Final Moult in pen & ink

Hey, look who's actually drawing again! For those who haven't seen my whinging and generally feeling sorry for my self on my other blog, I've been trying to get something ready for a show that's being hung next week, and in my world that's the signal to become completely blocked. Doodling for myself is fine, but the thought of putting something on a wall purposely for others to see it scares the bejeebers out of me enough to ensure that all arty things come to a complete, screeching halt (that "I'm not an artist" bit on the About Me tab? Not false modesty. I'm not an artist. The thought of putting my "art" on show is terrifying). Add that to the fact that this non-painter decided to work in acrylics this year, and... yeah. No art at all until the time crunch forced me to get something done. Pressure's off now, though, because the completed piece is all I've got and I can't do anything more about it.

Anyway.

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is haunted, and I promise that there's a reason why my brain went to dragonflies.

Entomophobes (of which I am a somewhat-reformed one) would be forgiven if they were creeped out by being around during the moulting time of some species of dragonfly. It doesn't happen with all of them, but for some species they exit the pond en masse looking for good, sturdy places to grip during the time it takes them to finally exit their nymphal skins. I don't want to bore you with the biology of the whole thing (for a change), but there's a good write-up here for those who are interested in the process. For me, the most incredible part of the whole thing is that it can take hours. Just imagine the vulnerability during that time, when your legs aren't yet solid enough to hold your weight and your wings haven't even inflated (and yes, I do mean to say inflated). If that happened to humans, I don't think humans would even exist.

Geez, all these words and I haven't even got to haunt. Get on with it, Dee.

I've been around local ponds in the late spring (doing school pond studies at work, mostly) in years where we've had masses of dragonfly nymphs climb out of the pond at once to metamorphose, and it really is a sight to see. All these rather large insects crawling along the ground and up any strong vertical surface, then splitting open their skins and starting the struggle to emerge. It truly looks exhausting, especially when you see it in real time as opposed to the sped-up versions you see on the internet. It's always a good learning moment for kids, to see metamorphosis up close.

What's left afterwards, though, is exuvia. Skins, that is. In peak years, hundreds and hundreds of skins all over the deck and picnic tables of the area where we pond dip. That's where haunt comes in for me. You can walk around the place and it looks like it's haunted by the ghosts of those hundreds of animals who have all shed their water-dwelling existence for an entirely new life. If I was feeling more poetic I could get absolutely purple here, but it is kind of a neat metaphor when you think of it. Shedding your skin, leaving the things that were haunting you behind, flying away... a lot could be done with that, I think.

Not by me today, though. It's enough of a triumph for me that I got the sketchbook out. It should happen more often now that the other piece is finished, I expect. Wish me luck with the staff show.

Symmetry in graphite

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is mirror. I have a bad habit of saying "this is a quick doodle...", but this one really is. Not at all obvious, I know. The fact is, I wasn't really in the mood for drawing this evening. I did, however, have something I wanted to say in regards to mirror.

When I was a kid, I drew. Just about every kid does. You draw, you explain to people what you drew, and you're happy. There came a point as I grew older, though, when that wasn't good enough. I started to hate drawing faces.

I never seemed to get them to come out right, you see. I'd start out great, but then they'd go all lopsided and uneven and my (even back then) slightly OCD self would get frustrated. In desperation, and since I hadn't yet been introduced to tracing paper, I used to draw half a face, fold the paper, do my best to trace what I could see of what I'd already drawn, and then unfold the paper and try to follow those traced lines to get my "perfect" face.

Is this sounding familiar to anyone else out there? If so, you know that faces done that way generally turn out worse than anything. The proportions usually aren't right. Eyes are too far apart. Chins are too wide. And for me, for whatever reason, mouths were often too small. Frustration on frustration, so I stopped drawing faces.

I've since learned through taking Early Childhood Development courses that pretty much every child goes through the perfectionist stage. Just drawing isn't good enough; the drawings have to be right. In the same vein (and I notice this at work particularly), children in that same stage will be very bothered if something they've written is written wrong and there's no way to erase it. Trust me, "just cross it out" doesn't work for kids who need everything to be perfect.

It's the stage, by the way, where a lot of people stop drawing all together. I can't draw this good enough becomes I can't draw, and there's the end of it.

For me, I didn't stop drawing. I wasn't as enthusiastic about it, maybe, but the drawing didn't stop. I didn't draw faces, however. Come to it, I still don't. Nowadays it's because I really don't have any interest in drawing people, but I'm sure that the disinterest started with my failed mirrored faces.

Now, the irony in all of this is that faces aren't mirrored. One of my little biological fascinations is symmetry. It's come up here before, so for anyone who actually reads this stuff I'll skip the diatribe and say that, for the most part (and we're talking about the so-called higher animals here), symmetry is bollocks. It's "apparent". Superficial. Our apparently symmetrical bodies are only apparently symmetrical on the outside. Cut us open, and things are shifted all over the place. You couldn't sew the left side of a body together with a created mirror image and expect it to function. And even on the outside the whole symmetry thing breaks down. Noses are crooked. One eye may be slightly higher than the other. One breast is very likely bigger than the other. And testes?

Well, ok, you get my point. The sad thing, though, from the kids' art side of view, is that telling a child that a lopsided face drawing is ok because faces really are lopsided probably isn't going to stop most children from getting bad face frustration.

So what to do? Well, I'm no expert and there's plenty of expert (or sometimes "expert") sources out there, so I think I'll let you look them up if you're interested in the subject. One suggestion, though. If you have a child who's hit the frustration stage there is NOTHING WRONG with letting them trace and copy things. Sure, it's not creative. Yes, we've been brought up to believe that stifling childhood creativity by telling kids the right way to do things is wrong. It would be wonderful if every child out there could make it through the perfectionist stage by figuring things out on their own, but most of us don't. If a musical kid gets frustrated by plinking away at the piano without being able to figure out how to make his or her fingers work right, we send the kid to piano lessons. Why do we seem to expect that a kid who likes to draw but is getting frustrated for lack of technique will eventually just blunder some way to success?



Um, yeah. Obviously it's something that matters to me, and I've blathered away too long about it. For anyone still reading, well, thanks.

Maybe I'll draw a face for you someday.

A happily lopsided face.

Cattails in art stix

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is burst. Autumn's nearly here, and with it comes the bursting of the cattails into seed balls. And as anyone who's ever used cattails decoratively knows, if you bring them in the house without spraying them with lacquer or something like that, in a little while you'll find yourself with a heck of a fluffy mess.

By the way, cattails can be an important survival food if you're ever lost in the woods (or near a marsh, in this case). They're easily recognisable, and pretty much all of the plant is edible. Tubers can be roasted, leaves can be split for the pith (but that's more work than I'd bother with), and the young flowers -- the "hot dogs" when they're still green -- can be cooked and eaten like corn on the cob. They're actually pretty tasty. The pollen can be used to stretch flour, and later in the season the fluff can be a good source of tinder.

And, erm, now you know.

This was done loosely and quickly on purpose. I'm still ruining things with too many details (that's why none of them have been posted) and I've got to get out of that rut somehow. The scanner's taken a bit of the colour again, so if you'd like to imagine a little orange rather than brown in the sky and on the tips of the leaves, that'll help somewhat.

I'm going to try to paint something now. Either that or fold the towels.





What do you want to bet that the towels win?

Um... something or other in inktense and art stix

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is imagination. And in the spirit of that, I kind of just let my hand do whatever it felt like.

I know -- that's pretty much exactly what it looks like. Ah well.

Incidentally, whatever it felt like apparently included not using brushes on the watercolour ink. I was going to do a proper wash (well, as proper as it ever gets for me, anyway), but found myself holding  the brush with a very distinct feeling of meh. Ok, then, hand. You get your way. Wet paper towel and streaky finish it is.

The colours, as usual, have been fairly mutilated by the scanner. I'm just going to let it stand (ok, then, scanner...), but I will mention that there's a bit of apple green in the centre thingy that isn't showing up at all.

And why apple green? No idea. The hand wanted it.

If I had to try to describe what's going on here, I suppose I could say that my imagination seems to work in a couple of different ways. Sometimes it just seems to whirl around in circles that don't really go anywhere, and sometimes it's more of a branching thing. One thought leads to another leads to another... you know how it goes. Some branches are obviously dead ends, some branches lead to other branches, and some branches just go straight back into the whirl.

But that's really more explanation than I was planning. Let's go another direction, then and say that my imagination apparently looks a bit like the inside of a veiny eyeball.

You can't not see it now, can you? Sorry about that.

Let's end on an even sillier note, then. Sometimes when I'm cropping the scans of these things I'll put them through the photoeditor's filters just to find out what happens and see if I can see another aspect that I didn't notice. This is what the current scan looks like as a negative.

I kind of like it better, to be honest.

Maybe hand knew what it was doing...

Quick plants

 Well, in the continuing mission to get out of my rut, this morning I did some (very) quick plant sketches. Quick, as in they each had to be done before my father's screen saver came on. 10 minutes, if I remember right. What you see here didn't take nearly that amount of time.

Pretty obvious, yes, but that's sort of what I was aiming for.

Like I said below, I've been too detail oriented lately so I'm trying to make myself not be. Sticking with broad stroke media (Prismacolor Art Stix, in this case), and trying my best to give enough detail to suggest the plant to someone who may not know it but at the same time to keep things simple and quick. And notice that I'm trying to use media that don't let me erase and second-guess myself.

Anyway, here's the first couple. Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) up top and Common Plantain (Plantago major) below. Weeds both, yes, but distinctive shapes and -- as an added bonus -- both very useful plants.

I should probably explain that I led my last edible plant walk of the season on Sunday.

I should probably further explain that amongst other things I do at work, I lead edible plant walks...

Um, yeah. Briefly, dandelion leaves are good steamed or in salads. Choose the younger leaves to avoid bitterness, or put a box over a plant and let it grow in the dark for a while. Dried and ground roots make a coffee substitute, flowers make wine, and dried flowers and leaves together can make a tea. Don't use too much though -- the plant gets its French nickname (pissenlit, or pee-the-bed) because it's a diuretic.

Plantain is also good steamed or raw when it's young. It gets stringy as it gets older, though. What makes it more important for you outdoorsy types, though, is that it's very effective at calming the itching and swelling form mosquito bites. Chew on a leaf until it's mushy (and the chewing is important. Saliva contains a mild protease that makes this work better), and then just slap it on the bite. It works, I promise. Plantain tea can also be soothing for itchy skin.

Well, there it is, then. Your useful weed moment of the day. Will I do more of these? Maybe. It seems to help to have a topic. I just can't run away from the teacher in me, I guess.

And to anyone wondering why I keep using the paper with the (fake) laid lines (Strathmore 300 Series Charcoal, for anyone curious. It has the advantage of being inexpensive, if nothing else) for things like this, I really have no answer. I suppose I like the bit of added texture.

Or something.

Acorn and Oak Leaves in chalk pastel

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is tall.

Before anyone thinks that I've just pulled some random drawing and am going to stretch to make it work, I promise I did this specifically for the topic last night. No, really. I was thinking Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. Tall has to start somewhere, right?

I've been too much hung up on details lately, which is one reason why I haven't been posting on this blog. When I'm dealing with detail work I'm that much more likely to be unhappy with it, so I've been throwing out an awful lot of stuff. It's a habit I thought I'd worked myself up out of, but apparently not. Time to try to fix that. Sooo...

Yesterday, armed with the whole mighty oak thing in mind, I clipped a piece from one of the two oak trees at work (oaks don't grow in my part of the world, by the way. Not naturally, anyway. So of course they included two oak trees in the landscaping around the NATURE CENTRE where I work. Sigh) and took it home with me. And last night I spent a couple of hours making a mess. Multiple doodles of the leaves and acorn you see above. All broad stroke media. No pens allowed.

Ok, well, I did use a sharpie at one point, but it wasn't one of those fine ones.

This is the only part of the exercise you're going to see, by the way. For the most part it's crap. That's all right, though. The whole idea was to get myself out of a self-created box, after all.

And did it work?

Oh, I guess we'll see. Watch this space, as they say.

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Just as an aside -- I'm probably in the minority here, but I'm finding that the Illustration Friday redesign makes me less interested in participating. It's not because my blog visits have gone down; that's to be expected when a person doesn't have to visit the blog to see the picture. It's more because I'm finding that I don't visit the blogs anymore. It's faster just to look at the one page. Of course it is. But that, I think, is where the whole thing starts to lose something for me. By seeing all the works on one page, I'm missing the thoughts behind them. I'm missing the processes. Oh, I know it's still easy enough to click through and see the original page, but I'm much less likely to do so now.

Yeah, I'm basically lazy.

But still. It's a bit sad to think that my laziness is causing me to miss some good art blogs that I might be following now if I'd actually had to look at them to see the art.

As I said, though, I doubt that it's a majority opinion.

Lily in pen & ink

Am I happy with this? No.

I started out intending to do some fine detail work because I haven't been doing that lately, but it wasn't long before my wrist informed me that we weren't going to do that at all.This became yet another scribble instead.

Sigh.

This is getting a little frustrating, you know? Ah well, what can I do but keep trying... or go back to wearing the *insert expletive here* brace...