Sunday, March 21, 2010

Fairy Tales To Be Told at ArtFest

This little fairy put on her magic shoes and is flying to ArtFest. She created a journal
to record all of her adventures.

Maybe she'll meet the fairy queen...
She made trades for her art friends.
She can't seem to get Alice out of her mind.
Stay tune next week to see what fairy tales she has to tell.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Portrait Studies

One of my goals is to learn how to draw faces and portraits. It's a challenge to get proportions correct and placement of facial features. Ever since I took a two day workshop from Anne Bagby in 2004, I've collected photos of faces and practice drawing them occasionally.
When we sketch at coffee houses in the winter, I bring my little box of faces and practice drawing them. To see how my drawing compares to the original photo, I scan each into Photo Shop and over lay them to scale. The drawing is on the bottom and the photo on top with an opacity of 50%.
Now I can observe both layers to see how they relate to one another.
This tells me I have to work on the placement and spacing of the eyes and mouths. With practice, these drawing will become more accurate.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Fused Glass Fun

Phyllis Solow introduced me to Kurumi Conley's glass studio in NE Portland. Kurumi demonstrates how to make a fused glass piece- pendant, coaster, wind chime, plate or magnet. She provides lots of colorful precut glass pieces and will cut whatever is needed to make a fused glass piece.
Here is my coaster before it was fired. Kurumi fires the pieces in her kiln and calls when they are ready to pick up.
The finished, fired fused glass piece looks like this-
She welcomes adults and children to her studio. It's a great place to learn how to make glass art.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Seattle Photo Crawl

Yesterday, Jan Harris and I took the train to Seattle for the day. Gwen Delmore met us at King Street Station.
We took the tunnel bus toward Pike Place Market. Our Photo Crawl began.
We met Dawn Shepherd Nguyen at the market for a day full of friendship, sunshine, good food and photo shooting fun.
Gwen made little 5x5inch eight page journals for each of us. Thank you, Gwen! Over lunch, we used our Pogo printed photos, collected ephemera, markers and memories to create our little books.
A Photo Crawl is a great way for art friends to enjoy a day together.

At the end of the day, we returned home refreshed and thankful for friends, springtime weather, flowers and fresh market produce .