I’m going to be trying something new this weekend & selling my work at an art show hosted by a trendy children’s shop in Surrey, BC. This should be quite a different crowd than the craft shows I’ve done in the past & it’ll be interesting to see how my work is received. I don’t paint specifically for children in mind, though I am definitely influenced by the great storybooks I grew up reading. I’m in a weird sort of gray (pink?)  area between cute, but not quite the super child-friendly cute that kids are used to seeing. Should be a fun experiment anyway!

If you’re a local, here are all the details:

An eclectic mix of modern kids artworks will be featured during this fun day. Meet and mingle with select local artisans – this is an opportunity for you to purchase hand-made high quality unique items for your little loved ones playrooms, bedrooms or jewelry boxes.

Come and see the great works with children in mind from local artists:

The last couple of weeks have been a complete whirlwind of busy-ness for me & the next two promise more of the same. So instead of a full, useful blog post that makes sense, we’re doing a quickie roundup:

Group Show

I have to finish up two more paintings for my group show next month at Raw Canvas Gallery here in Vancouver, plus I’ve been swamped with trying to get the word out about the show, like sending press releases, setting up a Facebook group & whatnot. I have one sort of finished, but I want to add a few more layers to give it more murky depth & I’m thinking about completely re-doing the girl’s hair. It’s bugging me.

Etsy Sales

The Etsy groups I belong to have both decided to do big promo sales at the same time with a big giveaway from the Etsy Canada Team and a sidewalk sale from my Etsy Twitter Team (more details to come).

Social Life

My art group meetings, this incredibly basic & dull parenting course we signed up for which has so far taught me nothing except that I’m already an exceedingly good parent (*snort*), my nephew’s birthday…why does it all hit at the same time? Even the fun stuff! The mister got tickets for the live re-broadcast of This American Life on Monday as a mother’s day gift for me. It was amazing. It was so cool to see how they cue up the quotes, add the music, Ira narrates…not what I pictured at all. Dan Savage’s story was a particular standout since it left both me & the mister weeping in our seats.

Of course we also had to see the new Star Trek on opening night. We took the boy & we all loved it across the board. Sylar as Spock? PERFECT. And surprisingly hot. Also surprising? It was really funny. Laugh out loud funny. Honestly, even if you’re not a Trekker, go see it. It’s a solid movie even without any back story or character history.

I did have to laugh at the whole ohhhhh! They replaced the original cast with young, sexy newcomers!!! What will Hollywood think of next? But…yeah. That’s Hollywood. Next up on our summer blockbuster roster? Transformers 2! I loved the first one so much I was catching flies the whole movie, my jaw wide open watching the shiny chrome twist & transform. So. Freaking. Cool. Hollywood movies are rarely better than my imagination, especially as a child, but Transformers completely blew my 9 year old mind out of the water.

I feel like I’ve been such a busy bee this week, but I haven’t really accomplished anything. Running around to the post office, researching cheaper alternatives for shipping boxes ($4/box from the post office is teh suck, especially when compared to USPS which has cheaper rates, faster service & FREE boxes!), my first meeting with a local artist group, going to the boy’s basketball & hockey games…gah! It’s Thursday already and I’ve had hardly any time to paint!

That will have to be rectified today since I have class tonight and 3 homework assignments due. I have to a paint the same subject (an apple) in 3 completely different styles: using only a palette knife, thick sculptural brushstrokes and a blendy one. I feel like doing the blendy one first since that’s my obvious comfort zone, but I know how long I can spend adding more layers, adding more glaze…might be better off getting the tough ones out of the way.

Off to paint! Have a lovely day. =)

After three classes, I finally have something positive to say about my drawing course at Emily Carr.  The first two classes in this very short course (only 6 classes total) were a major disappointment.  The instructor is very talented and I’m sure he’s a fine teacher for the full time art school kids, but when it comes to drawing fundamentals (the name of the course, btw), he’s been less than stellar.

We’ve spent a good third of our class time introducing ourselves, then showing our work and talking about it.  For my ADD-adled brain, this is pure torture.  I want to learn!  I want to DO!  Spending 30 minutes talking about “What is a line?” makes me want to rip my hair out.

The course is basically led by the students and the instructor teaches by just answering our questions.  That might be good for advanced students who know what they’re doing and have specific questions about shading, perspective etc., but when you’re just starting out?  Most of the class doesn’t have any clue what to ask other than “So, how do we draw?”

The third class he redeemed himself though; we did an entire class on the human body.  He demonstrated the rules of splitting the body into eighths, we had a skeleton there to help us really visualize the body from the inside out plus we got to sketch from a live model – a nude live model.  I’m hardly a prude and quickly lost my self-consciousness at the whole situation, but it was a little startling right off the bat.  I caught myself a few times thinking about the fact that I was staring (I mean really STARING) at a naked woman’s butt.  No wonder so many people practice sketching with bowls of fruit!

Nudity aside, the class was enormously helpful for learning how to draw all sorts of different poses.  At one point the instructor got the model to stand up against the wall in front of a slide projector so he could project an image of a skeleton over her body.  Like an x-ray, it was a great learning experience to really see what’s going on inside our bodies.  By working from the inside out, I should (in theory) always be able to draw the human body in anatomically correct poses and positions.

It’s funny…as often as I draw and paint people, there are so many things I had simply never noticed by attempting to draw from memory.  Hands, for example; people constantly draw hands that are too small and make the entire picture look off.  Try this: hold your hand up in front of your face.  For the average person, their hand is the same size as their face.  That seems HUGE to me!  I think about all of the girls I paint and how BIG their faces are…never would I think to make their hands the same size.  Feet too – much bigger than you’d expect until you really start to LOOK.

Seeing where the shoulder joints are, where the hip joints are…all of those sort of angles now make sense when I’m sketching.  I don’t have to worry about if the position of my figure looks awkward or not because I’m not drawing it from the outside, from the skin; I’m now thinking about the skeleton and how the body really works.

It (almost) makes the first two classes worth it!

I drew this little flying girl last night using the new watercolor pencils (not crayons) and am thrilled with the way she turned out.  It’s so much easier to get in and work on the details with the pencils.  I’m wishing I had a few more colors though, like a brighter pink, a nice copper and maybe a brilliant purple.  Ah the never ending world of art supplies!

Her dress is left plain because next week I’m going to be learning how to collage paper dresses.  She looked too sad with a vacant white body, so I had to at least scribble in a bit of color.  Can’t wait to dig through my paper stash and pick out a new dress for her!