Mother's Day gifts

This impatiens plant was worse for wear after spending the weekend in my little guy's backpack, but shortly after the Sunday morning delivery, I repotted it, watered it, and put it in the sun.
Dash didn't want to spoil my Mother's Day surprise by delivering it early!

My second Mother's Day gift was this lovely painting, with Dash's little hand outlined, holding gorgeously colorful flowers! I also got a card from Rosie.

One more thing, does anyone remember this post? Well Dash does. We camped out in the backyard in August of 2008, almost three years ago. So, what makes the cut when he draws a picture of dear mommy? Him and me in sleeping bags, in a tent. I think his caption was meant to read: "I love my Mom because she slept with me in a tent." Honestly, he's been a bit nutty about sleeping bags lately! He was weeping and cranky on the way to school last week and the only way I was able to distract him was to talk about how if you have two sleeping bags, you can zip them together to make a HUGE sleeping bag and the considering the possibilities got him out of his funk. Cutie.

The Egg Hunt

I knew my darling readers are thirsting for more art, so quench yourselves on this lovely pen and ink drawing, composed by Rosie, titled "The Egg Hunt."


If you are having trouble with the penmanship or the narrative, I believe this is her characters' dialog:

Rosie: Hey, mom I found one!

Mom: Dear, there's some more up there. (pointing to impossible-to-reach-spot)

Rosie: Okay.

The Easter bunny, pictured amazingly close to our dear protagonist, is very nicely drawn, don't you think?

While the Fox Eats his Dinner, the Siren Tempts the Kraken

Rosie and I are both taking classes at The Art League for the first time this semester (okay, the second time for me, but the first for both of us). My silkscreen instructor told us a few classes ago that there would be a student show open to all current Art League students; we could each enter one piece, no charge. Heck, I thought, why not enter? It would be a mild ego boost for me and a big feather in Rosie's cap. Decision made, I filled out the forms and we each picked one piece from our class portfolios.

Rosie chose an oil pastel drawing she made of a reclining fox, ready to eat his dinner. We have at least one family of wild foxes in our neighborhood and Fantastic Mr. Fox is a favorite movie, so she is familiar with her vulpine subject.

Mine was the second design I made for the term, a five-edition print of a kraken and a siren, completed in three passes with four ink colors. The design was transferred to the screen using a photo-emulsion technique that I'll need to experiment with more at home. The underwater scene is composed from antique renderings of a giant squid, Edmund Dulac's 1911 illustration of the mermaid from Hans Christian Anderson's A Little Mermaid (a favorite book illustration from my youth), and my own drawings of fish and coral/sea plants.

Monkeyrotica and I made plans to meet BFFs Kelly and Mike at the Art League gallery to see the student show along with all the kids after having a wonderful lunch at Atlantis. So consistently tasty, is Atlantis! After we arrived at the Torpedo Factory Art Center and while I was waiting on everyone to finish taking potty breaks, I got a call from the gallery (just one floor below us). My Kraken piece had sold!! I was elated! Luckily for us, the buyer had agreed to let the gallery keep the piece until the show closed and we could still visit it. Monkeyrotica wanted to take a photo of me with my artwork and the kids insisted that they be a part of this moment:

I had gifted an edition of The Kraken to Kelly, who told me later "You should have seen Thea's (pictured far right) face when she realized that the piece hanging in the gallery was also hanging in our house. So impressed in her own 7-year-old-way." 


This whole experience has left me wondering why I never followed this route professionally or even as a hobby. The last time I entered a gallery show was in my senior year of college, too many years ago to count. Okay, honestly, I've never thought I could make a living as a fine artist, and I'm still not sure I have the marketing stamina to make a go of not working for the man. Having artwork in a gallery—and selling it too—has been a great experience!

P.S. The "We will miss the bees" t-shirt I'm wearing was created by Tina Seamonster. 

Getting my hands dirty, at long last

Graphic designers use computers all day long at work, which is a reality that I wouldn't have easily anticipated when coming out of school oh so many years ago. When I chose the graphic design field, it was because it promised a desirable balance of tech and traditional art/illustration. Even in the first decade of my career, there were still light tables, drafting tables and markers within our offices. Not so anymore. Along the way, illustrating by hand became more or less economically unfeasible—on the computer it's so much faster and accurate, easier to make revisions, and much less messy. Customers these days have no idea what to think if presented with a preliminary sketch (I learned the hard way a few years ago), they expect to see a "final" illustration and still be able to easily and quickly make major revisions to it.

I miss traditional drawing media and the hand-eye precision it requires, the happy accidents and discoveries you make along the way. I'm resolving to not eliminate creating original works of art from my personal work, at the very least; and, I'm trying something new, a technique outside my comfort zone. I'm taking a semester-long, studio art class to learn screenprinting. Thinking back, the last art class I'd taken that was more than a day-or-two-long workshop was back in 1997. Yikes.

After attending one of those workshops a while back, a hands-on screenprinting demo, I was excited by how easy it seemed to create a lovely product from a simple stencil. Revved with enthusiasm, I asked for a screenprinting kit as a birthday gift. I gave it a try at home and was quickly intimidated by the kit. It came with too few instructions and several mysterious solvents and chemicals. There were too many opportunities to fail without any knowledge base to troubleshoot from. Even though I tried to invite some printing-experienced friends over to help me get over my hang-ups, the craft-dates didn't materialize; I had screenprinting paralysis. The kit started to gather dust.

My first class was this past Monday night. The instructor gave us some history of screenprinting, having herself learned the technique in its American heyday back in the late '60s, early '70s. We started out with cutting a simple design out of freezer paper, attaching the freezer paper to a screen, and printing our stencil using a mix of three or more colors across the screen. We got to the business of creating our designs rather late in the class, but thankfully, I'd brought a sketchbook that had some drawings in it from when I was designing Dash's raccoon doll and was able to get something down on paper quickly. Wrapping my head around making a stencil with the appropriate negative and positive cutouts for my sketch was a little tough that late at night (the class is from 7 to 10 p.m.), but I managed it. I finished seven raccoon prints and cleaned everything up just after class officially ended. (Photos to come—sorry, we were so pressed for time, I wasn't able to get my camera-phone out with paint-splattered fingers.)

I have homework for next week's class—coming up with a high-contrast grayscale (or straight black and white) design to print out on a transparency. Looking forward to it!

Rosie's Self Portrait

I'm so impressed with this self portrait that Rosie drew in her 2nd-grade art class! Mrs. N, the art teacher, was telling me how wonderful it was before I had a chance to see it, and now that I've had a peek, I agree wholeheartedly. With just a felt-tip pen and crayons, she drew a beautiful scene of herself and our family pet parrot, Weegee. I love her beatific expression with a slight smile. She's set herself in her (imaginarily pink) room, holding Weegee next to his cage (that *does* have yellow, purple, and brown toys in it). In her right hand, she's holding his pelleted food, since she's now in charge of feeding him. Around her neck is a bow, tied with her purple cape's strings, and the magenta dress with a red heart she's wearing is adorable. These articles of clothing are imaginary, although she does have vinyl butterfly decals on the walls of her room!

Her school has been kind enough to offer to reproduce this drawing on mugs, t-shirts, or journals. Hard to resist—I'll be purchasing several items as gifts!

Grade-school dioramas: How much should a parent help?

A few weeks ago, Rosie came home from school with an assignment from her first-grade teacher: an open-ended home project. The guidance was simple, the subject was the First Thanksgiving, and it must have a written part and a visual part. It needed to be directed by the student as much as possible. And it was due today.

Rosie just turned 7, and while she draws very well and likes to write stories, I knew that I was going to be helping. A lot. I was determined to let her make the decisions and try not to influence her too much. But in the flurry to finish before bedtime last night, she was upset that I was "doing all of it." So not true!! I perked her up with this pep talk:

"Who picked the subject?" (How the Indeins Helpt the Pilgrims)
"Me," said Rosie.
"Who wrote the story?" (Two pages of prose on maize farming, Wampanaug-style)
"Me," said Rosie.
"Who drew the illustrations?" (Her two pages had four hand-drawn & -colored scenes, total.)
"Me," said Rosie.
"Who drew and cut out all the plant pieces?" (Her shoe-box diorama showed three stages of corn plant, using cut construction paper and pipe cleaners.)
"Me," said Rosie.
"Who decided to make popcorn to hand out to her classmates?"
"Me," said Rosie.
"Who wrote the title on the box and signed her name?"
"Me," said Rosie.
"See? All I did was make the box and help with the pipe cleaners! Most of it was you, sweetie."

After letting this sink in, a huge smile crept onto her face showing sincere pride in all that she'd done. For sure, I was helping every step of the way, because she needed motivating to get it all done in time, but all the work underlying the diorama's theme and basic elements came from her. So that her presentation would run more smoothly and she could face her classmates, I copied her story (that ended up taped —by her— onto the shoebox lid) onto note cards. She was so very excited about the end result, she was bouncing off the walls and kept saying, "I can't wait for Mrs. Clark to see this!" It warms my heart to see her this revved-up about school work.

I'm planning on videotaping her presentation tonight and posting it up here. Look for it! I was so focused on FINISHING IN TIME that I didn't take any photos. I know we must tonight—or soon, before her brother destroys the shoebox—her presentation's adorable.

So, how much did I actually do? I'm not telling. The way I built-out the shoebox was rather complex. But she truthfully did everything I asked about above.

UPDATE: Silly me, of course her teacher is keeping the presentation at school, set up in the school library, no less! Who knows when I'll be seeing it again at home for videotaping or otherwise?

Finally, the Recital Movie

First a disclaimer. I didn't know Monkeyrotica was taping my class' dance performance at the studio's recital this summer—I had only thought my friend Brent was (who I was so happy and thankful had come with his lovely wife Chris to watch and support my dancing obsession!!) and that his camera had malfunctioned. So I was relieved and excited when I discovered this video in our archives a while back and found that there was some documentation! Honestly, the lot of them were sitting fairly far back in the auditorium and I was hardly expecting much of a recording at all.

Enjoy this dance, set to Mannheim Steamroller's Come Back to the Sea. The recital theme for 2009 was "Celebrations" and ours is celebrating a Day at the Beach. It has very fluid, lyrical choreography that requires grace and strength. In my class, there are actually six dancers, but I think you only see three on stage for the most part (due to framing), then flashes of others as the choreography plays out.

Brandi Carlile live

Wednesday night, I met a few close friends at the 9:30 club to see a live show. I really was just happy to be out—I jumped all over the invitation and didn't even check out the acts aside from looking at their promo photos on the 9:30's homepage. We totally missed the first band (doors opened at 6), but I was stunned by the main act, Brandi Carlile. Accompanied by just a ukelele and her two backup singers, she opened with a achingly beautiful song, Oh Dear, that quieted down that rowdy crowd in the first bell-like notes. "The twins'" and her voices are just amazingly lovely, powerful—I can't remember the last time I heard such range and quality, live. Alternating between hard rock, country, and mainstream pop styles, her endearing twang and friendly, adorable stage demeanor added to just how delightful the entire show was. She had us completely silent for an unplugged song and singing along in three-part-harmony for another. Everyone was utterly charmed by her.

Here is an excerpt from a performance of hers earlier this year. They must have decided to tone down the "country" for the DC audience, because we didn't hear this comedic segment or her covers of these "terrible, uncomfortable," hilarious country tunes. Brandi is incredibly talented, and just so freaking cute! Take a look:

Resolving for Fall: picking up loose ends

Maybe now that summer is over, I can consider getting back into blogging more often. It almost seems like I took summer off, doesn't it?

SCHOOL!
Rosie just finished her first week of First Grade and I think this year will ROCK!! Her kindergarten year was a roller coaster of getting called out for behavior issues. With her new teacher, though, I think things will run more smoothly in 1st. Mrs. C already told us that her teaching style is a polar opposite from Miss M, and even her classroom is set up in a more relaxed, creative way. There's a relaxation area with couches and activity areas set up with much more opportunity for collaborations between classmates. They already have art projects up on the walls and Rosie is excited about math problems (Yay!).

DANCE!
Thursday was my first modern dance class of the season, and there are a few new dancers enrolled. Four new teenagers signed up, while three of the dancers from last year have moved on. I resolve this year to keep better track of the choreography. I am very guilty of going to class, dancing my heart out, leaving, and then not thinking about it until the following week. By the time next Thursday comes around, I am banging my head against the wall, trying to recall dance steps. This time, I actually wrote them down before bed the same night. Starting off well!

ART!
Friday evening, M. Monkey, the kids and I went to see our dear friends Lauren & David at his art show opening. David's artwork is phenomenal——at first glance, beautifully crafted and attractive, but once the purposes of the wearable art sink in, an energizing sensation of discomfort and desire to participate sink in (I don't have claustrophobia and am comfortable in small spaces, so I'm always intrigued). Someday, I will wear one of his pieces; there has always been a line at the shows when he was allowing volunteers. It was lovely to see them and we all kissed, hugged, and promised to not let so much time pass between our visits. We have known them for over 12 years, but have not seen them as much while our children have been in the larval stage. Now that Rosie and Dash are more interesting little people (and we have reliable babysitters), I foresee renewing our friendship.

AMUSEMENT!
Saturday, we spent most of the day at Six Flags amusement park for my company's annual picnic. Despite arriving at 10:30 a.m. and leaving at 2 p.m., I only rode on two rides? Rosie and Dash both rode on five, and Monkeyrotica only rode one, I think. Maybe when they are older, they can run free and Monkey and I will be able to ride together once again. As it is, we spent all of our time in the kiddie "Looney Tunes" section. We went with our friends Bill & Beth, who we have also known for ages (since HS for Monkey, and sixteen years for me). We all enjoyed the lovely weather (overcast and cool is perfect for an outdoor activity!) and talked about how we needed to do more together as well. Common topic? Beth mentioned that after many friends and family have had kids, they stopped thinking of inviting them along for parties and outings, even though they like kids. We'll do better, I swear. It's so easy to make plans for friends with kids so that the wee ones can entertain each other, without realizing that other pals are being left out. We parted after a long day of it and by the time I got home, I passed out from the exhaustion of marching around, keeping track of everyone all day.

WINDING DOWN.
Two playdates for Sunday! Rosie and Dash wanted to see THEIR friends on Sunday, so we had back-to-back playdates with Ava and Brian (matched ages) in the morning, and Fiona in the afternoon. With Fiona over at our house, all the children were so well-occupied, that I was able to clean the house without being pulled away to fix this, play this game with me, show me how to use the computer, etc.

I hope to see you more often as well. There's a lot that I put aside this summer and I want to pick it all up again.

I <3 Rosie's "Slyping Byuty"

Can you see all the basic elements here? I'm impressed that she's got Princess Aurora, the evil fairy Maleficent (& Maleficent's pet crow w/perch), good fairies Flora, Fauna, Merryweather, AND the spindle that Aurora pricks her finger on.

What an eye for detail! Her spelling is just the icing on the cake. Six and a half is a fun age.

Portrait of Ernie

During arts & crafts time at Auntie M's with the kids, I took advantage of art supplies the kids weren't using and drew Ernie the parakeet with colored pencils and pastels. Rosie and Dash were occupied with painting Dash's wooden train tracks with various watercolor hues.

We intended to meet at a park and let the kids run around, but the weather didn't cooperate. About 10 minutes after we left, it started pouring rain! So, off to the crafts bin we went. Drawing Ernie was a bit of a warmup for the "painting-pet-portraits party" that we have planned for next weekend, except that it's the wrong style. We'll be using more of a waif-on-black-velvet look. Oh it'll be awesome! I can hardly wait!