Oh no! I fell on Half Price Books

I am sure I am not the only one who has this problem, but Abe sure isn't one of them. Whenever I go to a book store, I can easily find a dozen books to get. I don't even have time to read, so I mostly get reference books. Particularly art reference books. So when I have time to read some day, this problem will be even worse. You know what Abe came away with? Luxor 2 (an awesome video game). This weekend, Half Price Books had a 20% off sale and I fell for it hard. I thought we weren't going to go, but Abe got off work early on Sunday and we made a day of it. Including finally get me some pants. But no one wants to hear about pants. What about the books?!

Gnomes by Huygen, 1976; Giants by David Larkin, 1979
I love all these books from when I was a kid. I don't know if I have the fairies one the my mom had when I was little, but now I have the Giants and Gnomes books. The art in these is just amazing and if you have not looked through and read these books, you really need to. They are so creative and fun. I love how they are written like the creatures are all real. Definitive facts rather than myth.

A Master Class in Drawing and Painting Landscapes by Sarah Hoggett and Abigail Edgar, 2009
This book actually covers a variety of mediums: graphite, charcoal, ink, colored pencils, pastels, watercolor, gouache, oil, and acrylic. There are different landscape objects: clouds, trees and bark, grass, rocks, water, light, rain, etc. Then there are a bunch of projects to practice grouped by the natural and those invaded by people. Looks like a fun book to work through with lots of handy information.

The Printmaking Handbook by Louise Woods, 2008
This, I can tell from the images on the cover, is a small version of the Complete Printmaking book my mom has. It includes lots of different printmaking, too: relief printing (monoprint, linocuts, and wood blocks), intaglio (engraving and cutting, which I thought would include linocuts and wood blocks), lithography, screenprinting, photocomposition, and alternatives. I am particularly interested in the section on paper since that is the problem I am having with the crow comic and the reason I haven't printed it yet. I am a bit confused about the organization after a brief look, but perhaps it will make more sense after I am more thorough.

Watercolor Tips and Tricks by David Norman, 2009
I have only briefly flipped through this book, but it surely looks handy. I didn't see anything on painting grass in particular, but there is one on hair and fur. I think that could be applied to grass, which is the fur of the earth, right? :) But it has sections on different things you might like to paint and then often a demo. Like realistc skin color and then a demonstration of a woman in glasses. Painting smoke and mist includes a demo on painting the bridge at Brantome. It also includes information on techniques, like washes and painting wet-on-dry or wet-into-wet. I'll have to glance through this book closer before my next water color.

Sumi-e Kit by Shingo Syoko, 2002
Wowie-wow-wow. This is a kit that comes with a little book, that actually looks pretty good. But the best part is that it is a kit. A few pages of rice paper, three smaller brushes, an ink stone, and two ink sticks (red and black). The book includes all things in brief: history, materials, how-to, and practice strokes. Then it has lessons! Bamboo, plum blossoms, orchids, chrysanthemum. Though the lessons mostly focus on plants, there are a coupl pages on wild life in general, and the carp and lobsters in particular. The final section is about experimenting. I think this will be a great book to restart with. Once I get the hang of it from this book, I can move on to the slightly more complex and detailed Complete Sumi-e Techniques that I used with my mom on our vacation. And now I get to try the ink stone instead of teh sumi ink bottle. Which I think will make a big difference. Sounds like a lot of work. Grinding the ink takes a few minutes, but the book mentions "this quiet and repetitions actions has a calming effect, helping to clear the mind in preparation for the painting you are about to do" (19). And it looks like not a single thing has been used, even though the section with the ink and brushes has been opened. Though it has some bad reviews on Amazon, I think they expected more than a simple starter kit.

Sketches

I painted this a while ago and have been a huge slacker in getting it posted. I think we will eventually be selling prints of this. Specifically, they should be available at my booth at the Bellingham ComiCon, Saturday, October 24, in Ferndale, WA!

Anyways, I sketched this out at work in bits and pieces. Then enlarged it and transfered it to cold press water color paper, did the water color and then inked it. I chose the cold press because it is smooth compared to the hot press, but when I actually tried to ink it with a nib, it was much more difficult than the hot press paper I used for the inked water color of Umbrella Girl. So I will try more on the hot-press paper.

Resting by ~lunavalse on deviantART

I was unsure what to draw last night as I antsily waited for Abe to catch up on The Jerks thumbnails so I could finally catch up on the buffer (I like to have 8, which is one month).  So I drew these from The Sartorialist.

Sue C. Boynton poetry contest

My mom, Anita, was so kind as to let me do some illustrations for the broadsides she made up of the winners and honorable mentions in the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest. And they have all been announced and displayed and whatnot so now here are my images. They look even better on the actual broadsides which you will be able to see on the buses and in some libraries and banks in Bellingham, WA, this summer. I wasn't able to go to the opening event, but from the reviews I have heard second hand through my mom and brother, they are being well received. Which is totally awesome.
First up is the angel or handless woman statue/headstone from the cemetery for Bellingham, written by my brother's friend's girlfriend, Rachel Mehl. So it's pretty cool that I got to draw an illustration for someone I know.

 Next up is the illustration for a poem called Your Blue Shirt. Apparently, this was quite a popular one that night. People found it really cute. I think it was the way my mom put it on the broadside and colored it.

 A Day at the Lake was a poem by sixth grader Alyssa Gallant. This was a fun one to do, let me tell you.

 Pencil Elves was a pretty cute poem by fifth grader Kobe Woodruff. I hope I did it justice. Jim, who MCed the event announcing all the winners and stuff, pointed out the teethmarks to Kobe while MCing.

Finally, Pete was written by my brother's friend and my friend's brother, Caleb Barber. So for that I got to draw a really cute dog. I got a call from my mom and she got to tell Caleb and Rachel today that I was thrilled that they were thrilled with my illustrations for their poems. (For some reason the scan got screwed up and you should be able to see all his feet.)

All in all, what a cool project I got to work on. Maybe I will get to do more next year. I hope so.

Corgi sketch

I worked this in while I was at work the other day.

I am pretty pleased with that little drawing. Corgis are just the best. Fun to be with; adorable to look at; great to smell... oh, wait. Very often not great to smell. :) Yeah I'm talking about you Ernie.

Sketches

Drawering time. Drew me up some corgis. But I kept getting distracted with how cute an entire page of corgis is. These were pretty fun. The top two are from photos on google. Then there's Ernie. And the bottom two are based on a 'how to draw a corgi' tutorial that I found super helpful and used to draw another cute corgi at work today.

 Then I needed something else to draw because I was a bit spacey and kept forgetting I was supposed to pencil the next two Jerks comics, so I went to The Sartorialist.

In my personal life, I am doing C25K (Couch to 5k) on my bike. It seems it might be a jinx to put this in my blog, since everything else I said I would do I didn't, but oh well. It is pretty fun. I did it tonight and instead of biking the last 5 minutes for the cooldown, I walked around the apartment while my gross organic artichoke finished cooking because my butt hurt from the bike seat. But I was on it for 25 minutes, so that is good.

Sumi-e practice

So when I was on vacation, we took an evening to do some sumi-e painting. Well, to practice sumi-e technique. I found out later that some of my favorite paintings that I thought were color paintings in a sumi-e style are actually wood cuts! Sumi is a type of ink (the kind I use for my inking, acutally) and e means painting or something, so it just means painting with the sumi ink. Pretty fun. I got a book on painting sumi-e from Henderson's in Bellingham nd got some Sumi-e brushes at Daniel Smith and brought them up to the Silver Lake cabin. So we didn't have a full set to work with and I start out with a large brush. I practiced the different strokes first. Just loading the brush with ink took some practice. I don't know if we ever got it right. At least, not consistently. The solid lines are what you would use for the outline style paintings. The wide one that are dark on one side and light on the other are the boneless style, or Southern style. And when you use both, it is the Northern style, which I personally like best. For looking at. Since I have never done it.

Then we practiced circles. I didn't really understand the directions in the book (Complete Sumi-e Techniques by Sadami Yamada), which involve twirling the brush between your fingers. Because of this, I would like to be able to take a class on Sumi. I learn pretty quick from watching. Though I suppose most people do.

 Then we tried the flowers. I am not sure if the problem was the paper or self-teaching, but this did not work so well. I bet it was a bit of both. Each petal should be dark in the center and light at the edge. They were when I first put the ink on, but there was so much water and the paper wrinkled so mu that the ink spread over the whole wet area. Anyways, I want to try this again, but it is simple and would make a nice little picture in teh end. Just need to try a different paper. We were using paper ripped out of my mom's sketchbook that she bought when she was in college.

 Then I switch to a smaller brush, which helped. I think we were using letter size or smaller, so the page filled up super fast when I used a large brush. After a few more practice flowers with the small brush, we moved on to grass. Not sure I get it. I should read that part again. I think my hands wants to draw the same line over and over, but the grass blades should each be different.

 A few more practice grass, and then leaves. Which ended up looking a lot like lips or fish sometimes. Good thing to note. But I guess on this page I was getting a little better handle on the grass.

 More leaves! I think at this point I was starting to get frustrated with how to ink the brush properly. The book talks about using an ink stone and we had a bottle of sumi ink. So maybe that was part of the problem?

 Finally some roses. At this point, after an art deco style rose, I was sick of it and we went to bed. Drinking and learning. Good combination.

I do like the tiny rose even though it is all light gray. In the end, it was pretty fun and I would like to try it again, but I would also like to try it on some good practice sumi-e paper. Whatever that would be. Not too expensive, I hope. The book says newspaper can be used for practice. I have to see if I have a roll of newspaper from my mom or if we imagined that I took that. Someday there will be more sumi-e up here.

Drink and Draw sketches

Abe and I finally got to go to drink and draw last night. So I drew. We were all alone at first - we were upstairs and everyone else was downstairs. So I drew this.

Then we moved over to the table when other people came upstairs and had some great conversations that seemed to revolve a lot around pasties - not the British food.

I love that weird rabbit fella. Abe asked if he was my spirit animal. It is pencil, so it isn't really that dark, but it is hard to see at the light pencil color on a computer screen.

Then I couldn't think of anything to draw towards the end, and ended up with this poor fella.