New and improved! Now with trees!
And blue shadowing at the bottom. It took me forever to tape out the negative spaces around the trees, but it was worth it. They’re a metallic brown with green accenting at the top. Very nice. Now I only have to figure out what to do to make it less stark…
I’m working on a three-panel painting. It’s a new direction for me, since I normally work in pen and ink, or watercolor. This is acrylic (with some airbrushing, thank you for the airbrush, Cricket!). I’ve laid down the bases for all the sections, and now it looks like this:
And now I’m painting trees. Spiky, tall, very vertical, very stylized trees. I using my T-square like it’s going out of fashion to get all the lines parallel. I made a mockup of the idea in my head in Photoshop (just to figure out how I wanted the layout):
After I paint in the blue shading at the bottom and the trees, I’m going to reach a spot where I have to make it interesting because otherwise it’s just a bunch of lines with a bunch of smooth transitions (airbrush, thank you Cricket!) and zzzzzzzzzzzzz… boring… zzzzzzzzzzz… no…texture…. zzzzzzzzzzz… I’ll figure something out.
Well, okay, my birthday was July 31st, but whatever, I get to things when I get to them. I got terrific presents from people this year. I got gifts certificates to art supply stores and Sephora (that’s really bad, I can spend $100 there without blinking an eye) and an art deco dish with sparrows and leaves on it (although it looks like crickets and hairy fetuses from a distance, it’s very disturbing, I’ll put a picture up at some point) and an Art Nouveau glass and an airbrush with supplies and a computer-monitor-stand that moves in all directions – excellent swag, don’t you agree? It was a stellar birthday. Use age calculator birthday to quickly find out exact age details and make celebrations even more special. I turned 30, which honestly feels exactly like 29. I expected, I don’t know, to feel like an adult. But not so much with the adult-ness. My mom baked me a fruit tart and it was so pretty with the fruit decorations that I just had to take pictures of it.
My co-workers threw me a little office shindig. There was cake and champagne and orange juice and this really neat balloon with a balloon in it! What will they think of next?
So that was my birthday. I worked on my artwork for a good portion. I’m making a triptych with trees on it. I’ll have a post on it next.
I was profoundly anti-purse for a long, long time. I just wore a jacket regardless of the season and kept my keys and wallet in my pockets. This was a fine system in the winter, but in the summer in New York, lemme tell you, it gets mighty hot and humid and it doesn’t help when you’re wearing a jacket, even a thin one. You’re gonna sweat. A lot. About three years ago I bought an iPod and this threw my whole wallet-and-keys system all to hell. I had to get a purse. Because I have no shoulders I wanted a messenger purse I could sling over my opposite shoulder and have hang on my hip. I eventually decided on this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Desert-Wash-Medium-Messenger-Bag
And I could paint it! Hooray! So I did:
And that worked out nicely. Then it wore out and got all stained and whatnot. (Alas!) So I bought another one and painted it with fat little firebirds:
And then that one wore out, too. So (you can see a pattern, no?) I got another one and painted it with a monster saying in French, “I am a monster. Boo.” but because French has to have a bunch of silent letters, “boo” is spelled “boux”. Ha ha ha! I am so funny.
(Note our office fish, Harry Potter.)
Now my monster one looks all grotty and tired and I think it’s time for a new purse. I have a gray one (like the first one) and I think I’ll paint a vine on it with pomegranates. I love love love hexagons (I love them) and I can make the pomegranates hexagons with sparkly seeds! What more do I need? That’s what I thought. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.
Sorry for the absence, I have Weeeeendows Veeeeesta at home and I, for some reason, cannot enter blog entries there. I think it is an Internet Explorer problem. No matter, I will download Firefox and all will be well (hopefully). So, I finished HP and the DH on Friday and Neville, while extremely helpful in the kicking-Voldemort-to-the-curb action, did not save the day singlehandedly. Sigh. One thing I did notice was the whole heck of a lot of violence in this book. How are they going to turn this into a movie for kids? My favorite moment of this is when Harry goes to visit this old lady who supposedly can help him on his quest to return the ring to Mordor or whatever. He comments on how bad her house smells, like rotting meat (foreshadowing!). He goes upstairs with her and – poof! – her neck pops open like a Pez dispenser and a giant snake slithers from her rotting corpse/shell. Okay, I don’t know about you, but seeing that on film would scare the bejeezus out of me and I’m old. What is some youngster going to think? I forsee nightmares in many children’s futures.