May Update

Last Saturday I had a lovely day teaching my Intro Dyeing class. It was hosted by the Out of the Box Fibre Artists group. I was so engrossed in the class that I completely forgot to take photos, so this earthy colourwheel will have to do.

Seventeen years ago when I was a new member to this group, I was stricken with my passion for dyeing fabric after a presentation by Hilary Perrot, another member of the group. I hope that I can inspire someone else and continue the circle.

I am sad to tell you that my "design your own" class this weekend at Inspired Getaways was cancelled. Perhaps it wasn't such a good idea to hold it on Mother's Day Weekend, and also the same weekend as the local quilt show by the Common Thread Quilt Guild? 

Because I had four classes scheduled at the upcoming Salon 2018, Quebec's provincial Quilt Show, I had started playing with hand-dyed threads again. I was preparing to give a class there. Unfortunately there have been a number of class cancellations there, including three of the four classes I was scheduled to teach. I will still be teaching an Intro to Fabric Dyeing, but my Hand-dyed Threads class is cancelled. This is a shame really because dyeing thread is so much fun, but a difficult class to fill. I plan to have fun with it anyway, and as I go through the process I will take photos to share on this blog.

Here's an example of what these threads look like. More information to follow.

If I have been quiet here, it is because I have been occupied. I spent considerable time in the last weeks altering some of my favorite clothes. Due to a lifestyle change and commitment to my health I have dropped some pounds, and needed to adjust some clothing. I've been learning how to knit, and finally achieved even tension by learning how to hold the yarn. I haven't knit anything yet, just practicing until it becomes automatic. I'm also taking an on-line Sketchbook course with Sketchbook Skool. I must be doing something right because I seem to have enough time in my schedule to do some stuff for me :-)

The studio is cleaned up and ready to work in after the alterations.

My sketchbook supplies

One needs pretty knitting needles, right?

The appearance of better weather, including more sunlight, made me really appreciate the garlic bulbs that have been sitting on the kitchen windowsill. Yes I am in love with garlic bulbs! Just look at the lines and shapes, and the shadows and hi-lights!!!    All these photos were taken using the HDR setting on my Smart Phone.

I've already dyed 12 meters of fabric, in a variety of values, that will hopefully be useful in the quilt inspired by garlic. I am about to dig through my stash and see what else I might find there.

I'm also replenishing the blue fabrics in my store. I was almost completely out. I have 35 new meters waiting to be ironed.

Nicer weather, means more time spent outdoors. Nice to get out to Mer Bleue Conservation area and take a walk on the boardwalk.

I am in discussions about doing a commission quilt. The timing is very good as I've lost a significant chunk of my year's income with so many classes cancelled. I am at the "entertaining ideas" stage. Work will begin in June, and I hope for it to be finished by the end of the year. Stay tuned. I can't say more than that for now.

Enjoy the beautiful weather!

A Week in Class: Pencil, Pen and Ink Explorations

This past week I had the pleasure of taking a 5-day class. As an instructor at the Haliburton School of the Arts, I get an incredible discount on one course per year. I try to fit this class in each summer, so only a week and a half after returning from France I was on my way to Haliburton. My selection this year was "Pencil, Pen and Ink Explorations" with Marta Scythes, who has been a popular instructor at the College for about 30 years. I can see why: her passion for her subject is obvious. I know how tired I feel when I've taught for two full weeks, but Marta is teaching something like six weeks in the Summer Arts Program (four of them are consecutive weeks)!

An additional benefit of studying in Haliburton is getting away from the city and enjoying a week in cottage country. I know I've mentioned this before, but I literally feel my heart rate and breathing slowing when I round the corner and see this sight:

It is one of the first lakes you spot as you head into Haliburton coming west from Ottawa.

The Haliburton School of the Arts is part of Sir Sanford Fleming College, and is situated in a state-of-the-art facility in the woods.  I love the red front door, where the words, "Within these walls the walls within disappear", are inscribed.

Having taken two formal classical drawing classes at the Ottawa School of Art this past fall and winter, I was looking for something to further my drawing skills, but I was attracted to this class because from the description it sounded like the skills learned would assist with a daily drawing practice, something I've inspired to for a long time.

Pen and ink were the most used tools in this class. There were a lot of play exercises, as you can see from this page in my sketchbook. Of course value, along with instruction on composition and design, were a big part of the class. We did value scales and drawings to show atmospheric or aerial perspective.

When you are drawing with pencil it is easy to shade. With pen, you have to shade using lines. So part of the class was learning various ways to use lines and squiggles and scribbles and dots to shade with.  This is just a small sampling. I did note how much zendoodling draws upon the field of pen and ink. Zendoodling has taken some of this information and made it accessible to a wider audience.

One exercise was to do a small landscape showing the value changes resulting from atmospheric perspective. Then design a border that enhances it.

An additional assignment was to create a drawing and use one of the shading methods to create an image ranging from dark on one side to light on the other. The reverse was to be done with the background. I think this still needs a bit more work to soften the background transition to white in the lower right corner.

We had to do some blind contour drawings of the person next to us. My subject is "Andrew", one of my young classmates. Blind contour drawing involves looking only at your subject, but not at your paper or pencil. It is supposed to force you to actually see your subject. The resulting drawings look a little funny, but we all agreed that everyone's contained the essence of the person it depicted. Our instructor says these are a great way to begin a drawing, helping you actually see and feel the essence of your subject.

After a few blind contours, we had to draw the person by memory, without looking at our drawing. The point of this was to show us how part of our memory of an image can be muscle memory.

We had a live model for half a day and tried some gesture drawings. I LOVE doing these, as you are simply using charcoal or conte to capture the "gesture" or movement of the figure. These are very fast studies and loosely done. It seems to be one of those rare times I can loosen up with my drawings.

We were given an assignment to create a pen and ink design of our initials, and to include a creature in the design. We were to base this on celtic lettering. I don't really care that much for celtic lettering so I deliberately tried to make mine look non-celtic, although spirals are a very celtic motif. I quickly saw that my initials lend themselves well to spirals, and the curl in the Q could become a cat tail.

Our final assignment was to create a creature, either realistic or fantasy, using pen and ink, keeping Fibonacci design proportions in mind, and to design a border to enhance it. I am not big on borders so I tried to keep mine simple. 

I used a photograph my husband took in Italy last year as my reference material:

I'm really excited about incorporating these drawing methods into a more regular drawing routine. I hope that it is something that I can take with me on the road. I'm excited about improving my drawing skills for two reasons. It is a pleasant and enjoyable diversion from the quilts I live and breathe as my career, but I truly believe that drawing (and the seeing skills required to draw) will help improve my art quilts.

The other thing I'm excited about is learning more about Fibonacci numbers, or the golden mean. You have probably heard about the 'rule of thirds', which is a simplified version of the golden mean. I knew that pine cones, sunflowers and seashells all displayed the fibonacci numbers, but I had no idea how much of nature is permeated by fibonacci numbers/proportions. Tree growth, leaf growth, flower petals, and even human DNA reveal fibonacci proportions. I will blog about that in future when I've had more time to read up and research the topic in more depth. Nature sure is amazing!

I feel as though Haliburton is my home away from home.  I'll be back to teach The Art Quilt, July 22-26; Flowers and Foliage, July 29-August 2, and Dyeing to Quilt, October 21-25. That's an entire month of my year spent in Haliburton. 

Look Ma, I Can Draw!

My drawing classes have ended, and I have been working on my own. While they are not masterpieces, I am pretty thrilled that I am starting to achieve somewhat of a likeness to my subject. Our dear old cat, Kissabelle, is a perfect subject as she always appears in shades of grey and I have lots of great photos of her. This goal of improving my drawing skills is one that has been on my list for a long time, one that I procrastinated on for a long time, and one that I am absolutely thrilled to be making some headway on. It offers a wonderful new diversion from being a career quilter, as well as adding to my base of artistic skills.

In the first drawing, Kissabelle lies on a sheet of draped fabric (we drew lots of draped fabric in my class!). As I look at it now, I see a few things I want to tweak, but it is close to being finished. The original photo that was my model appears below the drawing.

I have also been working on a second drawing of Kissabelle, based on the photo below this sketch, which is really only half finished. I just wanted to share them today since I wont be able to work on them while I am away. My big obstacle is impatience. I want them to be done fast, and it just does not work that way. 

Still lots of work to do to get that arm and paw right. I think her nose is also a bit too long.

Kissabelle is facing some challenges right now ... suffering from pancreatitis. At 15, she is the last of our band of three geriatric cats, and very much loved, so I hope we can nurse her back to good health. It is going to require a diet change, which she is not very happy about. Peekaboo is stealing our hearts a little more each day too!

Drawing Fundamentals, Part 2

In December I blogged about my Drawing Fundamentals class last fall at the Ottawa School of Art.  Because I felt that I learned a lot in Part 1, and because I was impressed by my instructor, Mahshid Farhoudi, I decided to register in Part 2 this Winter. By the way, Mahshid also did a great interview with Liana Voia a few weeks ago. You can watch the UTube videos here.

This morning would have been my last class, but I did not attend since I am down with a cold. I am alternating between chills and feeling hot. This is my fourth cold since September.  Every time I travel I seem to catch something.  In September I caught a cold on the plane to Yellowknife; in October/November I caught a cold on the plane to Houston, and then I caught one this winter but I don't know where I caught it, and now I've picked one up on my trip to Toronto.  The funny thing is that they all feel like the same cold.  Exact same symptoms, and nothing a flu shot would help with because they aren't a flu. They all start out mild and work to a peak in a few days. I'm not pushing myself this week.  

I didn't accomplish as much in Part 2 as I did in Part 1. For one thing, Part 2 was only 9 sessions long vs. 12 sessions last fall. I also missed two sessions, one while I was away teaching, and one today because I was sick.

We began with still life. Many of these assignments would take hours and hours of work to do justice to, so what you see here is what I was able to complete within the classroom time.

Oh no, we did a blind contour of our hands, but only once! Many years ago I took a drawing class where we drew blind contours of our hands the entire term! I did indeed learn a lot in my recent class compared to that class of yore.

We did blind contours of our classmates.

We had live models for four sessions. Sometimes we did quick sketches like these.

Sometimes we did ink sketches/washes.This remains one of my favorite methods, and I plan to do more with this in the future.

This is my favorite piece this term. For this exercise we had to blacken our paper with charcoal, then rub the charcoal into the paper. We created our values by removing charcoal with an eraser to get the value we wanted, and darkening areas with more charcoal. A bit messy but I love the results.

Then we had a live model, which we had to sketch in three poses, roughing out our shadows and highlights.

In the last class I attended we created our own composition with the three poses, to make a piece that appeared to incorporate three women. We used a sheet of mid-tone paper, adding darks with charcoal pencils and lights with white conte pencil.

I missed the class where we would have finished this work. I missed today's class where we were going to copy a portrait by one of the Masters. I had chosen The Girl With a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer. We often copy the Masters works in art class to learn their methods, but these are always only considered practice pieces, not exhibition pieces. Due to the length of time that the Master's have been dead, most of their works are also now in the public domain. 

Instead I've decided to work on a sketch of my cat Kissabelle while I'm home sick. I love the highlights and shadows in this photo, and enjoy drawing draped fabric, so thought I'd give it a try. I will post the results when I'm finished.

Drawing Fundamentals Part 3 takes place this spring. While I would love to register, I would miss at least half the classes due to this being peak teaching season. I do have my eyes on a few classes at the Haliburton School of the Arts this summer. I remain convinced that improving my drawing skills will help develop my artistic eye and is the best thing I can do to further develop my work. I would like to make drawing a daily habit.

Just a Word Before I Go

Friday morning I am heading out of town for 10 days, teaching in Orangeville and the Greater Toronto Area. I'll manage a couple of days visiting with my sister and father in Waterloo between gigs. Tell me, how can I bear to leave this? The little blue-eyed girl, also known as "Peek-a-Boo" has stolen my heart.  Just look at those eyes!

This week I discovered a few U-Tube videos I want to share.  Remember that post I made about the show I saw at the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum by the group Soulplay? Well this week I discovered a video in which Liana Voia (the same person who interviewed me in January) does a gallery walk-about with the Museum's Curator, Michael Rickley-Lancaster.  You can walk around the show virtually here.

It also happens that yesterday Liana Voia interviewed artist, Mahshid Farhoudi, my wonderful drawing instructor at the Ottawa School of Art. Mahshid was born in Tehran, Iran, and came to Canada at the age of 16. She is mainly a figurative painter who deals with issues of identity, disaplacement and belonging. I think you will find her story to be an interesting one.  There are two videos: ONE and TWO.

Drawing Fundamentals and Zentangling

I know I've been a bit quiet lately.  I've been teaching quite a bit locally the last couple of weeks, and have one more class on Saturday.  However, my art class (Drawing Fundamentals I) finished today, and I wanted to share about it, as well as the Zentangles class I took a few weeks ago.  These are both things I've been wanting to do for a while.

I've taken a couple of drawing classes in the past.  In the first one, about 10 years ago, we spent 10 weeks drawing our left hand (or at least that is what it felt like!).  In the last one a few years ago, we were told to take a pencil and draw without much instruction.  What I loved about the class I've been taking since September is that we were introduced to a variety of materials (pencils, charcoal, conte, and ink), and we received instruction on how to use them, how to see and how to approach a drawing.  This class is a credit class in the Art Fundamentals certificate program at the Ottawa School of Art.  It gave me more meat than the "general interest" classes I've taken in past.  I've already registered for Part 2, which begins in January.  Fortunately I managed to only miss two of the fall classes due to teaching travel.

So we began by learning to draw shapes and shadow shapes.  Who knew that it might be a good idea to use more than one hardness/softness of a pencil in one drawing?  Who knew about using those blending sticks?  I didn't, but now I do, thanks to my instructor Mahshid Farhoudi.  Drawing below is a ball in a bowl.

We loosened up with some blind contour drawings (no looking at the pen and paper, only the subject) using a pen.  I found these quite fun. Students in the class took turns modeling.

 

We had live models for four of our classes.  We began with quick contour sketches using charcoal to capture the basic pose.

 

 We then tried a longer pose.

 

 I tried a self portrait.  The eyes still need more work.

 

 I think you can tell how much I liked doing quick sketches with ink and brush by the sheer number of them I've included below.  It is about capturing the light and shadows and the the pose. 

 

 

 

  

 

One of the big bonuses in this class is that we had two days of studying composition.  The Old Masters were, of course, masters at composition, so we were instructed to choose a couple of works by either Rembrandt, Rubens, Rafaella or Boticelli. 

 

I chose The Three Graces by Rubens. 

 

but ended up working with my other choice, "Moses Saved From the Water" by Rafaello:

 

It became apparent that many of the Masters works contain an entrance and an exit that leads your eye into and back out of the painting.  We studied how the eye is directed around the composition.  You can see in the photo below that I've traced lines and arrows showing the way the eye moves.



 

 We spent a couple of classes drawing draped fabrics.

 

and finished our last class doing another self  portrait.  I need to work on the eyes a bit more on this one.  Either that or I badly need some sleep! 

 

Two weekends ago my friend Sylvia Young invited me to her house to take a Zentangles class with Barb Round, a certified Zentangles instructor, from Campbell River, BC.  There were four of us (Sylvia, Nicole, Arlene, and I) and with Barb's inspiring guidance, we all turned out wonderful results.  You can also see that even though we were all given the same instruction, we produced different results.  For me the beauty of "tangling" is largely about the focus required and the way it calms and centres.  I've sat down a few times since to try some tangling, and found it very calming and meditative.   

 

 

So I have to say that the kind of stuff I learned in Drawing Fundamentals is hard (at least for me and at least at this point because I'm such a newbie), but the kind of stuff I learned in Zentangles is fun and relaxing.  I hope to work both into my life more regularly!  As with everything in life, mastering a new skill requires practice!

 

Is there something you've always wanted to learn?  How about making 2013 the year you indulge yourself?