Workin on getting my groove back.

I have mentioned it before, when I take a break from drawing or painting I have to practice to get back into the creative groove.  Then when I am being creative I need to play at it every day.  Does that happen to you too?

Drawing zentangles is a great way to practice.  Control of your pen is so important, lots of tiny little lines, balance, composition, repeat, repeat, repeat.  All good for getting back into Creative Shape.

Another thing I do to get back in shape is Pinterest!  Who hasn't found it yet?  It's been called the biggest time suck on the computer but I still love it, especially for ideas.

Find a few like minded people on Pinterest that love to share their pinterest posts and repost them to your page.  When you need inspiration all you need to do is look over your boards.  Just be sure not to copy, that isn't nice.  Oh, I know that they say there are no original ideas but at least try to make it your own and give the artist who inspired you credit for the style.

Another thing I like to do to get inspired is to go through my favorite blogs.  There are so many great ideas, wonderful artists and many of them are so generous.  And a bonus, many have posted  tutorials on how they make their art so I can see all their newest ideas.

Check out rappy-art.blogspot.com for a great tutorial about drawing mandalas.

Iamthedivaczt.blogspot.com is another blog that I go to for inspiration.  She posts a drawing challenge every monday and zentangle artists from all over the world post links to their drawings.  Her challenge this Monday was to use 2 zentangle patterns, Mooka and Assunta and make a drawing with them.  I took her challenge and created my fish at the top of the blog.  Mooka are the fins and Assunta are the scales.

I sat down on the couch last night with my old Zentangle pattern book, a piece of 9 x 12 bristol paper and a fine point Sharpie.  The fish happened and it felt great to get my groove back.

It' ain't pretty but it's home.

It's been a great summer and I kept very busy though not so much with my Art supplies.  Instead I got creative with a hammer.  We put an addition on our old, old cabin. Then we finished off the inside and added some charm. I think it will work just great as our little home while we build our new house next summer.  It isn't pretty but we are going to call it home.

We started with a 12 x 20 foot bedroom/storage addition and that turned our one-room cabin into a 3 room cabin!  

 That is me putting the sheeting on the roof of the addition.  It was a very hot day but at least the mosquitoes couldn't find me up there.

My farmer is taking some measurements to fill in the top of the addition walls.  It's an odd way to do the roof but that is how the original cabin was done and we decided to keep it the same.  Near as we can tell the old cabin may have built back in 1940's.

I'm such a fashion statement when I'm working!  But baggy pants are comfy when you are up and down a ladder and the boots, well they help my old feet from getting sore with all the climbing.  I'm putting the last board up on the wall in the bedroom.

We made the boards for the walls with the trees that had to be cut down in order to make our road.  One of the first things we did when we bought the land was set up a little saw mill.  What we don't use for lumber we will use for heating our home.

When we bought it, the walls in the cabin were an assortment of old, used wall panel.  It was so ugly, put up in any and every direction, nothing cut to fit but laid one on top of the other to cover any holes.  Once we covered it with our pine it all looked great!

                                                         We love to Reuse and Recycle.

The wood stove was thrown out by it's last owner because the glass door had broken. Bernie fixed it with a piece of metal.  The old microwave cupboard got new pine boards in the back to hold it together.  We salvaged the carpet from an office building.  Bernie thinks the chrome kitchen table may have belonged to his Grandmother and I added some color with a blanket we bought in Mexico. I dyed some lime green curtains I found at Value Village blue, now they match my old denim quilt so we used them in the bedroom to close off the closet and cover the door and window.  Actually there is very little that was bought to furnish this place.  It's amazing how much stuff you have once you start looking.

Konrad and Elizabeth, My farmer's Great, Great Grandparents.

We found these old pictures while cleaning out one of the old building on the farm.  It seemed a shame to see them all covered with dust and neglected so after a little cleaning we hung them in the dining room.  We want to do some investigating and find out as much as we can about them. It will be a mystery, history quest for us.

This is a pretty small space compared to what I'm used to in a kitchen.  No stove/oven so I will have to make do with a bbq, hot plate, crock pot and electric fry pan while we are building.  

Anyone have recipes they want to share? I need to get pretty creative or we are going to be eating a lot of bbq hamburgers for the next year or more! 

I didn't take a picture but I did set up an area in the back storage room as my Stu Dee O.  If I get any time next summer I will at least have a place to be creative.  I have a feeling though, that my creative energy will be directed at making our new home unique and interesting.  Ideas are already running through my brain!  

Time to go, again!

Well, tomorrow, if nothings go wrong, and it's been going wrong a lot lately, My farmer and I should be headed to our little "grainery with windows"  aka. our cabin.  We will be there until we have to come home to harvest.  We are planning to move there permanently next spring so that means packing up the farm and moving it 4 hours north.  After the farm auction I will be changing My Farmer's name to My Sawyer as we plan on operating a small saw mill in our "retirement".  

Today we loaded our semi tractor trailer with lumber, insulation, the mower, a back hoe,  and 2 - 4 by 8 foot and 32" high already planted garden boxes. I will let you know if the veggies make the trip, I'm not holding my breath but nothing ventured nothing gained!












The most important thing I packed today was my Art supplies.  Like I said in the last blog, they go where I go and I have them all nicely tucked into a smallish cart, organized and ready to get back to my Color Love lessons once I get those garden boxes situated in a sunny spot.

I will send you a picture once I have my Stu Dee O set up again!  

Catch you later!

Lori

My Stu Dee O could have blown away.

Between our home in Texas, the mobile home on the farm and the one room cabin, where we plan to build our dream home,  I do a lot of moving of my art and craft supplies.  They go where I go and I go a lot!  Each home has an art space and the guys around the farm like to tease me about my "Stu Dee O", (studio).  I don't care about the teasing, only about finding a nice comfy, inspiring space to do my work.  

There was a wonderful old barn in our yard that My Farmer's kids had fixed up into the ultimate party place.  Well the kids parties have slowed down now that they have gotten older and the Party Barn became the junk and old furniture depot. I suggested that we should have our own party and invite all our friends so MF and I hauled out all the junk, cleaned  and washed the floors and windows and then we celebrated.  

When the celebrating was over and no one was looking I slowly moved  my easels, canvas and paints up stairs into the newly spic and span loft.  I set up in front of the huge patio door and had all the natural light I could use.  I had tons of room to spread out and I thought I had found a great place for a Stu Dee O.  There was one really annoying problem with painting up stairs in the loft of the barn in front of the patio door.  When the wind blow that window whistled, I mean it really made a racket.  I could hardly stand the noise so now not only was I limited to finding the time in a day or a week that I could spare to go paint but it also had to be a day with no wind.  Days with no wind out here on the Saskatchewan prairie are very few and far between and I stopped painting.....

I just can't stop being creative though and discovered zentangle drawings.  A pen and some paper is all I needed and I can handle that on the kitchen table or my computer desk.  Unfortunately, I didn't stop at just one pen, I had to get a whole bunch and then try some Tombow watercolor markers and some Copic alcohol ink pens, oh, and then I dug out my wonderful, old set of Prismacolor watercolor pencils.  I took some art classes and needed more stuff, like pan pastels, Inktense pencils, Peerless watercolors and a whole bunch of inks in spray bottles.  I out grew the computer desk but couldn't stand going back out to the barn again with all that noise so I set up my new
Stu Dee O inside our little home and dreamed of the space I was going to have once we build our new house.

               Yesterday there were 8 confirmed tornadoes in southern Saskatchewan, where we live.

I don't believe it was a tornado that hit here but it sure scared the crap out of me.   The wind did a lot of damage, though not near as bad as it could have been.  What it did do was blow the patio door in the loft of the barn in and glass shattered all over the place. The wind also peeled off the barn's tin roof and blew out the other barn windows.  Our yard's a real mess but if I had left my Stu Dee O set up in the barn loft I would have lost all my pens, paints and drawings.

                                               My farmer, me and all my art supplies are safe.

Bazaart is over and now it's time for summer

I have been preparing for Bazaart, http://www.mackenzieartgallery-bazaart.ca/  the huge outdoor Art show at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, since early January.

I am not new to Art and Craft shows, I have been selling my creations since the mid 80's and have tons of experience setting up and tearing down booths, displaying my work to it's best advantage and helping customers.  I love to talk to the other artists and to the people that are interested in learning more about my work. They all inspire me to keep creating art.

What I am new to is "Outdoor" art shows.  Outdoors in Regina, Saskatchewan means wind, wind and more wind. 

Last year at Bazaart the weather was so terrible that I could hear pottery and stained glass smashing to the ground in the booths around me.  It was awful and I was very glad that my acrylic paintings bounced and the mud could be wiped off with little or no lasting damage.  This year I was taking fewer acrylics and more watercolors so I made sure that every painting was sealed in a protective cover and I had super strong clips to attach them to my display boards.

The show was on Saturday.  The 3 days before the show it rained... they said Saturday was going to be sunny but then rain again on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.  What were the chances that the weather man would actually get it right?  

Slim chances is what I though and I was not surprised when I woke up at extra early on Saturday morning  to rain.  I packed the truck in the rain, drove the hour to Regina in the rain and unloaded my tent and displays in the rain.  Then as I was setting up my tent the rain stopped, the clouds lifted and I had great hopes....until the wind started blowing.  

My darling daughter, Jen, came to help me for a few hours before she had to go to her real job and we had the tent up and were putting the displays together when the wind blew our tent right over.  It was upside down on the lawn beside our booth space.  Thank goodness we had no one on that side of us or we would have wiped out their entire display.  We got things back together, screwed everything to everything and weighed down all the corners.  Then when the art was all hung we assumed the position.  Jen holding down the 2 tent corners on the right and me holding down the 2 tent corners on the left.  

Let the show begin!

The crowds came, saw, enjoyed, bought and by 5 pm they were all gone. 

I now have fewer paintings but more money (to buy art supplies, of course). I talked to some interesting people and saw some strange ones, like the funky lady with grey hair, except where she dyed it purple and the guy in the skirt and the 5 ladies shopping together, all wearing sparkly, red boots.  It was a fantastic people watching day.  

I was packed up and had everything in the truck by 6, was home with a large, loaded pizza by 7:30 and in bed by 9:30.  

Five months of painting, one day of selling and it's all over for another year.  

Do I have time for another class?

Well I did it, I said I wasn't going to, but I did anyway.

I signed up for Joanne Sharpe's new on line class.  This one is called Color Love.  I have already finished her other two, Letter Love and Artful Alphabets.  I just couldn't resist this one, I mean really, it's about Color and I love Color!

I may not manage to get all the lessons done, 25 of them for $35.00.  They are posted, Monday, Wednesday, & Friday for 5 weeks, but they will be up and available forever, so if summer gets busy I will just save them for a rainy or quiet day or when I need a little art fix.

The first lesson was all about getting familiar with your stash of coloring supplies.  I made color swatches of my paints, pens and inks.  I also did charts that I can hang on the wall in front of my work space.  That gives me a great visual aid to go to when I'm looking for just the right color to add to my art.

A bonus from this lesson is my crafting area got organized and I found paints that I had forgotten I had, pulled them out, tried them again and now have some "new again" favorites. One of them is Spanish Orange!  That is a color from Prismacolor and I have Spanish Orange in a watercolor pencil and a pencil crayon.  It is such a vibrant yellow and I know it will go great in many of my new pieces, but honestly, before I did the color swatch I never used it.

I look forward to many more "Ah ha" moments during these classes, they have all been great fun and I have no doubts in my mind that this one will be just as wonderful.

I'm Certified!

For the past two days I have been immersed in Copic Markers.  Up to my elbows in VB000's, R25's, B12's and the other 341 colors.  I colored and shaded and learned how to air brush.  I can mix colors for the perfect skin tone, add the perfect highlights and shadows to a bouquet of flowers and mix the hard to work with reds to make a perfectly colored Santa Claus.  I learned everything you could possibly want to know about how Copic alcohol ink pens work and why they are so popular among papercrafters and illustrators.

I got to meet some very enthusiastic ladies, most of which were stampers or scrapbookers, something I know almost nothing about but they take very seriously.  After seeing samples of their finished pieces and how hard they work to put together their pages I understand that craft a whole lot more as well.

I now can put my new found knowledge to work on my own drawings and have another option for coloring in my lettering.  All that remains is for my order of pens to arrive.

Hurry up Mailman, before I forget everything I learned!