UFO's: UnFinished Objects

What knitter/artist/quilter doesn't have a stack of unfinished projects? I wish I could stick with a project long enough to see it through. Many years ago, my daughter asked me to draw a picture of a girl with a winged horse. She wanted the girl to have white hair with purple highlights. I got so far as to make a partial drawing, scan it (at low-res, hence the pixelation), and Photoshop an experimental background. I used a reference photo for the horse (a catalog image of a pegasus sculpture) but drew the girl from imagination. Crude as it is, I still like it enough to post it here.


Here's hoping that I can clear enough clutter out of my house and life in 2009 to make it easier to concentrate on my art.

Patchwork Teapot

Well, I haven't posted here for a couple of months, but now I have something worth adding.


I was asked to create a flyer for a ladies' social at my church. Our guest speaker's topic will be, "What God has taught me through quilting." At first, I planned to draw something elaborate, with a teapot, a vase of spring flowers, and a quilt draped in the background. Then inspiration hit, and I decided to simplify it into a single element that summarized all the ideas.

The teapot symbolizes hospitality and refreshments, the patchwork brings in the quilting theme, and the heart symbolizes the love and fellowship we share. That leaves out spring, but I guess the flowers on the teapot will work for that. With the teapot placed in the corner of the flyer, and a "quilted" border all around the edges, the flyers came out quite nice, I think.

The teapot was colored with Prismacolor pencil over watercolor and Tombo watercolor pen. I drew it about twice the final printed size; I've found that reducing my work digitally eliminates the tiny mistakes and irregularites of the original.

Raqs Sharqi Dancer

Pencil study of a Middle Eastern dancer, and the resulting piece created with colored pencil over watercolor. The dancer came out a little more voluptuous than I had planned. I see room for improvment in the way I portrayed the coins on the headpiece and the front of the belt, as well the background. Oh, and come to notice it, the raised hand isn't quite right either. Well, that's okay, mistakes are for learning from. On the plus side, I'm very happy with the hair, the skin tones and shading, and the patterned fabric of the skirts.

I could use some advice on backgrounds, though. I had a sort of abstract, gently patterned background in mind. I tried to suggest the shape of an arched window behind the dancer, but it came out pretty lame so I cropped it out of these photos. I was going to fill the window in with scrolls and flowers, sort of like the pattern on the skirts. It would look sort of busy, but then again, I like a certain busy-ness to my pictures. I like texture and richness. Sort of like a Persian miniature.


Media:

• Colored pencils (Prismacolor, Rexel Derwent Water Colour, and Caran d'Ache Supracolor)
  
• Watercolor
  
• Micron pen
  
• Aquarelle Arches hot pressed 140 lb. paper
  

A Look Backward

Okay, before I go on to what I'm working on in the present or planning for the future, let's take a step back to what I did in the past. Below are two of my early pieces which my mom proudly had professionally framed.



The one on the left is a watercolor I did in high school, just for the fun of it. Mom liked it because she said, "The more you look at it, the more odd things you notice."

The one on the right was done in colored pencil outlined with a Chinese ink brush. It was a project for a calligraphy class I took at Ohio State back in the 70's. I was illustrating a scene from a Chinese fairy tale called, "The Maiden of Yueh". My professor, Dr. Eugene Ching, expressed his approval by putting his own seal on it (that's the red oval on the lower left-hand side of the drawing).

Here's a close-up from the first painting:



More recent work to come later this week.

Snow Scenes

I've done very little (actually, nothing) in the way of landscapes, but every time I see pine trees weighed down with snow, I feel the urge to grab my watercolor pencils and have a go at it. Here are a couple of photos I took from my back deck in December. Isn't that mist over the snow beautiful? I'd like to combine these scenes some way to show the soft, moody blue look of snow in the twilight.





My late mother-in-law, Hildegarde, was quite good at painting snow scenes. Here's one of her watercolors that I particularly like: