Reclaiming Lost Drawings, Sort Of

F and I have been playing around with the idea of putting old button feet on our bags.  Yesterday we made our first footed bag, and I drew it this morning.  The buttons are from our giant collection of what I guess you could call Vintage buttons (only they're really just used and sometimes old buttons that people have given to us).  This is a smallish bag, around 6" wide and 8 " tall, and we were concerned about the corners wearing.  So we thought little round buttons would protect the corners from rubbing and wearing.  At the same time we love the way the blue buttons look like blueberries.  And then we heard about various superstitions and cultural beliefs that handbags should never sit on the floor.  In Feng Shui there's a belief that sitting your bag on the ground causes money to fly out of your life.  So there's another good reason to give our bags little feet.

P and I went for a picnic walk on the River Trail this afternoon and we saw some true Solomon's Seal as well as false Solomon's Seal.   The plants essentially look alike, except that the flowers and berries occur all along the stem, hanging down, in true Solomon's Seal.  These drawings are of false, where the bloom is at the end only.  it is much rarer in these woods.  On the right is a galax with its bloom.

And then I was missing my lost drawings a lot tonight and decided to try to find photographs of the wooden statues in the wonder-filled Frederick Mares Museum.  It was easy to find them on line, and I even found a gallery shot of the wooden Madonna and Child statues that I spent a whole afternoon sketching.  So here they are, many Baby Jesi (and also my King Cake Baby Jesus-- he's the one who looks like he's yelling "Hey Mistah Throw me something!)

Back to Jenny's and Her Wonderous Things

Our book club met at Jenny's tonight, and I had a chance to draw a few of her things.  Her house has the same intriguing atmosphere as the Frederick Mares Museum in Barcelona.  I revisited that place at least four times while we were in B.  As I was drawing Jenny's porcelain Baby Jesus I lamented the collection of Baby Jesi that I drew at the Mares.  I drew at least seven carved heads of Baby Jesus statues, loving the weird little details.  One was madly drinking from Mary's breast;  another had a silly leer on his face;  another was solemnly blessing the world with his pudgy wooden fingers.  Jenny's has pearly little teeth that seem to pop out of his gums, and his eyes are glass. 

On the left is a bag that F and I made for Jenny, hanging on the back of a chair.  Jenny wanted a favorite old bag replicated more or less, and that's what we did.  It's a good small bag with text in every language you can imagine, from the back of an Arcana dog food bag.

Mysteries of the Jacob's Ladder Unveiled in the Small Tutorial

Begin the tutorial by breathing slowly while looking at the moss-garden-in-a-bottle drawing at the top of the page.  (I need to get some more moss for it later today.)

I've spent several hours making a prototype of the devilish Jacob's ladder shown in the drawings below.  It isn't hard to DO, in that the skills you need are not high level.  But the tricky part is remembering the order of the steps and not gluing when you think you probably should.  It's very easy to make a stuck-together mess of things, and if that happens, all there is to do is peel things apart and start over.

I wanted a seven page or block ladder so I started with 14 blocks of cardboard approximately 3 1/2" high and 4 1/2" wide and three pieces of 1/2" wide x 40" long ribbon.  (In the actual edition I will be using clear plastic strips cut from the bottom of a shower curtain liner so that the printed images will show even though the strips pass over them.)

I first drew lines on seven of the blocks as shown in step 1.

The rest of the steps are on the first page above and on the second page, just above here.  I used high quality glue stick to stick the ribbons down and PVA to glue the plain blocks on top of the glued-down ribbons.  Try enlarging the page to better read my small and crabbed handwriting.

Last are two prints of Jesse.  There will be a print of him on every page of the Jacob's ladder, doing his driveway roll.  I carved a rubber block (that pink Speedball stuff), and here I tried out two different colors of stamp pad ink.  The surface of the blocks is going to be sanded milk paint.  This stamp pad ink (pigment style) prints well on sanded milk paint.

Backyard Pseudo-Archaeology

Cleaning out one of the backyard beds today I found a pile of shards.  This winter had apparently been too much for the little ceramic face pot that I had placed in a bank of ivy and periwinkle a dozen years ago, and I was really sad to see this favorite piece of mine reduced to a pile of broken chunks.   I gathered them up and took them inside to clean up and make some little farewell drawings before consigning the chunks to the bottoms of plant pots.  I loved the occasional eyes, mouth, ear, and cheek that showed up even partially on the pieces.

I decided to see if I could even partially assemble the face, and sure enough, all the pieces were there!  I glued it together, but I'll keep it inside on the screened back porch from now on, maybe tuck it into one of the plant pots there, and bring it inside in the winter.  I modeled this pot after a reproduction of a Mayan piece from a museum store.  I want to make another one, this time modeled after this model.

Deja Vu at the Bird Sanctuary

When Jacob was around 5 or 6 years old, he and I used to spend a lot of time at a muddy pond and on the trails of a bird sanctuary adjacent to a pretty lake near his house.   We also paddled our canoe around the lake almost every weekend in search of turtles.  Now that he's 14 we spend more time doing other things, but today he asked me to take him to the bird sanctuary so he could take pictures with his new camera that he bought on eBay with earnings from a spring break job.

We stopped at the grocery to buy a picnic lunch, and I noticed that he made a bee line for our old favorite foods-- Fourth of July crackers and cheddar cheese, berries, a cookie for him.  When we got to the pond we remembered an afternoon when we were there and I loaned him my sweater because it was too chilly for him, and the sweater hung down past his knees.  Now he's a good five inches taller than I am.  Once at the pond Jacob started taking pictures and I started sketching both the birds and him.  We saw sand pipers, mallard ducks, yellow swallowtails already doing their puddling thing, and even a turtle.

After a while we moved to a new location, along the boardwalk by the lake.  I drew an astonishingly large and complex tree (and Jacob added juice from a blueberry for a bit of color-- something he used to do when we both sketched and rubbed leaves and flowers on our pages for natural colors).  Then Jacob spotted an amazing pile-up of our favorite turtles.  It looked like there were maybe ten or so turtles on a rock;  but then at one point we counted as 14 of them slid down into the lake, leaving10 or so more on what was actually a log.

Funeral Procession for Dead Plants

P and I cleared the poor dead rosemary and lavender and heather plants from the front garden this morning.  Everybody has lost rosemary this year.   I had gone early to the herb sale at the farmers' market with Fran and gotten some replacement rosemary and lavender plants, but they were a bit hard to find as even the growers had suffered some setbacks in all the extreme cold this winter.  The bed needs to be cleared, mulched, and turned over before the new plants can go in.  After we cleared, we loaded the cart with the dead plants and took a break while I drew the astonishingly loaded garden cart.  The drawing above is of the first load.

We hauled two more loads, of which the above is the second, to the back yard fence and heaved the plants over the fence into the field.  These plants were massive!  The new babies will need a couple of years before they can begin to fill in the bed.  We think we'll move some rudbekia in there to fill in the gaps this year.

Busy Day, Few Drawings

I feel like I've been home spinning my wheels for weeks, but we really just got home 46 hours ago.  Today's drawings are a mixed bag for sure, but they do represent nice moments of a day stuffed with technology and filling out paperwork to retrieve lost things.  First thing this morning I went to a soothing yin yoga class, and while we were doing a walking meditation, I glanced out of the front glass wall of the studio from a vantage point I have never been at before.  I saw below me in the little playground a cast cement dragon/dinosaur/lizard creature that had a bench built into its back and whose tail stretched out to form a wall!  I couldn't draw it on the spot, us being in the middle of step-breathe-slide-breathe-step etc, but I memorized it and drew it later at home.

Later when I was driving home I was in a short line of traffic that was stopped for a pair of wild turkeys and their three little chicks.  We all love to hate the turkeys, destructive of gardens as they are, but even the turkeys have cute babies, and we always stop our cars for them as they waddle across streets like they own them.

P cooked dinner tonight, his take on some of the Catalan dishes we've been enjoying for the past two weeks.  He made chorizo with wilted spinach and pine nuts, cranberries, patatas frites (only his patatas were roasted), and a tomato thrown in for good measure.

And today I picked up my iPhone.  Here it is humming on the tabletop, inscrutable with its absence of the back arrow with which I am familiar from my old android and its silky sliding unlocking process and its totally different everything.  And mainly with its complete absence of a contacts list.  I have been hours at this stupid computer with the phone in one hand adding phone numbers as people send them to me.  The android was not exactly synching seamlessly with my macbook.  grrrrrrrr.