Little Boxes WIP

Work in Progress
16" x 20"

We had a lot of fun last week over the kids winter break. The weather was faithful to the school break aptly named "winter break" and dumped a lot of snow on us, allowing the kids and I to perfect out sledding techniques. I also was able to hang new art both in Vaughan Gallery in Portsmouth, NH and Sharon Art Center Gallery in Peterborough, NH.

Even with the busy week I had to start a new drawing. I don't know about all of you, but if I don't have a piece in progress I get grumpy and disconnected. :-) That's why I made sure to start a piece at the beginning of last week. This one will go with my new box series, although the box isn't a traditional box like the other one. This is a box of drawers I picked up from the local Fairgrounds Antiques in Keene, NH (well I wrestled it out of the hands of my friend/fellow artist Luann Udell to be honest). I plan on working on it today now that everything is back to normal and will post an update soon.

I started a new storage technique for my colored pencils that I thought I would share with you. Previously I had my bulk of colored pencils separated into color families and tucked into drawers of my card catalog, which I would pull out and set across the table when working. Then when I was working on a piece, the pencils I used would go in my rotating pencil holder (actually a utensil lazy susan from pampered chef). This was not the best way to store them because it was hard to see in the amazing pile of pencils in each drawer to find the pencil I needed or to correctly know the inventory of my pencils when I ordered more. What happened was I ended up with way too many pencils from guessing which colors I needed to buy. Now that I've been happy using other pencil brands more than those in those drawers, I knew i needed a better way to keep track of my inventory.

Wow that was a long story to get to this point!

So this is what I'm doing. Using a sharpie I labeled each pencil name on the pencil tray they came in and also put the corresponding lightfast rating for easy reference. When I am working on my drawing, I still arrange all my pencils into my lazy susan, but when I am finished with my drawing I arrange the pencils back in the box and asses which pencils I need to replace. Sorry for the blurry picture!