Paper and Threads

EDM Challenge #222:  My Favorite Art Tool

I love Niji Waterbrushes!  I started playing with watercolor paints approximately 5 years ago and bought a series of round brushes from size 00 to 12.  I learned how NOT to spill my water containers, but never felt completely confident that I could paint in my sketchbooks in the living room, bedroom, or friends homes.  I was an "early" convert to the Niji waterbrushes and now even use them with watercolor pencils in the museum - where only pencils are allowed.  This year I found the large flat one which is perfect for painting large areas - and not getting too fussy in small areas.

I'm so nervous that I might lose one, that I have a new set of 4 waiting for me with my art supplies at all times!

Posted by Shirley at 9:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

We were at a wedding this weekend, so both of my journal pages are from the event.  The wedding was held in a church and the reception in a wonderful hotel conservatory - full of beautiful flowering plants.  Just before the cocktail hour I was able to make a quick painting of one of the many floor to ceiling trellises. 

This morning I painted one of the roses that I brought back to our hotel room last night.  The red-orange-salmon color was spectacular. 

This is a double page spread and the grey line down the middle is the center fold.

Posted by Shirley at 8:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This is my 3rd year participating in this challenge.  I already complete one journal page per day, but I only upload a small number of those pages to my blog.  Shouldn't be a surprise that I don't upload drawings and paintings that I don't like.  This challenge forces me to upload each and everyone for 31 days - the good, the bad, and the ugly.  At the beginning of the month, this makes me a little more careful about choice of subject and may even make me less spontaneous.  Midway through the month I can usually overcome these feelings. 

Here is my journal page from yesterday May 1st.  We eat dinner at a restaurant in Grand Central Station before going to the Broadway theater - and almost always have Ceasar salad, a thin crust sausage pizza, and a glass of chianti.  Last night the play with Matthew Broderick got a bad review, so we savored dinner even more.

Here are several journal pages to finish posting from April.  The first is from a Gauguin drawing that was a study for his Dancing Girls of Breton.  The Morgan Library and Museum had the 5th installment of the Thaw collection drawings and I loved this one!  The second is from a reading at Barnes Noble by Arthur Phillips - author of the Egyptologist.  My book group is reading it this month.  He read from his new novel, but it was still fun meeting him.  This image is from the book cover - the colors are mine.

EDM Challenge 221: Hand-held game

I'm not a game player, but have a basket of cards from my children's childhood, occasional games of solitaire, and "War" with my grandchildren.  This set of cards has a figure skater from the 1984 Olympics, so at least drawing it game me practice with unusual persepctive with the skater body.

Posted by Shirley at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I fell in love with the concept of recycling old, "ready for the garbage", books.  Most of the ones I've used cost $1.00 and were on the cart that was ready for disposal.  This gives them a completely new life and provides me with a fun watercolor journal to use for daily sketches.  I recycled 7 books, previously posting a detailed set of instructions and photos on my blog,and then took a short bookbinding workshop to make my own watercolor journals including the book cover.

Here are all of my blog posts re: both recycled and non-recycled books I made:

http://www.paperandthreads.com/bookbinding/

Here are my instructions for recycling my books:

http://www.paperandthreads.com/2008/03/recycling_an_old_book_as_a_wat.php

I used my Michaelangelo Sonnet book for figure drawing practice, and then one called Painting Made Easy.  Last month I made my 8th recycled book as my 3rd volume for figure drawing practice and this one is called The Illustrator. 

I use a 5 hole, modified coptic stitch to stitch the signatures together and then glue the spine using paper and mull - a technique I learned in my bookbinding workshop.  But there are still small gaps using 140 lb watercolor paper that I can't avoid, although they are so much smaller that I don't cover them with strips of the endpapers as I did previously. 

When using book covers from old books, you have a fixed size for the pages and some waste watercolor paper.  I decided to use the waste piece for the first pages of my new recycled books and used these slightly smaller pages for some 90 second figure drawing using Pose Maniacs.

I love the freedom of selecting a size for my watercolor journals when I make my own covers, but as a book lover, I also really love searching for a book with an appropriate title and/or theme and giving it a new life and prominent place on my bookshelf.

Posted by Shirley at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have 1000s of digital photos and not a single photo of the Moon.  As I contemplated whether I would see a moon over the buildings here in Manhattan, I remembered the song from the movie Arthur and the phrase "between the moon and New York City."  I painted the skyline around the World Financial Center and a moon - and hopefully can now get the song out of my brain. 

The weather here was magnificent this past weekend.  There are fabulous tulips everywhere I look and I took a small art stool outside Saturday to paint several of the orange red tulips that are in huge tulip beds and around the trees in planters along the avenue. 

On Sunday morning we left the apartment at 9AM and walked to the area I call the Duck Pond or Toy Boat Pond.  This year the concession stand is open again and the patio is a wonderful place for morning coffee.  We really missed it last year.  While my husband did the crossword puzzle, I drank my coffee and sketched and painted a cropped version of the cafe counter. 

Here is an earlier journal page I did while sitting in the same place.

Posted by Shirley at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)