Monster drawing rally

It was great fun, a big crowd milling around and good art... what a blast to see so much art being made so deliberately, so fast, with so much good energy.
Image 1: Here's my drawing. Yet another battle scene (see Nov. 2 post: Small Worlds ). That hour went by quick.
Image 2: Here I'm making it (that's Heather Bryant working on  her small green creatures to my left).
Image 3: And there's Hal with E.A. Poe (and a problem with his brain).
Image 4: Crowd shot for context.

Most of these photos by Casey Gwinn (Thanks, Casey!).

Practice practice

Second annual Monster Drawing Rally at 1708 in Richmond is tomorrow, well, today I guess. Hal and I will be there from 3-4pm.
It's late Friday (early, I mean, Saturday) and I'm home from work and figuring out what I might draw while I'm there. We each (70 some artists) get an hour to produce work that then gets sold to benefit the gallery. We did it last year and it was very cool.
See you there.

Vegetation + light

Lately I've been thinking about lighting – I want to wrap all the trees around my house in sparkly white. These are a lot smaller than that. Adding light to beautiful paper and lots of x-acto work is making me happy.

Paper-wrapped votive, 2" diameter x 3.25 inches.

Snow on the mountains

Here's the smallest pop up I've attempted, about 3.5 inches high. They remind me of a sparkly Advent calendar we had when I was a child, how I loved the daily ritual leading up to Christmas, opening little doors and windows to reveal a treat, a treasure or a secret ...

Pop up

I've been making some pop-up sculptures lately, mostly from bad, or maybe just not wonderful drawings (of which I have quite a collection). It's nice to recycle when I can.
There's something really satisfying about successfully cutting out delicate curves and shapes. It's a no-mind sort of process, once I get the panels, elements and folds worked out (definitely a not-no-mind process).

This is a small piece, about 5 inches square when it's flattened out, made from a mixed media drawing on watercolor paper. I'm calling it Bones I, more to come.

My new favorite artist is Kirsten Stolle

Hal and I were wandering around Asheville NC last week and came across a few wonderful small wax paintings hanging in a cool restaurant (called The Junction, I think). They are sweet, detailed map-sort-of-images and I couldn't stop looking at them. Love the detail, the tiny drawing and the humor. Check out her web site: Kirsten Stolle's web site or
www.dolbychadwickgallery.com/painters_html/stolle_html/stolle61.html

Small worlds

Today is a day for organization, archiving and 'show entering.' These are three recent pieces in a series called "Soil Sample." (You can see a couple of others in the March 12 and April 5, 2011 posts)

As usual, some more successful than others – the reason I like to work in series. Underdrawings of ink pen were layered with paraffin, china marker and a few bits of color to ponder again the worlds of fragments that make up everything.

I like how the drawings seem to be progressing from passive, floating environments to more active, almost battlefield-like scenes.

Soil Sample III, IV and V
Ink pen china marker, paraffin and crayon on paper, 14" x 11"