January Journals 16

I wish I had put this in my sketchbook I sent to Brooklyn Art Project, it was very fitting.  It was shoved in a cubby in my desk apparently from months ago.

Now Alice, my dear
you have made your steps,
each one of them so winding...
Shall we go into the castle
with its high walls of crumbling stone
and find out who lives there?
Before they burn down the world.

Wow.. I guess I couldn't think of any good imagery for that. I can, now.  Maybe tonight I'll update here and try to sketch what it should have been.

all I had time for, really, today was this
 bits in the margins of my lists and notes

January Journals #15

So we are now about halfway through January.  I've kept up, mostly - the comic counted as a sketch that day.  This is my attempt again to draw the hill by Byas Road and Macedonia, near McKenzie TN.  This is a summer photograph I found via Google Maps.  It still doesn't have the same perspective that piques my interest - and maybe I'll get out there with a camera one day soon and capture just the right angle - not to mention the red grass that is so stunning right now against the black leafless bark.

Were coming further along on the remodel - hope to be done very soon.  Lots of little details and finish work. 

January Journals 14

Simba Learns a Lesson - available here

The automatic drawing style is something not a lot of artists do.  It involves putting pen to paper and scratching out a few rough lines, without any idea of what will come from them.  Then, the artist will sit back for a moment until the faces or bodies in the picture become apparent - and trace out the shapes between the lines to make a whole picture.

The drawing above is done in the automatic drawing style.  The parts that showed through in the original few lines were the mouths of the lions, the beak of the bird on the right, the curve of the rock and the wings of the bird above.

Each of these automatic drawings is truly one of a kind.

Twenty minute memory drawing - trying to remember what that scene looks like by the red grass hill near the Rolls Royce house on the way to McKenzie.. every time I pass it I wish to get a photo but the perspective I see can only be captured from a place where there is nowhere to park or stand.

January Journals 13

waiting room
They took another tooth out at the dentist today.
This is a bit of a vision I had while waiting afterwards.. of peach and green lines encircling and taking the pain out of my head and away and back around

January Journals #12

a quick little sketch of a painting I saw in a dream..  it turned out cute enough to warrant more work.
but not tonight.. very tired

Took Esme to the Star Wars movie, and now it not even quite 8 pm and I am ready for bed
They are taking out one of the last of the nerve exposed teeth tomorrow
and I hope my cabinet has arrived

Automatic poetry


Hope in the Thicket

For all our yesterdays and all our tomorrows
we call you here before the roses
to dream of what could be a
and to see the path before you
not as a stumbling between the thorns
but as a gathering toward the light
that is revealed at the end of the thicket
for it is only a few more dark steps
here in the undergrowth
before we emerge again

January Journals #8

A plan for a wall mural.. but I'm not sure if this will be the dragon that will go there, yet.
Did a lot more today at the tile worksite on very little sleep... time to sleep tonight soon and up and run again tomorrow This is a wonderful little tool for the price - we did more than 3/4 of our cuts at the tile jobsite the past few days with this, and it was nice to not be sprayed with water in 30 to 50 degree weather for every single cut.

January Journals sketchbook #6

Ephesus Church and Hwy 77 near Paris, Tennessee
working from memory
will try to work from a photo next time, the frost on the hill and the way the sunlight came over was what I really wanted to capture, but without a color photograph it is hard to get the right colors from memory

journal today:
I want to remember t he way the sun looked over the fields coming down over the hill with the treeline dark and scattered and the sunlight over the frost in the  distance.  How the sun looked coming through red leaves and evergreen on the way to Camden this morning.  Red shining and the green soaking it in, spiky and assured.  All the little bits of rays of light coming in between.

and a challenge to see how your studio is set up at the moment...

I found it a little eerie I didn't mean to set up my paints into a color wheel, but they are.  But as always, my sense of the color wheel is not quite the same as others?  One artist tells me ROYGBIV but I see white into yellow, then of course yellows into greens and blues, and then because the purples are simply mixed, it goes to the reds, and the reds to black... and you can make brown across the table two ways - green and red or purple and yellow.. and then there is orange and blue which is usually a dark umber color or a way to mix gray if done just right.

January Jumpstart Day Five

The best pencil box ever

This is the most amazing pencil box, ever.  It has a useful easel and three drawers with lots of partitions and little locks on the side.  If I needed to I could lock everything down, grab it by the handle and go.

vintage books and vintage sewing patterns

I've posted these books and sewing patterns on mariemeyer.etsy.com   A 1963 fishing book with amazing illsutrations including color fly fishing lure plates and knot tying.  

Then there is the McCall 7302 sport dress from 1948, of which I made the skirt once and loved it.  It can be very hard to find those patterns in the larger sizes of today - and this one is bust size 38.  

And Simplicity 6824 girls size 7 wardrobe which has a wonderful pants pattern, that can be made into shorts, and a short or long sleeved shirt.


We read this Total Money Makeover together last summer and it had a lot of really good information. 

Did some little paint sketches tonight on some loose hexagon tiles

january journals #5 calico at sunrise

The morning light has come upon us. The birds are shrieking like cats out in the cedar trees. My calico is watching them, telling me the jerks and tells of their heads with her eyes. A silent pastime fit for a winter morning bundled within our nest

Morning whiskers claiming my scissors, my pens, every angled surface as her very own, rubbing her chin down along each line and purring loudly.  She jerks her head back as a blue jay swoops down into the leaves in the yard.  Small quivers happening at her jaw as she wishes to warble but does not want the prey to hear.  A tightening of claws on the edge of the seat and back legs start to pump.  Tail twitches.  The bird takes flight.  A shared glance between us, and she resettles to her claim.  Calico at sunrise in winter light.
 

I have an idea for the sunlit attic scene in one of my short stories to think about today - see if I can get it started.  I have to schedule something with a contractor for tomorrow - hoping he will call me back.  But for the moment it is off to get ready for town and then after church the rest of the day will come as it will.

I am still very glad that the injury from dropping the tile was not bad.  In fact, my hands hurt as much from carrying it as my foot does from dropping it.  Another thing to be thankful for.

january journals 4 sketchbook

Aladdin

automatic drawing sketch

Picked up a lot of tile, worked on a blanket, talked to customers and did a lot of writing in the morning... time to sleep!

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. 

Jumpstart January

January begins tomorrow, and it is time to Jumpstart.  This year I have signed up for three things to do every day, although two of them might be accomplished at the same time.

1.) I will practice my Welsh
2.) I will find an art material, device or book each day that I have in my possession and give a review or demonstration of it, either with photos or with video, and post that to share.
3.) I will do some sort of art sketchbook or project every day even if it is a small one like my friend who does a single comic pane every day.

I did this sketchbook page yesterday, it reminds me a bit of the Farscape television show I had been watching.  And I did practice my Welsh, even though it isn't quite Janaury yet.

Materials :

This was done with Sakura Micron pens over colored pencil.
Micron pens are my absolute favorite for outlining and they come in several tip sizes, marked on the top of the caps.  My favorite size to do this sort of outlining is .45mm marked with a '08' on the cap.

My Absolute Favorite Pen
Buy a Package of 3 on Amazon to save and always have one on hand.

I am also reading this lovely book 'The Book of Delights', which is a collection of essays about one or many things each day that the author found 'delightful' and how he is more and more walking through the world feeling the delight in things around him and the joy of being alive.  Check it out below.