Catfacehorse

I was a little bit excited by the topic of ‘fleeting’ this week on Illustration Friday. I have had a dead beetle sitting on my drawing table for a while. The beetle’s fleeting life fitted with the theme for me, as did a lost feather from a passing bird.

Finally, after looking in at Illustration Friday for a few weeks, I have found a theme that struck a chord - ‘talisman’. I have managed to finish the painting over two nights and scanned it in tonight, just before the theme is changed over.

For those of you that don’t know Illustration Friday, it is a wonderful site aimed to get people making by offering up a theme each Friday, which anyone can then submit to the site. They also have a blog, which often has interesting interviews or articles on artists.

Feathers instantly struck me as an appropriate talisman - they got me started drawing again, and I find them everywhere. They may only be seagull feathers, but they are still perfectly formed and just as beautiful on a patch of city lawn as at the beach.

Last weekend, a dear family member had her baby shower. I wanted to make something special and borrowed my sister’s new sewing machine. My poor old machine is a teaching model from the 1970s and has given up the ghost. Again. With only limited time to sew, I didn’t want to spend the whole time swearing and re-threading bobbins.

I chose a ridiculously easy bib pattern from Amy Karol’s wonderful book, ‘Bend-the-Rules Sewing‘. Amy has a great blog that I have been reading for a few years now, full of great photos and excellent writing. I had the pattern photocopied and cut out already from a previous bib-sewing session for my first-ever niece. Last time, I made the bibs with the recommended snap studs, but I found that they snapped together too tight, making them hard to undo. I was going to use velcro instead, but forgot to buy any, so in the spirit of ‘bending-the-rules’ I dug through my sewing box and found some bias binding. Luckily, the colours matched the fabrics I had chosen, two Japanese-inspired craft cottons, and one precious piece of vintage Japanese fabric with owls on it that I had been saving for a special project. Hopefully, the ties will be practical once they are put to the test. The bibs apparently can be just rinsed out in the sink and hung on the high chair to dry. I am looking forward to seeing them all stained and well-used in a few months.

I managed to sew seven bibs (one for each day of the week), and a matching storage bag in one sitting from 6pm Saturday. I had them pressed and wrapped ready for the shower the next morning. Whew!

Once again, I am participating in Meet me at Mikes Words and Pictures write-along.

As a kid, I loved making little things. Little loaves of bread from cut up corks, little painted pictures for the walls of my doll house (made for us by my dad - a square house for me, a triangular one for my sister). I also made lots of little books - one was entitled ‘Rid the Flat’, and was about a world-travelling cat called Rid, who meets with an unfortunate end. This booklet is sadly in Tasmania at my parents house still, so will have to be shared another day. I did find another booklet however - the slightly less imaginatively titled ‘Holiday Booklet’.

Click through to view on Flickr, I have put in little notes about the story.

When Meet me at Mikes had an open invitation to share stories about school lunches, I thought I would join in too. There are so many gorgeous, hilarious stories, if you can, you should read every one. A few of my favourites are Pip’s of Meet me at Mikes, Claire’s of Loobylu, and Nanette’s of Rummage.

For several years, when I was too little to make my own lunch, my mum had me on a really healthy diet. When the other kids in my class had white bread sandwiches in clingwrap, I had soda bread in greaseproof paper. Where they had Tiny Teddies and Le Snaks, I had banana chips or carob. I would dread the sound of ‘eeeeuw, what’s that?’ as the other kids would peer into my lunch box. I craved Tiny Teddies, but I didn’t have anything that I could reasonably get anyone else to eat to swap for those precious little biscuits.

Once every eternity though, I was allowed a ‘lunch order’. The lunch order was a white paper bag printed with the canteen menu on the, with boxes to tick. I would put my coins in the bag, and off the bag would go with the lunch monitor. (Like Pip, I never knew what happened then - it was a deeply mysterious process.) The bags would come back filled at lunch time, change rolling around in the bottom.  I remember eating my  party pie and sausage roll on the deck outside the class room - every single time dropping my straw between the slats so I had to drink my lime flavoured mineral water straight from the can.

Now,  I would love soda bread for lunch but I rarely get around to cooking it. I am so impressed that I had these lunches made from scratch for me every day - thanks Mum!

On Saturday, I put aside the day to paint while Owen went out on a photo walk (a walk to take photos). I had the house to myself, some new art materials and nothing to distract me. Only problem was, I had nothing new to paint.

On the way back from a delicious brekkie at Gingerlee on Lygon St I spotted a garage sale. I had a good look through for something interesting to draw, when out popped a selection of tools. Gorgeous, rusty metal tools. (I had no idea what these tools were called.) Of course I felt like a complete idiot when I asked how much the, um, …tools were. Especially when I discovered that with only 60 cents in my wallet, the princely sum of $4 for all four tools was out of my price range. I went to the ATM and came back to purchase my treasures. I painted all day, and even had a play with some new acrylic paints. I had to buy brushes specially, as I discovered the hard way that acrylic paint destroys sable brushes. (Though I lost only one, and it was pretty old). Hopefully I can make it a bit of a weekend habit - it is so much easier to focus with a few hours up your sleeve.

I picked up these shell fragments on my brief summer holiday in Apollo Bay a few months (weeks, Owen tells me it was only weeks) ago. I liked the colours and shapes of the shells, as well as the fact that they were not particularly pretty or perfectly formed on their own.  It was also good to paint something slightly less two-dimensional than feathers or leaves.   I’ll be looking around this week for something else to put on my drawing desk to  paint - a challenge when I like to paint natural things and I live (happily) in a very industrial environment. I like the complexity of these little found objects, and getting to know them well, by looking at them really, really closely. I have a weird fascination for macro photos for the same reason. My grandmother’s theory is that short sighted people like myself see things close up in minute detail while everything else is a blur, therefore we must have a natural affinity for fine detail (although that is probably how we ruined our eyesight in the first place).

Here are two feathers I have painted over the last two nights. It has been such a relaxing way to unwind after work - they are almost meditative to draw with all their tiny lines.

I noticed the blog has been very greyscale lately, so I painted the coloured feather to change the tone a bit. Then I ended up painting another black and white feather I had lying around as well.

On another note, there is a wonderful Etsy shop set up by good-hearted arty people who have donated their goods with all proceeds going to the Red Cross Victorian bushfires appeal. I bought a beautiful print by Bridget Farmer, destined to go on my desk at work.

Reading A Short Course in Intellectual Self Defense this morning, a section on the construction of perception jumped out at me. Our brains have an amazing capacity to construct our perceptions  so that our world appears full of stable phenomena. I learned this way back in high school psychology, but it just struck me this afternoon that here might lie part of the joy of drawing for me.

Our brains perceive an object as having constant qualities, even though changes in light or position can change the object’s appearance. For example, I will see my familiar red bedspread out of the corner of my eye as red, even though peripheral vision doesn’t register colour. Mastering drawing depends on you tricking your brain into seeing things the way they really appear, before some of that interpretation. I need to actually see that the box isn’t perfectly square, it’s skewed towards me; that the arm pointed at me isn’t long, it’s foreshortened. For me, that flip into the seeing that you do for drawing is like magic, like seeing both sides of the visual illusion or seeing the 3D image in a magic eye picture. It also takes a fair bit of concentration for me, which is part of the fun.

Below is a picture I drew nearly three years ago that broke a long drawing drought and was followed by another long drawing drought. It took me ages, nearly two hours, as I needed to concentrate really hard to see the form of the objects, rather than perceive a lemon, capsicum and garlic.

Finally, I have been able to face the computer. Melbourne has been suffering through an unprecedented heatwave, and after work I have only been able to loll in front of the fan with a glass of iced water in my hand and a wet towel on my head.  (Not a pretty picture, but I’m a practical girl.) It has even been too hot to hit the beach until the weekend. See others suffering through the heat at The  Rachel Papers, Loobylu and Kirin Notebook.
Today I made it out to one of the city beaches. The water was a bit murky and there was a fair bit of rubbish left on the beach from the heavy use it has been getting over the last few days, but the water was cool and salty, so it fulfilled requirements. This was a big step for me - I grew up going camping in a pretty remote bit of Tasmania’s coast. If there was one person at the other end of the beach a kilometre away, we considered it crowded.  This afternoon, on the way back to the tram, I found this seagull feather in the sand and picked it up to paint later.