Oh, Christmas Tree!

"December Evening"

 

One positive aspect of dealing with a pandemic is that it pushes people to be creative in connecting with each other.

In November, one of my friends asked if I would try teaching a short mini-class on painting using the App, Marco Polo. Instead of sending texts, this app allows people to leave videos for each other. I've often wondered what it would be like to teach a painting class, so I decided to give it a try.

Tiny Sketch, 2 x 2.5 inches

I chose a lighted Christmas tree outside with a twilight sky as our subject. Simple, right? Just one triangle shape with a dark background and some lights, how hard could it be…and so began my innocent journey into the thick of the woods.

Tiny Sketch 1.5 x 2.25 inches

 I’ve never actually broken down my painting methods into steps so that someone else could follow me before, and I soon found that taking apart what I do was quite the challenge.

Figuring out the palette is often my first and favorite step, but this time I also had to think about palette colors that would be really common to find and versatile for beginning painters to use. 

 Cadmium Red, Cadmium Yellow, Ultramarine Blue, Titanium White

I painted a couple of sketches using the basic colors of Cadmium Red, Cadmium Yellow, Ultramarine blue, and Titanium White. Then I went on-line and looked for paint sets that would include those colors, but many used Cobalt blue instead of Ultramarine blue and the red and yellow were listed as “primary” colors.  Goodness, what should to tell people to buy?

Painting Sketch, 5x7 inches, using Cobalt blue.

This led me to make more sketch paintings using Cobalt blue to see if it that color would work instead. Soon I found myself down a whole color theory rabbit-hole, testing out “color bias” combinations of warm red, yellow and blue compared to using a set of cool red, yellow and blue. This topic deserves a whole blog post of it’s own.

Warm biased palette.

 

Cool biased palette.

 

My biggest concern being that my initial palette choice was wrong and would make painting harder for other people because I used a “cool” blue with a “warm” red and yellow. Seriously, this kept me up at night and I wasn’t happy until I had tested all the options. It turned out that I still liked that initial palette best after all, even if it didn’t follow the “color bias” theory. Well, that is creativity, sometimes breaking the rules makes the best art.

Pine Tree Basics

Next, was breaking down the drawing. One friend said she could barely draw a circle, so I told her not to worry because we would be making triangles! I measured and marked every shape so that I could explain how to get the tree and it’s branches placed correctly.

Since we were only using red, yellow and blue, I made one video on color mixing. I was amazed that it took 40 minutes to explain and my poor iPhone got really hot doing all that recording!

Then, it was the painting steps. Goodness, I think I made three or four sketch paintings to make certain I could explain and show everything in order. Yes, I wrote the steps down, I needed those reminders for when I actually made the final video.

Figuring out the steps!

As a side note, I believe that some of the quick, tiny sketches I threw together are much better paintings than the larger sketches I spent a lot of time making. It is annoying to me that I have a hard time capturing that spontaneity in larger artwork.

Tiny Sketch, 1 x 1.5 inches

 

I did feel the pressure when making the final painting on camera, it was an odd feeling to be watched while doing something that has always been a solo project. Overall, I'm pleased with how the video and painting turned out, although the next day I could see the blue shadows should have been darker on the snow. So far, I have resisted the urge to repaint that section. 

I've certainly gained an appreciation for all the extra work those artists I grew up watching on t.v. must have done to make painting on camera look so easy. A respectful bow to Bob Ross, Bill Alexander and Helen Van Wyck!

Happy Creating!
>^-^<

Tina

Summer Sketchbook Tour

Summertime and the flowers are blooming! Perfect for inspiration, sketching and testing out ideas. Often I will have other creative friends comment that doing my detailed type of sketching process takes too much time. 

They are partly right and I used to skip over it myself because it is incredibly tempting to just start putting those wonderful colors down on paper or canvas. Admittedly, I still skip sketching sometimes if I'm pressed for time or feeling particularly confident, but I know full well there may be consequences in the form of frustration, wasted art materials and lost time trying to fix mistakes. 

Even a simple palette color test is worth the time because of that nice feeling of certainly going forward, plus I think they are fun to do.

Here are some of my color sketches from this year and what I learned from making them...

Yellow flowers are my nemesis, for some reason I always struggle with getting the right shadow color to get the sense of light shining through their petals. I thought a simple palette of Benzidrine Yellow, Cadmium Orange, Burnt Sienna and Cobalt Blue would provide enough shadow depth, but the flower still looked flat. In essence I had several "yellows" and a blue, and it took adding a "red," Alizarin Crimson to finally get the deep warm brown I was looking for.

 

 

Figuring out what color combination I like the best is another way I use my sketchbook.

Did I want to use Napthol Red to make the peachy tones in the pink roses or would I be happier with mixing Permanent Rose and Cadmium Yellow? 

I circled the Green Gold, Sap Green and Prussian Blue after I decided they were my favorite mix for the leaves. This sketch also helped me notice that the greens were a bit cold and I would need to mix them with some Permenant Rose to warm them up a bit.

 

 

My goal here was to practice painting a really dark purple iris. I thought I knew what colors would get the result I wanted, but I was rather disappointed with the lack of depth and the whole thing felt too cool. I knew adding yellow to warm things up would only make the colors gray, so I turned the page and tried again...

 

 I searched on-line for a little bit of help and had a genuine "aha" moment when I saw the suggestion to mix the purples with Burnt Sienna! Of course, a warm deep yellow/red that was a perfect solution!

 

 

Here's an example of my color mixing instincts being right on target. I wanted to be certain to mix the correct greyed purple for the shadow side of the pink iris petals. The first combination I tried were Cadmium Red and Prussian Blue and they were exactly what I was looking for. Adding Benzidrine Yellow made it possible to mix a light green and the right shade of orange and peach. 

I love it when a palette comes together so easily and with only three colors plus white. It feels like an elegant solution.

 

I was feeling very uncertain about which paints to mix for an evening winter scene with pine trees, so I created this little grid to solve my problem.

The top row has the colors I was fairly certain I wanted to use. The second row mixes all those colors with Cobalt blue and Titanium white. The third row mixes all the top row colors with Pthalogreen and Titanium white.

Having these colors to refer to was really helpful in making my final painting.

 

 

Here it is, an example of me diving head-first into making a painting without a "sketchbook first" test. This photo doesn't really capture it, but I originally painted the shadow colors over the bottom rose petal and leaves way too dark and I was really bummed when I realized what I had done.

 

 

No one will notice now, but I can tell you I spent a lot of time repainting with lighter colors and glazing over those areas with thin color washes to lighten up that dark section. Acrylic paints are so forgiving!

I hope these few examples have demonstrated how fun and helpful solving creative problems in a sketchbook can be.

 

Happy Creating!

>^-^<

Tina

p.s.

For those of you wondering what happened with my eyes, the good news is the medicine helped and by May my right eye was better. Hurrah. Then in July, the same flock of floaters showed up in my left eye! Sheez! At least I knew what it was and was able to start the same treatment quickly for my left eye. 

After dealing with too many other bizarre health issues all spring and summer to mention here, I was finally diagnosed with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis in August. There may be some connection to that auto-immune disease affecting my eyes. I am hopeful that now I am getting treatment for that, my eyes will be healthier too.

 

 

 

One Magical Night in June

 One of my great joys of living on a mountain side was getting acquainted with the wild flowers that naturally grew there. Living at 8,000 feet has a demanding set of growing conditions: hot in the day, really cool at night and a short growing season.

I found this entry in my journal from June 9, 2001 and decided this was the perfect time to share it with you. The sketches and painting were created this spring.

"...I sat outside the other night and just loved the moonlight on the wild white primroses. They only bloom at night and are so heavy sweet and exotic that they don't seem to belong on this dry mountainside.

 Yet, they are part of this place, like the surprising sweetness of these mountains distilled into those little golden hearts, 

...but they close and wilt with the heat of the morning sun, they can only be enjoyed in the cool of night.

If I didn't live here, I wouldn't know about them. They are a bit of a hidden secret.

As I came up the steps to the studio that night, the little glow worms were out, another bit of mystery. They glowed a beautiful neon green like little runway lights guiding me on my way to my room.

It was a magical moment and I rejoiced in the beauty of that night."

"They Only Bloom at Night" ©2020

Happy Creating!

>^-^<
Tina

p.s. There are a surprising number of variations of Evening Primrose growing in the southwest! This link goes to the variety that looks the closest like the flower that grew on our mountainside, Oenothera Caespitosa, Tufted Evening Primrose

Little Trouble Maker

Home Sweet Home

I remember how nervous I was about moving onto our new piece of land in the mountains of New Mexico in 1996. I was excited to live in the forest, but also nervous about bears and possibly mountain lions confronting me on the way to the outhouse. It seems funny looking back now, because we did see a bear occasionally but we never had a mountain lion or even a bobcat bother us, what I should have been worried about were the much smaller animals!

One late fall afternoon, I had the door to the trailer open to enjoy the mild weather when I noticed something about the size of a small cat with tan brown and white fur scurry across the ground outside. It went from under one of our vehicles to hide behind some plywood we had leaned against the storage shed. Jeff was outside, so I asked him if he saw it. He moved some of the plywood and out popped this animal I thought looked like a Chinchilla. It had large eyes and ears and a somewhat fluffy tail. It was kind of cute, but what in heaven’s name was it?

To get a better look at this critter, Jeff set out a few pieces of cat food in a dish and we quietly waited to see if it would come out from under the VW bus and eat the food. It did come out, and quite brazenly too, especially since it was late afternoon and it would have been highly visible to any hunting hawks.
 

White-throated Woodrat, quick sketch

 
Even after a good look, neither one of us was completely certain what it was, so the next time we went down to town to use the computer at the library we searched on-line. (Note: At this point in time, we didn’t have a phone line to our property, there wasn’t cell phone service and we certainly didn’t have a personal computer.) We found out it was a white throated wood rat, often called a pack rat. They could be found living at high altitudes, in rocky terrain and ponderosa forests. Okay, we could check all three of those boxes! Now we knew what the critter was, but we had no idea that a battle of wits had just begun.

One night about 3:00 am, we heard loud scratching noises in the ceiling just above our heads. What was that? Jeff went outside to check but couldn’t see anything. He banged on the ceiling and the noise stopped for awhile but soon those scrabbling noises started up again. It sounded way too loud for a mouse, good heavens, could that possibly be the wood rat?

The walls and ceiling of the 1972 Prowler RV trailer we were living in were made of thin plywood with about a 2 inch layer of insulation between that plywood and the outside metal skin, even rain and hail storms were noisy, but good grief, it was hard to sleep with some large rodent up there making those annoying sounds just above our heads. It would settle down and we would drift off to sleep, only to be awakened again by that scratching! I still remember the vivid dream I had one night of seeing that wood rat’s face peering down on me after I dreamed it had gnawed a hole through the ceiling. Yeeesh.

The next morning Jeff went on the roof and noticed that the vent for our propane stove was the entrance point. He had put window screen over it previously to keep birds out, but this animal had chewed right through that, so he cut a small sheet of expanded metal mesh and attached it over the vent. Perfect.

That night, the scratching sounds started again! Good grief, we had inadvertently trapped the thing in! Sigh, we hadn’t given enough thought about this being a nocturnal animal. We couldn’t use poison, we didn’t want it dead in our walls, so how were we going to get it out? Jeff took the metal screen off and then spent the next few nights waking up at 3am to put it back on after all seemed quiet. We thought he could block the wood rat out after it had gone out to search for food. Nope, nope and nope!

Eventually Jeff came up with a different tactic. The pilot light for our propane fridge was accessible from a small hatch on the outside of the trailer. This hatch was long and narrow, about 16 inches long and 4 inches wide. When he took the hatch off, we could see by the poo-pellets left behind that our wood rat had been to that part of trailer. Great! Jeff decided to leave the hatch off hoping the wood rat would leap the 4 feet to the ground or jump over to the small juniper tree trunk that was only a little over a foot away from the side of the trailer. Problem solved.

Nope. That night we could still hear our unwanted “upstairs” neighbor moving around in the ceiling! That wood rat had moved in with us and wasn’t taking any of our hints to leave.

Follow the Trail, please!

 
 Jeff wasn't defeated yet, he took that long hatch door from the trailer and made a temporary bridge by balancing one end from a knot on the juniper tree’s trunk and resting the other end on the lip of the open hatch on the trailer. Then the best idea of all, he put a line of dry cat food pieces along his makeshift gangway.

We got into bed carefully that night, making certain we didn’t shake the trailer too much and undo Jeff’s handiwork. Generally, it’s not great to be awakened at 3:00 am, but it was the best thing in the world to hear that small piece of metal slap the side of the trailer and fall. After a few moments of celebration, we debated if it was worth going outside in the cold to put the cover back on the hatch. Jeff decided he wasn’t taking any chances and went outside and put the hatch cover back in place. Thank heaven he did.

We had just settled back down under the covers and started feeling sleepy when we heard the most unsettling thing of all, the sound of a wood rat’s tiny toenails scraping down the metal siding of the trailer! It was trying to get back in by leaping from the juniper tree and aiming for the once open hatch! Yikes!

It gave me such an eerie feeling that this animal was so determined to get what it wanted and it was my first inkling that I had underestimated what the smaller wildlife we were sharing this mountainside with were capable of.

Happy creating!
>^-^<

Tina

p.s. My right eye has been fairly stable as long as I keep using the steroid eye drops, still no diagnosis as to why I have this condition. I only have the MRI test left to do, but with the current Covid-19 virus trouble, that may take awhile to schedule.

A Change of Vision

Normal view, driving on a sunny winter's day in Nevada.

February 7th I was working on some sketch ideas for my brother who had asked me in December about illustrating a short story-poem he had written. I was making some mini test paintings and as the room I use for my studio filled with bright afternoon light, it seemed like something was going very wrong with my eyes.

There was an unusual amount of black dots, “floaters” is what they are often called, appearing in my right eye. It seemed like I was looking through a strip of black pepper flakes. Plus, everything seemed more blurry, like I couldn’t quite focus my eye.
 

Illustration of the floaters and blurring inside my eye.

 My heart was racing as I called the ophthalmologist, of course this had to happen after office hours on a Friday. I left a message and tried not to panic.  

Last spring while dealing with the usual round of allergies, I had my first change of vision. I woke up one morning with what looked roughly like a faint circle of black dots suspended in a kind of thick gel in my eye. This annoying mass kept drifting in and out of the center of my vision, making it really challenging to see clearly.

I made my first appointment with an ophthalmologist in over 30 years.

What had happened in my right eye is called a “vitreous detachment”. It seemed terrifying, but it was explained to me as one of those “normal” things that can happen with aging. Sheez, the things no one tells you about getting older! The vitreous gel in the eye gets thicker as people age and may pull away from the back of the eye. That part isn’t dangerous to the eyesight, only if it manages to pull the retina with it.

Steroid drops helping, black dots are smaller and there is less visual blurring.

                     (Looping shape is the right eye vitreous detachment turned on it's side.
                       the dark dot on the side is from left eye vitreous detachment.)

Thankfully, my retina was fine, but the doctor warned me that if I ever saw a “swarm of black dots” that I should contact him immediately. Those black dots are blood cells making their way into the eye. Before you freak out about seeing those dots in your own eyes, it’s perfectly normal to have a few, just not a whole bunch suddenly appearing all at once!

I took a deep breath of relief, it was a nuisance but I could manage since my left eye was still clear. I was immediately disappointed when the doctor told me that this same thing would probably happen in my left eye! Sure enough, a similar thing showed up in my left eye in August. Sigh.

The only treatment besides the controversial laser targeting or risky surgery of having all the vitreous sucked out of your eye and replaced with salt water is patience. Gravity is your friend and over time will eventually pull the annoying things to the bottom of your eye where they are not so much in the way. It looks like they are at the top of your eye because of the way the brain turns the upside down images projected on the retina right side up.

By December, I had pretty much gotten used to the inconvenience. Yes, making art was harder. I often had to tip my head to the side to get them out of the way if I was working on something detailed, I cried now and then out of frustration, but dammit, I wasn’t going to let them stop me from making and creating whatever I wanted.

This is why the appearance of that “swarm” of dots in early February was so upsetting. The doctor’s office did call me back and I was able to go in to get my eyes checked on Saturday. The good news, my retinas were fine. The bad news, the back of my right eye was obviously inflamed, which is also a danger to eyesight. The question was why?

The name for it is Uveitis, specifically Posterior Uveitis in my case since it is the back of the eye.  If you search on-line for what can cause it you will find a long list of about 30 upsetting reasons. I looked them all up, trying to understand what might be going on, but none of them felt like an exact match for me.

The rest of the month of February has been a series of blood tests and doctors visits and medications. The good news is that several of the scary things on that list have been ruled out. I don’t have tuberculosis, lyme disease, lupus or toxoplasmosis. The shingles virus was a real suspect at first, but it’s not that either. I still have an MRI test to do to check for multiple sclerosis or a tumor, which are more scary things to consider, but I would like to know for certain.

The only clue I feel I have is that I had a nasty sinus attack Dec. 22nd and then came down with a cold on Christmas day. I was still coughing weeks later when I caught the cold again the end of January and had another painful sinus attack just before this ordeal with my eyes started. Did being sick for so long mess with my immune system and trigger the inflammation in my eye?

The steroid eye drops I am taking are keeping the inflammation at bay, which I am truly grateful for, but they are not a cure. 
 

Illustration of how it looks currently.

I debated with myself all month about talking about this on my blog, but as an artist this event really shook my world. The first few days were so very upsetting and I was full of fear of losing my eyesight. I’m still concerned since I don’t have any solid answers yet. I’m grateful the doctor said I could drive again, so that is an improvement.

It also feels important to me that I let other people know that if you ever get an unexpected blizzard of little black dots in your eye do not wait around, get to an ophthalmologist as quickly as you can!

Hopefully Creating

>^-^<
Tina

Drawing From Memories

I’ve thought a lot about what I want to focus the Artist Life Experiment blog for 2020. I think we are due for some fear facing and experiment doing.

It’s time to confess my creative insecurity of not being that great at free-hand drawing. Frankly, it’s embarrassing. I’m great if I have my photo references and my drawing grid all plotted out. There is nothing wrong with using those tools. They make me feel secure and more confident that I will be successful in creating something beautiful. In the past, these tools have often been key for me to have the courage to even start a painting. The downside is that I think my drawings can be a bit stiff at times and I also wonder if my favorite tools have hampered me from developing a unique drawing style of my own.

I know the remedy for stiff drawings is sketching practice. Honestly, sketching practice has never been my favorite thing. It reminds me of practicing the scales for the piano, necessary work but not exactly inspiring.

If I’m going to do the work of sketching, I will be more likely to practice if I have an end goal in mind rather than just drawing “random things around the house.” I never liked that exercise suggestion! I’m thinking about making drawings for a book.

That book would be focused on the fifteen years we lived in the mountains of New Mexico and built our off-grid home from the ground up. Of course we have photos of many of the things we did, but I’m curious to see if I could do some drawings too.

It’s a huge goal and way too much to do in just one year, but “shoot for the stars and hit the moon” or some such inspirational meme. Seriously though, I won't know if this is a good idea or not unless I try it out.
 
To prove that I am not kidding about my free-hand drawing skills, I’m posting my first attempts at sketching with pen. Yes, pen, ballpoint pen and a little marker to be exact. I know, no forgiving pencil and eraser to cover past sins! 


I follow the blog of a pen and ink artist, Chris Wilson, who likes to share his knowledge. Chris claims sketching with pen is the best way to learn to loosen up. He suggests to start by holding the pen farther back and let the lines be less controlled. Also, imagine following the outside contour of the subject to get the overall gesture. This advice sort of works for me, but I already found out I do better if I look for shapes and aim to connect the shapes together, if that makes any sense.

Okay, here is my first try. Yikes! This looks weird even to me.

Cleaning Crew

and another…wow, a toy truck and giant deer! 

That elk in the back looks kinda good though.

Attempt #3. Messed up the placement of the back tire and what is going on with the chin of that little female elk up front…?

Funny Face

Oh, they actually have white chins! I looked for more image reference online to figure out what was going on. A big thank you to photographers Robert Harding and"@bingtravelbunny."

Finally, a drawing I’m less embarrassed about! Full disclosure, I covered up that mistake over the back tire with white paint and re-did the pen work.

Salt Lick

Here’s the story behind the event I am attempting to draw from January 3, 2011.

One Sunday, very early in the morning before the sunrise, Jeff called me very softly out of our nice warm bed. “Hey, you have to see this, elk are cleaning my truck…”
 
Puzzled, I got out of bed and made my way as quietly as I could over to the large east facing window to look, and sure enough, a small herd of elk had surrounded Jeff’s green Toyota Tacoma truck. The metal was coated with salt from the winter roads and these animals were solemnly licking it all over. In our fifteen years living there, we had never seen the elk do that before!

They must have felt they were in luck to find a tasty treat like that just waiting for them. We don’t know if road salt was safe for them to eat, but they were certainly enjoying themselves, even pushing each other a little, greedy to get to the un-licked spots.

Eventually they were done cleaning off the truck and started to notice us staring at them, that was their cue to disperse. They casually continued up the mountain side, nosing around for munch-able plants under the snow as they went. We watched as one by one the whole herd quietly vanished in between the trees. Another memorable moment that made our difficulties of living off-grid in the woods worth all the effort.

Just in case you were wondering, the door handles of the truck were not appealing to the touch when we went out to get in it later. Ick!

What do you think?

Here’s some of my original photos, they aren’t great because there was low light and my camera had a hard time focusing through the window. Do you prefer the drawing or the photos?

Cleaning Crew

The Elk Notice Us

Anyone else have a creative insecurity they are hiding? What are you doing to address it?

Happy Creating!

>^-^<
Tina
 
Here's a link to a list of Chris Wilson’s favorite books about drawing and sketching: https://chriswilsonstudio.com/sketching-books/