Paper and Threads

In May 2002, my husband and I rented an apartment in Venice for our 35th anniversary and invited our family to join us for the week.  My daughter and her husband, my two sons, and their girlfriends (who are now my wonderful daughters-in-law) joined us for a very memorable vacation.  I love Venetian paper and immediately considered drawing this frame for the challenge, but I definitely didn't want to draw more portraits!  Therefore I sketched a photo of our Palazzo in Campo Santa Marina and "put" it in the frame.  The frame is wooden, but the design section is a piece of handmade paper that is set into the frame.  I loved that trip and just thinking about it makes me smile.   Today I decided that I really should put the photo of the apartment in the frame permanently.

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Exploring sketching and watercolor painting was one of my personal goals after I partially retired in July 2005.  I worked through the Challenges after I joined the EDM group in September, and then decided to try to sketch (with or without watercolor wash) every day in 2006.  I'm constantly searching my apartment for things to draw and fill in some days with a monthly color challenge or sketching a small, jointed artist model in various positions.  I have lots of patience for hand quilting - taking months to complete a piece.  But my sketches tend to be very fast, and not very precise.  I'm trying to slow down enough to really see what is in front of me but I need to balance this with the time it takes from each day's schedule.  So far I have at least one daily sketchbook entry since Dec 26th.  It was fun for me to sketch/paint the above wooden toys yesterday.  We bought them 30+ years ago for our first little boy and now they are part of our grandchildrens' toys that wait for them in our apartment. 

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This is the first self-portrait I have ever done - and one of the first pencil sketches.  I took all of the advice from the Everyday Matters group today and my choice was to make myself look 20 years younger!  Seriously, neither my husband nor I see a resemblance, so Karen will have to repeat this challenge so I can obtain more skills before attempting self-portrait #2.  The drawing was made from the photo that I added, taken at my son's October wedding.  I don't even have any fixative for pencil sketches, so this image will slowly fade away in my sketchbook.

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February was my month to experiment with my cadmium red and alizarin crimson W-N tube watercolor paints.  I made several more sketches, but these are representational samples of the type of paintings that were done.  The "lion" journal, which I purchased in Venice, was done using a watercolor mask. I was pleased with the process because it actually looks very similar to the handmade cover - imprecise sketching and painting.

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Last Fall Laura F. shared her 2005 color series with the EDM group.  I am such a novice with watercolor paints that I just made the change from student grade pan paints to Winsor-Newton artist grade tube paints.  This seemed like a great time to play with color mixing (my favorite part), so I used blue to January - a frosty cold winter month in the Northeast. 

Cool: Permanent Alizarin Crimson, French Ultramarine Blue, Winsor Lemon

Warm: Cadmium Red, Winsor Blue, Cadmium Yellow Medium  

To learn how to mix colors using these two triads, I sketched objects in my apartment and tried to duplicate the colors for 6 months.  These are from January 2006, my Blue Month.   

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