Photo a Day Challenge

I started posting the photo a day record on my other personal blog... just because I like change.  See it here.

If it were instagram

Made with #Pixlr # - http://pixlr.com/mobile

Day 1_ Favorite Food {30 day Photo Challenge}

     I have not joined instagram (late anyways) but on Pinterest there are a lot of these "30 Day Photo Challenges" going around.  My friend [ Mariposa we'll call her] is passionate about photography and I was thinking it would be fun to *do* one of these challenges with her.  

I personally have failed at focusing on these, but I am putting up a few.  She has been doing AWESOME.

DAY ONE PHOTO CHALLENGE!!

FAVORITE FOOD IS COFFEE.

Maybe not the "Price Rite" brand, although it's OK, my favorites are most anything from Joe's Coffee House online, Birds and Beans "The Good Coffee" online and TRES MARIPOSAS! which is "coffee roasted for friends" and I call her and her two daughters my "Tres Mariposas" like my Three Musketeers. I love them to the moon and back. I died when I learned about this coffee company.  It's in Vermont too!  Love Vermont.  

So if you are ever thinking of a gift for me, and Movie Tickets seem Passe to you... Coffee from these places is a WIN.  ;P

Oh, and that Latte maker?  We got hitched back in May 2013. 

Here's the thing if you want to keep score.  I'm only on Day one, and she's on like... day 8.  I'm a week behind.  SIGH.

January

Have not been keeping up with the painting.  Nothing to be concerned about really.  Same job, same everything...less interest in painting? That's definitely it.  It has been very, very cold here.  Jasmine says, she gets all the blankets.

IT HAS BEEN THIS COLD. JASMINE GETS ALL THE GOOD BLANKETS.

I HAVE MADE THIS CUTE OCTOPUS FOR MY SISTER-IN-LAW WHO LIKES PURPLE.

IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE NOW, BUT THIS IS A PUPPET I AM WORKING ON FOR AN ANIMATION

EVENTUALLY IT WILL LOOK LESS "SILENCE OF THE LAMBS" AND MORE CUTE AND FUZZY.  NEED A DUST MASK.

January.  It's almost over.  I was trying to finish up a giant number of projects that I had started last year.  I think I finished 3, and was able to get a lot further along on a few more.  Expectations!

Artist Trading Cards "ATC" - because I did.

I have a stockpile of "Artist Trading Cards" blank of course, and I am always deifying these little 2.5" x 3.5" cut pieces of Acrylic Pad Paper.  They sit in my drawer, wanting to be masterpieces that I trade with friends and artists and just have this awesome Artistic lifestyle sipping Martini's and being posh and wonderful... but since that doesn't happen for reals, and most likely won't, these cards just had all this unnecessary mysticism, or hopes and dreams, put on them, that stunted their potential and growth.  

So I was cycling through an emotional roller coaster in my Artist head one evening and decided... I'm never going to be the posh cool Artist that receives this beautiful fantasy of give and take pen pal art making and I got pissed about being alone all the time, broke and invisible so I opened all the little packages and started painting them all the color brown that you see on the package below.  I don't like it when my life is not ever like my dreams.  Art Therapy.

This started as an assignment from the book "Drawing Lab."  A person is to make art using a small inanimate object.  I chose these that live in the drawer dedicated to pencils in my drawing desk drawer: 

Wooden Sculptures acquired years ago Mom gave them to me.   I don't know who she got them from.

The gist of the assignment is limit your color palette and only use the object throughout a series of drawings that you complete each in five minutes or less.  The rule of the book is don't get too precious about it.  The assignment is fun and sketchy and no pressure art.  I really free up creatively when I "draw" with paint, I don't really relax drawing with pencil, I can't really "paint over" mistakes when I draw.  Erasers don't really erase.  

I started with four dinky acrylics that comes-with-the-dollar-stretched-canvas-purchased-at-Christmas Tree Shops and used those to "use them up"  but they actually ended up nice flowing paints.  Ivory Black, Yellow Ochre, Cobalt Blue, and Cad Orange.   I started just using two round brushes size 0 and 2.

Then this one had to start coming alive.  I was having a great time with the assignment just being what it was, and then this magical thing happened where my imagination just started flowing through my arm and doing that Zone/Sync thing and a story happened, and an unlikely friendship happened.  :)  So for the last two I broke out all the little brushes, including my awesome Princeton Select brushes.  I used a teeny bit of white (cheater) and definitely took more than five minutes (sigh... FAIL at directions...)

EYE CRINKLES!! SIGH :) Happy Giraffe is happy.

THESE BRUSHES HAVE SOULS I SWEAR!!

The finished pieces did end up getting a proper home to my good friend Annie. I was visiting and I have a compulsive need to gift her something when visiting.  We went out to chill at the lake where I dug some sweet caverns with my feet in the sand as she talked about all things.  Annie is one of my only friends that I really listen to and don't cut in with advice too early. 

 Her husband Matt came home while we were out.  Annie had left the cards on the Kitchen table.  When we came back, Matt said VERBATIM what was going on in my head when I was making them. He was describing the little story that was on the table.  I wanted to cry... it was so moving.  I don't think I said a word though.  It was just one of those things that never happens.  My thoughts transferred into the work.  :)  "He was going to eat him, and then he doesn't, because he thinks 'this one isn't scared and could be a friend'"

It was just so arresting because he said it exactly in the same words as I had in my head.  Psychically connected, or psychically imprinted into the art?  hmmm.

I may have just teared  up.  It was pretty Magical, the whole experience and I definitely hope to make some more someday and see if I show someone and that happens again.  If I ever die I want Matt to write all the reviews of my work to let people know what was going on in my head.  :)

So here's the next batch to be painted, someday. :)  I have to get back to Val's painting!  AHHH!  :)  I must stop being so precious about that one too, and just get some wine and dimples paint already.  

Carla is cool too, and you should check out her website sometime and her art.  

Distracted by Actors...happily...must be Disciplined like a Jedi.

I'm awake and I should be sleeping.  Got caught up in the van gogh movie.  And this cute critter.

Dimples Paint.

I went out with a co-worker (who is 20) the other night and we being frustrated working part-time at a retail shop decided to go out and, well... whine like babies.  When I (35) should be getting off my ass and getting more film work I was swearing a lot about suffering through this retail job.  Like every other word.  I am proud of it, yes I am because it's better for me than that quiet thing called holding it in, or even meditating, which isn't really an outlet.  The difference that day was we were sitting next to a family in "Not your Average Joe's" and well... we were trying to clean it up with code word "dimples."

So "DIMPLES" get to the DIMPLES point already, Paintdimplesventure.

This week my main focus has been the detailed task of cleaning up my shaping, perspective lines, coloring, and my language.

my coffee went cold you can tell because it's the map from harry potter on the cup when it's hot.

I am having perspective issues with the cheese and cracker board.   It's been a little hard to imagine the vanishing line for me.  So feel free to steal the photo and draw over it in PS if you can see what it should be.  The "Ah HAH" moment has been lost on me.

Dimples Grapes and Dimples Sunflowers.

Dimples Highlights and Dimples Shading

Dimples Blurry Dimples Trees in window and Dimples more refined bricks in the Dimples wall.

There it is.  I hope to work more on the dramatic lighting this week but needed it to dry a bit before I went ahead and did some wash over the background wall.  I'm getting way more detailed than I have to, since the style is more like the reference photos in the background that I think my Aunt is looking for... but this is what happens when I paint.  I do whatever happens for a long while and then I go in and change it.  It's like it has to reach a certain Jess-style point before I can let it go and make it someone else's.  It's been happening since... I picked up a brush and dipped it in paint.

   It becomes more matchy of Aunt Val's Kitchen colors every time it's worked on, but for some reason, it's easier to have bright base colors to tone out with grays and tans later to create the sages and wine colors she likes so much... it takes a little mixing and not straight from the tube to get the subtle color with these water mixable oils since they only come in a few numbers of colors.  I'm getting there I swear with a lot of help from my color wheel :)  And all the other painter's say "DUH" but I must remember... this is the first time I'm using oils and now that I know it is a challenge to pull out the intensity of color in oil... I will be, you know... using it a lot more for my own work.  :)

This guy is way faster.  Watch :)