Red shoes 2 - In Progress

I didn't get that 14 hours I had with the other shoes so this is still in progress. I should be able to finish it today. :-) As you can see my photo is terribly distorted so I just decided not to crop it and let you all see pieces of my back porch in there. Now you can see why I pay to have my artwork photographed!

Summer Time!

2.5" x 3.5" - NFS

I guess its finally summer here in New Hampshire. Its hot and the kids finally get out of school this Wednesday. Yes they are still in school - I think we go the latest in the country! We're making up for those winter snow days now.

I love summer and doing things with the kids - we go swimming a lot at a nearby lake and sometimes trek out to the ocean which is a good 2 hours away. I don't look forward to those days that the kids are just bored bored bored though. You know what I mean - when all the other kids on the block are at camp during the day or on vacation and the heat outside starts to be a burden instead of fun. To the kids they expect to be doing something everyday but it just plain costs too much to be doing something all the time.

We get all these fliers at the end of the school year for all the different day camps going on and my daughter really wanted to go to art camp. I just can't afford to send her to day camp when I'm at home anyway so we've decided to have our own art camp - why not right? Now I can't wait for summer vacation! My plan is we go on little picnics for art camp in different places around towns, and invite her friends to come along - we eat, we draw or paint from nature, the kids can run around and its FREE! :-) I like that bit a lot!

I'm going to start that second larger piece with those red shiny shoes today! I took off yesterday and the day before for Father's Day - tidied up the house Saturday which it really needed after getting so many drawings done. MORE DRAWING DONE = LESS LAUNDRY DONE. Sigh. BUT I'm back to work and will hopefully have something to post soon!

I Heart Shoes - bigger

Here it is at 11 x 14." I worked on this yesterday from 9 am to 11 pm with taking 1 break to mow the lawn. I think that is part of why I'm fast. I get into then and can't stop. Working on something 14 hours straight is completely different than working a bunch of days for one or two hours. OK I'm fast with my strokes too but I do think there is something to having a large amount of time dedicated to it.

Carousel

What a great day today. Its super nice outside and have already gone for a walk through our downtown, which has had so much traffic blocked off because of the construction of a traffic circle, that it is such a peaceful place to walk now as most of the cars are gone for the summer.

The best thing, though, was when I got home a big box from the Pampered Chef was waiting for me by my door! I thought my mom must have went to a Pampered Chef party - but no - it was from someone who was on the cruise with me in Alaska - my new friend Fannie. :D She sent me aspinny carousel, that is usually used for utensils, to put my colored pencils in! She must have felt sorry for my with my system of ziploc bags which held my pencils. Can you tell I'm excited? Well I've already put it to use and emptied out that ziploc bag! They call it a "Tool Turn-About" at the Pampered Chef if you want to get one.

Woo-hoo! OK I'm just starting to work on the red shoes larger. I'm going 11 x 14" with them. & I'm using my new carousel too!

THE E-Word - ELLIPSES

ELLIPSE - An oval or oblong figure, bounded by a regular curve, which corresponds to an oblique projection of a circle, or an oblique section of a cone through its opposite sides.

Simple right? Well why are they so hard to get right in a piece? I was having trouble fixing my ellipses on my strawberry piece below. You can see on it where my plate ellipses went wrong as I haven't updated the image since I corrected it.

The strawberries on the plate kept on making it hard to see the actual ellipse of the plate and I kept over correcting myself. Well I figured there had to be an easier way to check the ellipse besides scanning it in photoshop and checking it on there. Here's what I came up with:

I took some tracing paper over the drawing and traced the lines of my plate and then folded it on itself to see if the sides match up, unfolded it and folded the other way to see if the top and bottom line up. One thing that was throwing me off is that the strawberries are closer to the right side of the plate than the left making it hard to "see" the full ellipse. Well I won't say its perfect now but its a lot better!