Saturday, October 27, 2012

New Class - Adventures with Romans

Samples from the new mini-class I'm teaching, Adventures with Romans.  We start with traditional Roman letters and tweak them in fun ways for journal pages and mail art. 

I rejoined the San Diego guild, with the goal of studying with Pat Blair in March (lead White House calligrapher). 
Colorful Counterspaces: I'll play with more variations along this line.  The squirrel is a modified version of one I saw in Sachiko Umoto's book, let's draw cute animals. I modified the cheeks to be more puffy like our pet, Suzy's cheeks, which are always stuffed with as much as she can possibly hold.  My version also reflects the fact that a squirrel has claws for climbing and digging, not fingers--maybe squirrels in Japan have those? :-)  Here again is a link to our videos of sweet Suzy: http://www.youtube.com/krisandden .

Envelope Exchange - Opposites



Last month, this envelope happily arrived from Mark B Hill. Since my husband is used to seeing more light-hearted envelopes arrive for my various exchanges, he was quite curious to know who sent the "macabre" design.  Thanks, Mark!

I don't "do" macabre, although it's a goal of mine to master shading with pen-and-ink--Mark does such a fantastic job with that!  So, Mark will receive a thank-you from me with an envelope design that's the opposite of his--light and airy. These leaves were cut and scored from Fun Foam.  I now need to make some in the shape of the amber gum leaves on the lawn in my yard.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Canvas Sneakers

I FINALLY got my sketchbook back from the Spring semester.  It seems the instructor kept it, rather than returning it with the other students work.  He didn't tell me he was doing that, but later he showed it to his classes as an example of a how a sketchbook can be used.  While all the drawings are not top quality, they represent further exploring the topics assigned.

Later, after doing this sketch, I created a larger color-pencil version.  I like this one better.  I think the larger version is a little to lanky.