January Journals #4

It is the fourth day of January.  Does it feel sometimes like you have lived ten days in two?  It does for me, even more the more I create.  I have some copper thread I found yesterday that I want to use in my sketchbook, and I am thinking it might be a good idea to find a magnifier loop to pull over my desk for doing small work like embroidery and tiny lines and dashes in fur and feathers.

It's the one in the middle

This is what I have in my cart to try out.   And I will give a review here when I get it how well it works.   It looks like it would be great to hold on to things and that would give me an extra hand, so to say, as well.  Even with my glasses on sometimes I find it really hard now to focus in exactly the right place close up to the project.

I am working much more in my sketchbook for the Brooklyn Art Project.  It is like these little Kraft Notebooks.  When I finish up with it I might even miss the size and need to order some more of them.

Remember you can still purchase my book 'Time in December', as well.  It is only 99 cents on Kindle, but the paper copy was larger than I thought and it turned out beautifully.  I have gotten two very nice reviews saying it 'reads so much like poetry', and that they wished to dream the poetry when they went to sleep.

 I am working a bit here and there on new short stories for 'House of Sunlight'.  I hope to have that ready to print or send out to an agent in March.  I haven't decided yet - and some of the illustrations need to come to me.  The first one came in the form of the yellow house, and I have others in mind.  The illustrations that are in Time in December did not come to me until a certain point, when I did them all in a few days.  Sometimes art is like that.

I made a ten minute sketch the other day and just really wanted to put it on this canvas.  However, I know my perspective is odd with one eye far sighted and one eye nearsighted.  I also HATE working over scratched pencil lines on my canvas.  So - last night the solution hit me.  I had done this in the past when making murals on the wall from photographs.

It is the mathematical reference to making a canvas.   All you need is a calculator (or your phone) and a ruler that measures to the eighth (1/8) of an inch.

This is the painting I am working on.  I used the mathematical technique last night to transfer bits from the original drawing.  I measured across at twelve points

in the picture from the drawing, did the mathematical ratio conversion and located them on the canvas.  Then using them as reference points, I drew the perspective in until it fit.

The drawing dimensions were 40 percent smaller than the canvas.  Because of this every measurement I made on the drawing became divided by .4 to locate where it would be on the canvas.  For example - if a point was 5.5 inches across from the left on the drawing it was located 13.75 inches from the left on the canvas and so forth.

Sometimes you have to wear your mood right out there on your chest. 

I have a shirt that says 'Be Amazing, but first Coffee' and it always gets comments.