-h'Hoo-hoo-hoo or at least that's what the internet says a great horned owl's call sounds like.  Yesterday a friend took another friend and I to see an owl's nest. Since the hubby is also interested in owls, I came home from my first outing and I left immediately with him to take him to see the owls. While I got good pictures during the first visit, the light was much better for the second visit. 

Here are my top pics. This experience made me so incredibly happy!

It's the same adult owl in the first 4 photos.

If you look at this one full screen, the very yellow eyes are more apparent.

I like the extreme turn of the owl’s head in this one.

I feel as though I am being judged by the owl and somehow not measuring up.

The other adult owl is in the photo below. It was hard to get a shot of this owl, both because it was easy to lose the owl in the trees and second because I kept getting pictures where a branch was across his eyes from the number of branches and/or the wind.

I'm still playing the same game with myself where I don't crop or edit my photos, even though the middle 3 would be even better if they were cropped.

There were people with some serious camera lenses, far beyond my lovely 60x zoom point and shoot. I'm sure they were getting even more incredible pics, but I am quite happy with my camera.

Figure Drawing

This month’s project is a bit of a hodge podge. I have some “clean up” from prior months that I want to complete and I want to do some pre-work at home, so that I can practice figure drawing, mostly gesture, out in the world in May. Gesture drawing has never made sense to me. From a thinking standpoint, I do have a basic understanding. From a doing standpoint, I have always felt that I’m flailing around on the page. That’s what I am trying to fix. 

I found a good book, Figure Drawing Design and Invention, and the first chapter is giving me ideas and tools to use. This is going to take a lot of practice, but at least I have an entry point. I did 2 pages of gesture drawings today, which sounds like a lot. It wasn’t.  I was drawing very large and going also using poses from a website.

Here is the 2nd page and the two on the left are a good start for day 1 of a new project.