What I probably do best, but not what I want to keep doing

Sketch a day- day 6

I was busy today updating my computer with the next mac version and then trying to get back photos from when my computer died... I think my daughter's sweet 16 photos are gone... going to try to snipe a photo or two from people who were there.

My sketch today is something I do naturally and often.  It is a sketch of my bedroom floorpan.  It is a stupid room.  The most obvious place for a bed, between two windows is under a vent and right next to the bathroom.  I don't like that.  There is a huge sitting area with a slated ceiling like a huge dormer.  My bed is there now, top photo, but I have been bored with it.

The biggest problem is where the cable jack is is also stupid... on the wall behind the couch in the upper photo and so I can't really see that from anywhere that it makes sense to put the bed.

It is an enormous room really, just poorly planned.  The people across the street actually took half the area where we put the bed and but a wall creating an extra closet (for him) leaving only a little bump out on the side for two chairs.. it does look nice, but once again, I don't want to hear every time hubby flushes the toilet from my bed.  I guess I could have bigger problems though.

The lower photo is how I am thinking about changing it... putting the desk armoire in my bedroom and the couch in front of the TV... but we do like to watch tv in bed, so there's that dilemma.

This is a very messy sketch, but in it is my biggest strength.  I have a great grasp of scale. I can look at a piece of furniture and know it is going to fit in a room... i don't even need a measuring tape.  I just know.  I can draw a room to scale without graph paper, and still get it right.  I have a similar skill for color.... I can look at a sofa, go to the store and bring back coordinating fabric without a swatch.  I still gladly do floorplans for friends with decorating dilemma's and help pick fabric, but my own bedroom has me stymied.

Yes, I did do interior design work in a former life... when we lived in New Orleans, and also the year following that when I was just outside of NY, waiting for my husband to change jobs because I kept getting sick in New Orleans.

I gave that up to do murals,  (I still do on occasion, about one a year) but also slowly gave that up when I started homeschooling.  I began writing about decorating for websites which did very well for a while,  I even had a homeschooling column or two, but citizen journalism died hard... and now I have come full circle, trying to find my artistic fit.   I could go back to decorating, but I don't really feel called to it... it just comes naturally.  I am ready for the art gallery in my heart.

Brainless doodles

sketch a day- day 5

It's Sunday, and I really have no deep thoughts. So here is my day 5 sketch of the day.  I tried to portray a couple of celebrities, and then a random person from a magazine.  Portraits are really not my thing! Can you name the two celebrities?  

Good luck! 

Fighting the urge to delete these.  Not my best work. 

Perfectly imperfect

sketch a day-day 4

I looked at some of my work from 25 years ago today... It was in the garage.  I am going to toss it, after taking a few pictures because it is all charcoal and has become muddy over the years.  Still, there are some good things about it. I will take some photos before trashing it.

One thing I noticed is that there is a slight slant to everything I draw.  I think it is because I don't sit still and I don't hold my head still... I move around and kind of lean to one side, so there is also a slight lean in my work.  You can see it in this candlestick drawing from my mantle.  Also the middle candle is out of perspective because I drew it first and then when I moved my persecutive, I did not change it.

But... nothing in life is perfect, and interestingly enough, my most slanted, imperfect pieces have been purchased (long ago, when I drew regularly).... so there is clearly beauty in not getting it quite right.

Perfection is a dangerous thing anyway, isn't it.  It can hold us back from showing our work... I almost didn't post this.  It can keep us from moving to the next step professionally. It can keep us from doing anything at all because we feel like it might not be our best.

When children, (and in my experience, especially boys) I have learned that perfectionism often gets in the way. When my son was in public school, before homeschooling, he would take his completed homework out of his bag and leave it on the table because he would rather not turn it in at all, than to have it not quite right. This fear of being imperfect still follows him in college, and I have to push him to do things like publish the darn website already, or to just do your best at that moment and hand it in!

So, I have some question for you... What are you holding back as you seek perfection? What have you let go and allowed to be imperfect?  What lesson have you learned from these actions?

Real life still life and lessons learned

Today's art education video was on doing a still life. I've done tons of still-life's over the years, but I am not fond of them. They are always so fake and contrived.  For example, where in life are you going to find an apple, next to a vase, next to a wooden model?  Only in an art classroom. That kind of unnatural situation often bothered me when I was studying art in school.  I think the situation that bothered me the most is when a nude model stood on a ladder. Who is going to climb a ladder naked in real life? No one. That's who.

So, my still life includes items that really were on my desk and arranging them, meant only moving them a few inches so I could get them all into an arrangement that would fit on the paper. A real-life-still life.

sketch a day- day 3

Still life reminds me of that old Sesame street song "one of these things do not belong here". Remember that? I have learned in life, that sometimes it is good to be out of place in the world... to stand out like a sore thumb. After all, that was a huge part of our homeschool experience, often being the only one of our type.  Still, when we force things that don't necessarily go together into a setting, it can be unsettling and confusing... much like a still life set up in an art classroom.

But if you are willing to, you can examine these items and make sense of the relationship they will have with each other. Let's look at the items in a typical classroom still life:  a clear vase gives the artist the challenge of portraying transparency on paper. An apples give the challenge of portraying a round object on flat paper, and the artists model helps you to process a more complicated item in the background, which by the way you can draw in a more impressionistic style because it is typically further away. These items are put together to create a challenge... as a learning tool.

Perhaps that is why God places unlike things together. At some point he decided to take people from Africa and throw them in with people from Europe and other countries around the world. That didn't start out to well did it? But over time, people began to look at the relationships between us and found a lot in common.  Red blood, organs that are undecipherable from each other, and emotions that act thusly to injustice. We still have so much to learn from each other, but I have learned that this real-life still-life is not as awkward as I thought, and that all of the discomfort and feeling out of place, has been quite educational to me, and to others as well.

We still have a long way to go, but we are richer for the experience.