Two weeks gone

A lot has happened since I posted last. The reason for that is this.... I threw my back out last Friday morning and have been stuck in bed way more than I would like this week. But, that aside, I've actually made some good sketches the past couple of weeks and I have also finished a sketchbook. So here are some of the last two weeks high points from my last sketchbook. Enjoy! 

And here is a quick flip through video of my last sketchbook if you want a little look at the whole messy thing:

http://youtu.be/WsSti1RXj-Y

I've started a new Moleskine watercolor sketchbook and have also been doing more drawing and painting on loose sheets in recent weeks. I'll keep you posted on that as there is more to share. Hopefully I will be able to spend more time making art and less time lying on my back in bed this week. Only good thing about lying around in bed was catching up on watching The Night Manager, which is fantastic so far.... Did a little sketching during it too. 

Too much and not enough

Some days, when sleep overnight wasn't what I would have wished for, children waking me up at odd hours in the dark, or a late night of the "just one more chapter" game that all avid readers play sometimes, on those days, I feel like there isn't enough coffee in the world to wake me up. And, anyway, if I drink too much coffee, I'm just jittery but not more awake. It's a problem I face often. 

So, exhaustion is a problem for me, for sure. And it shows up in my art. 

Frequently. 

I usually just push through it. A cup of coffee or strong tea, a bit of self discipline, and another cup of tea or coffee later in the day. I manage to wake myself up enough to get to work on things, to get the kids to school, to make some art, to get dinner on the table. But as I make myself tea in the afternoon I often wonder: how much is too much exhaustion? Too much drained energy? How much is enough sleep each night to not have several days a week of feeling like I am dragging myself through the day? Will I ever get back to that feeling of being able to wake up fully when I get up that I had until my mid twenties and that disappeared when daughter number two came on the scene? Would I make more or better art if I felt awake? Or would I just keep drawing my coffee cups and coffee pots just because they are there to draw? I've been up since 3:30 when daughter number 3, who is 5 years old, woke up and turned on her light and informed us that it was time to get up. A half hour later, after being told firmly that we have to sleep in the middle of the night, she was back to sleep, and I was wide awake and couldn't fall back to sleep myself. Why is it that at 3:30 in the morning I felt so awake that I couldn't sleep, but too tired to actually get up? Why don't I feel wide awake 2 hours later? I'm too tired to answer these questions. That probably means it's time to go make some coffee. 

Friday musings

I recently completed an artistic challenge. I challenged myself to make art in my sketchbook every day for 60 days. I did it as a personal artistic challenge as part of My Peak Challenge. You can find out more about MPC here 

http://www.mpc2016.com/ 

MPC is basically a challenge to get healthier and more physically fit, but also to challenge yourself to break out of your comfort zone in whatever way you feel you need to in order to be your best self. 

During the fall and early winter I had been struggling to figure out how making art fit into my life. How to juggle or balance taking care of my kids, the house, my own personal needs, and make time to make art. So out of this struggle I came up with my 60 day challenge. 

I decided that one of the things that was holding me back was simply the idea that me making art was less important than all the other things that need to be done every day. I could easily put off making art until tomorrow, for instance, but I couldn't easily put off feeding the kids their dinner until tomorrow. The problem with that kind of thinking was that I have been completely miserable when I get stuck in that attitude. So I decided to take the advice of Pablo Picasso, one of my least favorite popular artists, and to remind myself that, while I don't particularly like Picasso's art, I admire his volume of work and his work ethic. So as I picked up my drawing tools and my sketchbook each day I reminded myself of Picasso's words: 

"Inspiration exsists, but it has to find you working." 

In the end that shift from thinking of making art as the thing I could put off to thinking of art as my real work, the only work I have ever really loved, helped me to see a path ahead of me that I actually feel good about instead of just worrying that I would never find the time. 

If you are interested in looking at more of my 60 days project (minus a few that I just didn't feel like showing!) you can find most of the sketchbook pages in my 60 day challenge album at Flickr 

https://flickr.com/photos/7517647@N08/sets/72157666493395382

If you want to follow my art on Facebook, here is a link to my page 

https://m.facebook.com/Nora-Allsup-Gardner-Art-1713339342284252/

My NEW Winsor and Newton Heavy Weight Paint Box... and My old Schmincke Box with Lukas colors in it

This is my new Winsor & Newton heavy duty watercolor box. 

As you can see it's got two good sized mixing areas, and one has more angled slanted areas with a deeper well to them than the standard light weight boxes (as shown below with my old Schmincke box). 

To me the best things about this box are the deep mixing areas which allows for mixing up a really big puddle of color without making a mess, and the large area in the box for brushes. What I always felt was missing from my Schmincke box was a large enough area to keep brushes as you can see my large size 12 round brush takes up a lot of room in the Schmincke box below, but I have plenty of room for 4 brushes including the size 12 round and even a pencil and a small ballpoint pen in the Winsor & Newton heavy weight box. 

The W&N box is just a bit larger, and just a bit heavier, but the design makes it much more functional to me. It can take 12 whole pans, but you could easily put in two half pans in each of the whole pan spaces and get more colors in as needed, which I will probably do eventually as money permits and my wish for other colors in the palette developes.

I got this new box from Ken Bromley art supplies at www.artsupplies.co.uk as Winsor & Newton doesn't currently sell any of their pan colors in metal boxes on the US for some unknown reason, but you can get a similar box from Jerry's Artarama at www.jerrysartarama.com in the US and can fill it with your own pans of whatever watercolors you like. Unfortunately they only seem to have a half pan version at Jerry's last time I looked, which is less useful for me than the whole pan box as I prefer to have whole pans of my most used colors (burnt umber, french ultramarine, an orangey red like vermillion or dose dore or something like that, and aureolin or winsor yellow). Another interesting thing to note is that the whole pan Winsor and Newton watercolors are not available in the US either (why?!) but they can also be purchased from Ken Bromley Art Supplies in England if you want to switch out some of the colors (as I did right away and will probably do more of as I tend to change my palette a bit considering what sort of painting I am doing regularly). I switched out winsor red for rose dore and lemon yellow for Indian yellow right away and plan a few more changes when I get some colors in half pans soon. As you can see in my Schminke box (which actually is currently filled with Lukas paints from Jerry's) below, I normally keep a larger palette than just the 12 in the new W&N box above.

 

This is my old Schmincke watercolor box which I recently refilled with Lukas paints from Jerry's Artarama. Lukas paints are much more economically priced than many artist quality paints, and I recommend them to those who can't afford the more expensive ones but still would like artist quality.  I prefer to use them with a bit of extra gum arabic (I like holbein gum arabic paste as a little goes a long way and it comes in a tube instead of a bottle which makes it easier to take when traveling).  I find that the Lukas paints feel a little lacking in gum arabic in their formulation (for my taste anyway), so I add a drop of it on my palette as I am working and add a very tiny bit to mixtures as I work which makes these paints feel better to me (more like W&N or Sennelier, which are my usual favorites).  Anyway, this is my largest selection of colors in a box that I can comfortably carry around with me, so I take it when I have no idea what I might want for colors because this one pretty much has all the bases covered.  I have smaller boxes, but the problem with the mini boxes is that they don't fit a decent sized brush or even a water brush inside them easily which I find a bit annoying.  I will do another post some day about some of my smaller palette boxes if anyone is interested in that and the pros and cons of the those.

So, these are the two boxes of watercolors that I am using most frequently lately.  I expect that the heavy weight box will be a fixture for me from now on as it works so well with the large brush I like to have with me for doing washes and mixing up the quantities of paint that are needed for such a large brush.  I am undecided about whether the large brush will stay in the light weight box since it's so tight on space for brushes. I have two size 12 sable brushes from Creative Mark, which are excellent and really reasonably priced in comparison to Winsor & Newton series 7 brushes which I have only been able to manage to get up to a size 4, but one may have to live at home as it's just too tight in the box with it in there and I can't fit a pencil or pen in there now which I am not thrilled about.  

All in all they are both good boxes, both can fit either whole or half pans which is a must for a box for me, and they both fit some brushes in the box (though some brushes need to have the handle shortened to fit in either one).  The heavy weight box has mixing areas that work better for me when I do large washes, but the light weight box works fine as long as I don't need the deep wells for mixing.  The brush space is much larger on the heavy weight box, but adequate in the lightweight box for about 2 or 3 brushes and a pen or pencil. The lightweight box clicks closed a bit tighter than the heavyweight box.  The tin of the lightweight box (as the name implies!) is lighter and thinner, while the heavy box is thicker and will take more of a beating (my old Schmincke box is about 17 years old and is scratched and quite dented in several places, though still very useable).  I expect to use both for a long time, though I may slightly prefer the new W&N one now!

Midcoast Maine travel journal

We spent the last week of August in Maine right on the coast by the water.  It was beautiful and I took several hundred photos of our adventures, but I also spent a lot of time drawing each day.  This first drawing was the view from our campground toward Cadillac Mountain... the kids like playing on top of the mountain so I thought it was cool that we could see it from our campground.

 

Ella read a lot... she stays still so I can draw her when shes reading.

 

There was so much going on that Tessa went back to taking naps a lot of days.  I drew her feet while she was napping as feet are something that I find tricky to draw... they are not too bad if they aren't moving :)

Here is the view from the top of Cadillac Mountain back toward our campground.

I started this drawing in ballpoint while Tessa was wading in the shallow water in Winter Harbor on the Schoodic Peninsula. I only got about 5 or 6 trees done while I was sitting on the beach through, so I took a somewhat lousy reference photo and then finished it up later. Drawing the trees was really meditative as they are really sort of just a pattern and once I have the idea I just put them in without really looking at the reference photo much.

I was sitting on a stoney beach when I drew this one fast and using water soluble crayons. I am not sure if I like these crayons all that much, but they were interesting to play with.

The day that I did this quick drawing we had gone on a boat from Bass Harbor out to Frenchboro and back again. By the time I had a couple of minutes to draw it was dark and I did this by flashlight at the picnic table as the mosquitoes started to eat me.  I finished it in about 10 minutes flat as I slapped mosquitoes!

4 color ballpoint a the laundromat in Millbridge.  Finished in the time it took to wash our clothes mid week.

We found tons of apple trees by the roadside and brought two bushels home to turn into apple butter for the winter. 

The kids liked a little spot called Blueberry Hill.  They found more blackberries than blueberries there though!

I bought myself this lovely winsor and newton series 7 brush while we were at a great little store called the Naturalist's Notebook.

I started this little watercolor sketch sitting in the parking lot at Thunder Hole near Bar Harbor, but didn't get time to finish.  Again, I snapped a blurry reference picture and came back to it to finish when I got home. Below you can see the colors that are in my new Winsor and Newton heavy duty watercolor box, which will get it's own post in the next few days for sure as I really like it and will be using it for a long time I am sure.

It was good to draw every day.  This isn't all the drawings I did at all, there were many more than I want to post all at once.  But these were my favorites.