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!

Three cheers for colour! I’m so excited to be bringing my girls to life, first with the shading and now moving on to shading with color, but I’m finding it a little more difficult than I was expecting. I started off using some “Caran D’Ache neocolor II Aquarelle” watercolor crayons that I’ve had kicking around for years. I can’t even remember where or from whom I got them. I shaved & shaved with a box cutter , but had a really tough time getting them to a sharp enough point so I could do any small detail work. The big white crayon was great for blending though, as was the blender pencil that came in a sketching kit my stepson got a few months ago. Yay for finding art supplies around the house! Cuz my budget is tight with a capital T this month. This is my first try on paper:

After adding a bit of water, seeing the page get wavy, then seeing my black pencil lines get smudgier & smudgier (especially into the white of the eyes, which never fully recovered) I was starting to get frustrated. I tried to go over all of my lines with an ultrafine point black Sharpie. This worked well in spots, then got caked with wax & would stop working. Wipe it off…scribble scribble…try again. SLOW GOING. It worked out in the end, but I had to really scrape hard and when you’re working on paper? Just not a good idea.

I was convinced I needed to get the real watercolor pencils, plus some good non-watercolor pencil crayons & picked those up today. I went for a walk with the boys and they wanted to pop into the comic book store. Since I had the dogs with me, I had to wait outside and what did I see 3 doors down? That I’d somehow never noticed before only a few blocks away from my house? A little art supply shop! I love supporting independent businesses and the owner was a sweetheart. They welcomed me inside (yes, even the dogs!), then charged me only $1 for a couple of pencils, a little more for the rest ($1.50?). I’ll definitely be going back there when I’m in a pinch.

Can’t wait to do some more practice sketches on paper and then – on wood!

I’ve been adding blog posts over at Ning instead of posting here, but since the majority of what I’m working on right now has to do with the Suzi Blu workshop, I better start posting or it’ll be a good long while before we get a proper Cagey Bee update!

My girl sketches have grown leaps & bounds since we started adding shading. I love how Suzi shows us exactly what she does to give her girls depth. It’s not a lot, just a little around the eyes and along the jawline into the cheek, but wow! They don’t look like flat, lifeless little girls anymore! Yay!!!

As I keep practicing different faces, hairstyles and gestures, I find myself running out of ideas, drawing a complete blank. I flipped through a bunch of fashion magazines the other day and cut out models with cool hair or interesting dresses that would work for my sketches. Maybe I’ll glue them right in my sketchbook so I can always flip back quickly when I run out of ideas.

That’s me, KGB! Working on my homework for Suzi Blu’s awesome workshop. It’s only the first week, but we’ve already had a couple of videos and PDF files, plus a bunch of homework. All of the course content has been really well done; Suzi did a fantastic job! If you want to learn how to draw pretty girls, this is the class for you.

I love that we’re getting right down to it, practicing faces and eyes and poses rather than going through all of the rules of drawing, perspective and so on. Instead of learning tons of theory and then trying to figure out how to apply that knowledge to the subject matter you want to draw or paint, we’re starting right from drawing what WE want to draw – pretty girls. hehe

I uploaded some of my homework sketches to my Flickr, as well as the Flickr group for the class. Feel free to add me as a contact and as your Ning friend too!

My painting class at Emily Carr ended today, but just as one class ends another one is beginning – and this one’s online!

The lovely Miss Suzi Blu is doing her first online workshop. I stumbled onto her YouTube videos earlier in the year and I’ve been a devoted fan ever since. She’s so inspiring and has a wonderful playful attitude that makes creating art seem fun again, not scary or intimidating. And for only $55? How can you go wrong?

You can check out her community on Ning here. Then don’t forget to add aCageyBee as a friend!

It was with a sniff that I walked out of my last painting class this afternoon; it has been such an incredible experience for me. I’ve learned so much in these few short weeks, met some cool people and just generally felt alive, inspired, happy.

With most things I’m quite content to be self-taught, making good use of the library and the internet. I’m pretty good at deconstructing things, figuring out how stuff works on my own, so I wasn’t sure that a painting class would be the best (or at least the fastest) way to improve my painting skill versus simply getting out the paints and having at ‘er. But after this class, I’m totally changing my tune. It would’ve taken me years of trial and error, plus many expensive trips to the art supply store to randomly test out materials, to figure out on my own what I’ve learned in this class. Things like using medium or gel, how colors work together, composition…these are all things I might have eventually figured out, but it would’ve been a lot of “This painting doesn’t look quite right, but I don’t know why.” Lame.

I mentioned before that our assignment was to create a painting from the collage we made last class and though I’m still not quite finished, here’s what I’ve got so far:

Another benefit of the class was getting critique of my homework and this was especially true today as we all had to hang up our work (some or all) so the entire class could see what everyone else had created. It was one of those gut wrenching moments to have my work critiqued by the rest of the class, but obviously a good and necessary experience for me to grow as an artist.

It was fascinating to see how different all of the work was even though we were all using the exact same color palette, had the same instructions and often had the same subject matter. One guy had the most vibrant beautiful greens in all of his paintings and another woman kept returning to purples and yellows. All so unique despite the fact that we all worked from just 8 colors. Amazing!