Picture 4, originally uploaded by robayre.
Thanks Bri, for letting me know about the scribbler.
It makes ever sketch look so amazing!
My original sketch is up at the top in red, the main black drawing is done by the scribbler.
Archive for May, 2008 Page 2 of 3
on the tracks, originally uploaded by robayre.
I really enjoy walking to work. I’m so glad that our new house is still within walking distance and actually only about an additional 5 minutes further. Last year I started a flickr set devoted to pictures I take while walking to or from work. It’s pretty sparse now, but hopefully it will continue to grow.
Today while walking I had something odd happen.
I was walking alongside a rental house, approaching an intersection when I noticed all of a sudden this fluff rolling down the street. As I came to the front of the house and reached the intersection I saw a person jump into a truck and pull away. Where the truck pulled away was left a large cherry blossom limb, covered in blossoms (which turned out to be what I thought was fluff). The limb was resting in the grass between the street and the sidewalk immediately in front of a house. There were no flowering trees anywhere near so I can only assume that the person stopped their vehicle dropped the limb there and then drove off.
What I like to think happened: A woman lived in the house and she told her boyfriend how much she loved the blossoming trees in the spring. He cut a limb from his yard and left it at her front door for her to be surprised once she woke up in the morning.
This is just a small sample of what kind of thing happens when walking to work.
It’s a new day, originally uploaded by robayre.
I finished this painting tonight. It’s a 6″x6″ acrylic on canvas piece done in the same style as the “Be kind” piece done for Found Art Tuesday a couple weeks ago. I really love this style and feel like I could do a bunch of these with different inspiring uplifting saying. It’s in the shop right now.
Ever have Thai Iced Tea? That stuff is like crack, or how I imagine crack to be addicting. This weekend we picked up some Thai and got tea to go. It has made me search for recipes to make my own. Feed the addiction, yes, sweet, swirling condensed milk in my tea, addiction. So I found this site that seems to be pretty good at instructions on how to make my own Thai Iced tea in many different ways. They even have a page that links you to where buy thai tea in bags or powder form.
And lastly, I am so excited about this final link. Can I just say how excited I was to see the post on today’s Design Sponge guest blog. I’ve always wanted to learn how to make patterns for fabric and papers and these instructions will make this so much easier. It’s so simple and I am so surprised that I didn’t think of this or hadn’t been taught this much earlier. You might even remember this tree pattern that I made earlier this year for fabric. (Note to self, I still need to execute that project, but now I can make even better patterns. yay!
archive friday pendant, originally uploaded by robayre.
This friday’s archive friday piece is a silver pendant I designed and cast in my metals class in junior college. It was one of a series. One I made for my sister had a tiny compass built into it, another had peacock feathers, but all had this silver cage framework that opened with a clasp. I took several metalwork classes and it was one of the first studio classes I took. The time period in which I took metals was a pretty stressful time. I was taking a full load of classes and working tons of overtime, and of course I had my second job at the church. Despite all this I managed to often return to school in the evenings and work on metalwork. I’d go to sleep at night and dream of metalwork. I just absolutely loved it. It also helped that I had the most amazing teacher at the time. It’s during this time I got in the habit of carrying and using a sketchbook regularly. Years later when I tried to return to taking metal classes again, it wasn’t the same. I think I had changed too much and my world had opened up too much. Instead of only having metalwork in my head, now I had metalwork, photography, ceramics, silk screening, intaglio, lithography, relief printing, bookmaking, 3D fiber arts, watercolor, illustration, collage and just about every other art imaginable under the stars, all in my head. I couldn’t focus on metalwork and just metalwork alone anymore. It was really sad to me because I had long dreamed of returning and being full of the same passion as I had originally. Metalwork will always have this special place in my heart and I still dabble now and again on using metals here and there on artwork or jewelry at home (meaning: no soldering or casting).
Remember this painting? I’ve chosen it to illustrate a few things that I would like to share today.
Firstly, this week this painting sold, along with several other pieces of my artwork. After last weeks Paper Stack Pack and this weeks feature on Decor8, my goal of having sold 100 items in my shop in 2008, seems to be more and more possible. Thank you everyone for the support of my artwork. As I said earlier this week, I feel like I’m having my Sally Fields moment, “You like me, you really like me.”
Secondly, why must rabbits chose to build their nests smack dab in the center of a yard? Why can’t they build it under a bush or hidden away in a less trafficked area like the rest of the animal kingdom? No, instead they build it in a central location, in a seamlessly camouflaged place. One can stand right over a rabbit hole and not even realize it is there. There are a few rabbits in my parents yard and I have quartered off a few place to avoid while mowing so as not to run over a nest. I think having my own pet rabbit makes me more sensitive to this problem than your average lawn mower. While mowing, this absolutely gruesome vision came to mind of what it must be like to accidentally step into a nest, accompanied by an equally sickening idea of a crunch. To my horror, yesterday as I spoke with Matt out in our yard, I took a step backward and my foot went right into a hole and there was that crunch I had somehow predicted. Immediately I yelped and cried frantically, commanding matt to look into the hole and tell me I had not just crushed a bunch of baby rabbits. He casually brushed some grass away and said it was nothing, but I didn’t trust that and got down on my knees and picked up the covering. To my relief, it was plastic tubing embedded in the ground from our sump pump. I don’t want to ever find out what the real feeling of stepping into a rabbit hole feels like. In the meantime, I’ll just continue to keep my eyes peeled for the occasional toad fleeing from certain death of mower blades, and now rabbit holes as well.
This last story is less rabbity, and more lawny. Earlier this week when I told my dad I’d be mowing their lawn he said, “it’s going to rain, you should pay more attention to the weather reports.” It really needed to be mowed so I disregarded what he said. Then, as I was drawing near the end, sure enough, it started sprinkling. I trudged on figuring it would stop soon and I only had about 20 minutes left. But the sprinkling turned into real rain and the real rain turned into downpour. At this point I had to stop, so I pulled over under some tree coverage, figuring it couldn’t last long. I was drenched to the bones and rang out my hair while I waited, and waited and waited. Finally when I had just about enough waiting (only a few minutes) and realizing that this was not going to just go away, I looked up at my parents’ house to see both my mom and dad’s faces in the kitchen window watching me just standing there in the rain. I approached the house and my mom ushered me in offering to dry my clothes to stop the onslaught of my impending pneumonia (you know, because I was out in the rain), and she said “Your father and I were watching you and he said ’she’s just standing there in the rain’.” I thought it was so funny, I was standing there hoping it would stop and they were watching me standing there wondering why I was just standing there, but not coming out to tell me to come in. As I headed home in my car the rain was beginning to flood the gutters and I passed some kids who were playing in the puddles in the streets. I just wanted to share this here because I’d like to keep this memory. My grandma got me in the habit of “creating memories” by trying to remember all the details and this was one of those moments I’d like to keep.
That is all for now. I’ll be back later to post something for the Friday archive.
My creation, originally uploaded by robayre.
Keeping very busy, busy, busy today. I don’t have much to say today, so I will share with you some of my flickr favorites.
Hello, originally uploaded by robayre.
Hello to everyone from Decor8! Welcome to my blog :D
Today = amazing.
I was so busy at work today that I didn’t even have a moment to take lunch, let alone check my email. You can imagine my surprise when I finally did and was tipped off by several friends that I had been featured on Decor8, one of the greatest design/art blogs out there.
The praise felt wonderful and as I said to my sister, I value that kind of recognition over a sale any day. It just means the world to me that someone I admire would have taken notice of my work and then goes on to share it to their audience. Honestly, I got teary. It made me feel so proud of myself.
Another amazing thing that I learned today: Tulips, after being cut several days, will open and close during the day and evening, (and this is where it gets crazy) even WITHOUT any exposure of natural sunlight. It’s like tulips have instincts. Immediately I think of a song they used to play on Dr. Demento, “I’ve heard the screams of the vegetables” Then I think about a story that my grandma used to tell about when I was really little staying at my grandparents house. My grandma and I were watching my grandpa out the window and when I asked her what he was doing she said trimming the roses from the bush. Apparently I started crying because I thought it was hurting or killing them and so she ran out and made him stop.
It’s really past my time to hit the hay, so I’ll say good night and thank you for stopping by everyone (new and old friends alike).
grass art, originally uploaded by robayre.
You may not be able to really tell what is going on in this picture, but it is momentous. This is me getting to paint outside, something I haven’t done in years and years and years. In fact, skip the painting. Just sitting outside and enjoying the outdoors…that is something I haven’t been able to do for years and years and years. It almost brought me to tears. Sure, I would go over to my folks’ house to mow, but I didn’t lounge around or really stop to appreciate the outdoors. Now I can just go right out my patio doors and plop myself down in some lush grass and just lay there. And I do.
Matt and I have been hearing all sorts of bird this spring and mimicking their call. It was a while before I thought to myself “You know, I don’t recall hearing, or at least ever consciously listening to birds’ calls the entire time I lived in that dungeon apartment.”
It’s spring, and the plants and wildlife are not the only things coming back to life.
I’ve added a yellow framed yoyo set to my etsy shop today.
And, this weekend I finally decided to devote some time to making a scarf from a pattern in the Happy Hooker book. It went by so quickly, I made two! The more green one was made using my own handspun yarn. The great thing about this pattern is that it goes so quickly and it doesn’t use much yarn. You could probably make two from one skein of yarn. Plus it looks so cute. Of course, there is the problem now that it really isn’t scarf season anymore.
self portrait colored pencil, originally uploaded by robayre.
Here is my Archive Friday contribution. My first reaction finding this in an old sketchbook was “awesome, this is definitely my friday archive piece” but looking more and more at it, it makes me kind of ill. The face is so asymmetrical and my eyes are too far apart, or are they too close? At any rate, I decided to keep it remembering that it was just something that I did very quickly so of course it will be far from perfect. Here is a link to other self portriats I’ve done, mostly photographs, so that you can judge for yourself. I think the reason I like this drawing so much is it’s bold use of color. I used to be such a light drawer that many of my high school assigned art pieces are no longer visable because the graphite was so light it just wore away over time.
When I see this picture I am immediately taken back to a different time.
From the fall of 2002 till the summer of 2004 I was on hiatus from graphic design and took a job as an aide at the local middle school. I like to say that I taught study hall. Yes, taught. I was supposedly replacing an aide who would let the students stand on desks, scream and destroy classrooms. I was coming out of my experience in art education (a year and a half of college classes) and had been working at my Sunday nursery job for 7 years. I kept the class very organized and the students were required to work on homework. If they didn’t have any homework, they must bring a book to read or artwork to work on that would keep them quiet and from disrupting the rest of the class. I was happy to encourage them to draw and carried around colored pencils and paper for them to draw on. Sometimes I would even create coloring book style pages for them to draw on that began to come into demand.
The students would stand in line for help on their studies and I would help them tackle anything from multiplying fractions to understanding their 7th grade science (which I can’t for the life of me remember what was in the curriculum at the time). If they were well behaved they were allowed five minutes at the end of the hour to quietly socialize. I learned a very important thing about education at this point. Book education is important and the reason why they are going to school, but social education (learning how to become members of society) is what they are geared towards. As much as we teachers would try and keep them from socializing, it actually is very important part of their education at this point. They are very much like sponges, taking in all things social and society. It is very important because at this age they are really at a stage of formation to who they will become as adults. Despite the creases in my forehead (I perfected the teacher glare that shuts a kid up with just a glance) and the piddles of paychecks, I really did enjoy this job. 1. It was incredibly low stress. 2. It granted me loads of time to work on whatever I wanted. Whether it be reading my own books, drawing or knitting, I got paid while I worked on my favorite things. My sketchbooks from that time are just filled with so much inspiration. The pages are brimming with ideas, journaling, and lots of drawings and sketches. I found quite a few drawings of my students’ faces (that I drew while they had no idea I was drawing them). I’d draw empty classroom desks, or schoolbooks and materials. This particular drawing I did is a self portrait, that I did during my first hour class. I think I had taken a camera phone picture of myself on the way to work and drew it from off of my little phone.
While I worked at the middle school I felt pretty ashamed that I, a college graduate, was working this aide position, which is normally held by uneducated people, hence the low salary. I really, really wanted to get back into graphic design so that I could again hold my head high and return to a productive career. After I secured my current job, one thing that I was surprised to miss about the aide job, and was a bit of a hard habit to break, was being able to write/draw whenever the urge hit me during the workday.
I guess that is all that comes to me when I see this self-portrait. I just think of the era that I had kids calling me “Mrs. Wells” even though I was unmarried :)
Happy Friday everyone! For about a month or so, I’ve been sending a cool youtube video to a friend of mine each friday. I’ve decided to start sharing them here as well. This is actually a video I posted a link to here a couple years ago, but didn’t have the ability to embed like I can now. It is one of my life wishes to ride in a hot air balloon. A couple years ago a bunch of us went to this hot air balloon fest, but it was pretty windy so they didn’t get to do as much as we’d hoped for.
I’ll be back later with my archive friday post.
