Proof Positive

I just finished reading a book by Dana White titled, "How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind." It's a hilarious take on real-world cleaning strategies. (Spoiler alert: Do the dishes).
I'm sure you're thinking why would anyone as organized as I need to read about home management?
HA!
In reality I'm just a crazy old cat lady hoarder-in-training. I mean, I don't even have one cat yet! I'm not so old! But if there were need of any proof that I have the hoarder thing going on, here is my entry to the Every Inchie Monday this week:

This is a clipping of a child's sweater from the Fall 1999 issue of Family Circle Easy Knitting magazine. I'm not sure why I still have the periodical, my knitting skills are not very, well, skillful. One of these days I'll actually knit a sweater. Maybe. It won't be that one.

For the Diva challenge this week:

The objective, to use Hamadox in a sentence (Ah ha!). Here, I put a few tried and true tangles to work. I'm really enjoying drawing with Prismacolor colored pencils and I'm trying to keep notes of which colors I'm using for future reference. (Yeah, like keeping a knitting magazine that is soooo last century. But, you have to admit, it came in handy this week!).

My last entry is for the TwobyTwo, where the word is "news." I like reading and am grateful that I can access whatever it is I need to know on the Internet. Otherwise, the papers might pile up ad infinitum. It could get out of hand.

Thanks for stopping by. Have a brilliant day.
I have to go do the dishes now.

Out of Practice

It's not really that I haven't been creating, just not as actively as I'd like. Feeling guilty about that isn't going to help or change the world, but it did lead to not chatting about it. I have a stack of little artworks laying around, mostly tossed into a corner or three when guests came to visit through the holidays.
Then the calendar flipped and things really got out of hand. Let's just say that there is a little order that has come of the chaos. Life can be....interesting, and it helps to embrace that instead of trying to fight it, right?
I was going to start a botanical drawing class, but the instructor wanted a list of art supplies of which I have NONE. Hard to believe that's even possible! But I have the book and am digesting the ideas before I commit to a totally new set of (Faber-Castell) colored pencils. I'm already invested in Prismacolor and Spectrum Noir, isn't that good enough??
I say all that as an introduction to Diva 299 with the latest official Zentangle tangle, Drawings (think: draw wings). Working on light direction, foliage coloration and subtle shading.

Then there's the EIM that I'm working on. Here we go with the first four of 2017. Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself, but I didn't want to lose that fabric swatch, as I'm bound to do.

The first one is rabbit (and you never have just one!), the hampster dance, a cat who looks as happy about the weather as I do (the cold, the rain! just stay inside!) and the dog (which, for whatever reason, one repeat along the selvage had all green shading. weird).

The objective at last week's TwobyTwo was happy. Too many ideas were trying to work their way through to the cerebral surface. One of my other goals this year is to tackle Illustrator. Again.
While this was created in Photoshop, some of the methods to make it were borrowed from what I know about Illustrator (slim-to-none). This simple thing took me an hour! UGH.

With many an apology to all of the artists who have gone before me in this, along with a special nod to Robert Herrick, who may have been the first to use the smiley in text as :) in 1648!
And we think we're so clever!

If the hamster dance music is driving you as crazy as I: Don't worry, be happy!
I bid you a happy and brilliant day! Thanks for dropping by!

Of Whales and Birds

I'll start with my contribution to the EIM. I had a whale of a good time finding information about cetaceans, the big mammals of the sea.

First up, the biblical account of Jonah and the Whale, a detail from the illustration by Everett Henry titled, "The Voyage of the Pequod," for the story, "Moby Dick," also known as just, "The Whale," by Herman Melville, the tail end of a whale and an image of a breaching whale.
Did you see the story of the whale they call "Granny" in the news this week?
Life can be funny that way, don't you think?
Ah, whale tales all! You can call me Ishmael.

Moving right along....
Next I tackled the TwobyTwo. The first two drawings are kind of self-explanatory.

This one requires a bit of back-story. I was in Sedona one day a while back and stopped by Garlands, a gallery for exceptional Native American jewelry, ceramics and weavings. I saw a beautiful Tree of Life (Bird Pictorial) wall hanging depicting hummingbirds and metallic yarns were used to make those lovely birds shimmer. I knew then that it would haunt me forever that I didn't buy the unusual piece (Navajo like to use only wool from the sheep they raise themselves. Metallic threads are unheard of), but the tag had more zeroes than I had.
Sigh.
So here I've attempted to draw a hummingbird that doesn't look like the Twitter thing:

I dream of hummingbirds, which I guess is a good thing.

Before I let you go, I'll share the Diva challenge piece for the week.

That's it for now. Thanks so much for stopping by. Have a brilliant day!

Spacey Space Themes

Previously, I mentioned that NASA released new images from the Hubble Telescope of the Eagle Nebula and that I could not find the links again. Well, tada! Here we go:

New!
Pillars of Creation in
Infrared

You can read the information here.  I found it as I was reading the story about how five of our planetary sisters are all going to line up in the sky starting tomorrow. That would be something to see, wouldn't it? I hope to get up to the Lowell Observatory and check it out through their telescopes.

There were also photographs from the ISS of a space zinnia.

I was very glad to find the links again as I had designs on the stars. 

You know you can put images from Hubble to personal use, right? It's a public domain thing, since We-the-People have paid for the space program. Therefore, you get this:

Space Bubble
Photomontage

It wasn't really doing what I wanted it to do, but yet another digital image collage is born (is it really collage if no paper is involved?) in answer to an art challenge. This one is for EIM; the word of the week is, "sofa." I wanted to tackle the thing from the perspective of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," just without the crazy two-headed president. (I'm almost done re-reading the book!!)

A different art challenge I responded to this week is from the Diva. This week is to raise awareness of Moebius Syndrome; her son has this neurological condition. Please read her post and you'll get an understanding of what that all means. Here's my rather simple answer:

MOEBIUS
Staedler Watercolor and
Derwent Metallic Pencils

Remember creating Moebius paper strips in school? Or even better yet, going to the Museum of Science and seeing their massive Moebius sculpture? Or the Van de Graaf generator? COOL!

If you're wearing an infinity scarf, that's a Moebius! If you're a fan of Dune or the Fifth Element, that's a different Moebius. If you're my friend, Mark the sculptor, you have created several stone Moebius. And if you're a little boy nicknamed, "Artoo," that's living with Moebius. 

I thank you for stopping by. If you're in the greater Phoenix area the next few weeks, I'll be hanging out at the Celebration of Fine Arts ("The BIG white tents") weekends through February 7 or thereabouts. Booth 216. FIND OUT WHY! You can email me (1xeritas@gmail dot com) to see when exactly I'm there; I'd love to see you! 

Meanwhile, the twinchie word of the week is, "MONEY!" That's what I'm doing next! How about you?!

This Fish is a Gold Mine!

Here are some variations on "Goldfish," for the TwobyTwo art blog. I didn't want to do just one and I had the luxury of trying different media. Indeed, I want to tackle each word this year from various perspectives. We'll see how successful THAT is!

I like the look of watercolor but have no formal training in it and my results can best be described as elementary. This one was done with Staedtler watercolor pencils:

He looks quite mean, doesn't he? You should see my other attempts, but I'm not showing them. This guy should be happy he's the best of the bunch.

Then there's a pencil sketch. While he already outgrew his fishbowl, I used it to contain the composition, unlike the first guy's blank canvas:

I really wanted to try to draw a koi in a fish pond, but he looked more like a drowned rat getting gobbled up by lily pads that resembled Pac Man, so forget about seeing THAT.
To try to just get to know some colored pencil colors, I downloaded a coloring page of Cleo from Disney's "Pinocchio."

The colors are all wrong, the yellow in the scan is too dark. I have no delusions that I own the copyright to that image, since Pinocchio came out in 1940 and Disney's lawyers are everywhere. I colored it, I'll take the blame.
This one is a photocollage of several digital images. As I was playing in Photoshop, I wanted to create a sense of movement, which is why some of it is blurry. It was intentional! Do you think it worked out?

The tangly woman at Tickled to Tangle is up to challenge #126. I haven't done one of those in a while and this one worked out better than okay. Thanks, Adele!

IAST 126
Phroz, 4Fun and Pop Clouds

As per usual I had one idea on how I wanted it to end up and it had its mind made up on how it wanted to go. Some of the geometry is off, but it's not a real distraction to none other than myself.

So that was soooooo last week. Now to work on THIS week!

In Living Color

We ran off to visit family in Colorado last week. "Run" being a relative term as it was 11 hours each way, but if my sister, the Professor, could travel 2000 miles to visit her daughter, we could go 700, right? I'd never been in that part of the States, among these massive granite peaks. I was not handling the altitude well or this weird time warp sensation as they're just now having spring weather, and we're well into the throes of the season I call, "Inferno." Lupines and columbines are for February. Snow?!!! (Sorry we missed the skiing at Breckenridge on the Fourth of July. NOT!)

And a happy belated Independence Day to my stateside friends! We are blessed with the Freedoms hard won on the battlefields many moons ago. We are free to use our creative voice to say how we feel or what we deem important. We can love, run, pray, sleep, eat and just be.

Me? I'm glad we're not travelling anywhere this week and I can just be--and not sitting in a car! I'm glad to be resuming my regularly scheduled programming--I started this creative week over at EIM. I like the challenge of working on just one teenie inch and it's a fun group of women from around the planet. (I don't know why there aren't any men in this group to create inchies). The prompt for the week is "yarn." I always have plenty handy, but I really wanted to illustrate "spinning a good yarn," as in telling a story. I couldn't really squeeze that into an inch so I went kind of old school (with a tip of the hat to Chrissy who loves her bling!). While I was looking for some materials, I found an advice column and on the reverse was a picture of a ball of yarn and thus a twinchie was born!

The other thing I've worked on is the Diva Challenge, with guest blogger Jen Crutchfield. Her challenge this week to all tangly people is to use color, but limit it to two or three. I typically limit it to two--black and white, with shades of grey in between--so anything outside of that is a stretch. I also try not to peek at what others are up to until I get mine finished. You know? No cheating!? But I stole a look at the work of one of the ladies who does both of these challenges--Jean Chaney. (She's a CZT here in AZ! She also typically thinks WAAAAY outside the box for the EIM. Endearing quality, that!). Jean drew a tangly piece based on a process called "Zentwining," created by Lynn Mead.
I like drawing twisty turny ribbons so I thought that'd be an interesting way to go. I even cracked open a package of artist tiles instead of just opening my journal. I can do this! Well, I made a few attempts and it wasn't anything like I figured it would be, but my teenie brain saw a similarity to the ribbons and well....

Collection of some bracelets
Including a new agate one
from the Professor

Materials--Some Colors!

I ended up collecting two Pitt pens, one conte pencil, eight colored wax pencils, one graphite, one Y&C gel and three Sakura glaze pens, way more than just two per the instructions. I was very excited last week to have actually FOUND my colored pencils, which have been packed away for a few years and left unused for much longer than that, so I may have gone overboard! I practically forgot how to use these things, especially all together (such as how useless a conte is over a wax pencil and if I'm going to go all out, use the good stuff and skip the leftover kids craft supplies).  I'm much happier with this result than what I had going on, but I'll have to try hand at Zentwining another time.

Only next time in black and white!

Thanks for visiting my twisty turny world. Be sure to check out what these other creative types are making!