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.

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.

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.

When I was a kid, I used to take playing very, very seriously. My sister and I would make up games, then spend hours making all the components necessary. In fact, it was the making that was usually the most satisfying. I decorated the dollhouse my dad built for me with little carpet offcuts, I painted tiny little cardboard landscape scenes for the walls, and using a trick my cousin taught me, made little loaves of bread from carefully shaped corks cut with my pocketknife. We would get out our little family of bears (me) and rabbits (my sister) and put them into the miniature environments we had created. If one of us happened to get bored and slip out of character, the other would whinge ‘be serious’, and the game would continue.

Owen and I went for a picnic in the park near our place a few days ago.  A twenty minute bike ride through the sunshine and (thankfully) cool air and we were at the bend in the creek. After a small spread of thermos tea, bread, cheese, olives, orange cake and homemade lemonade, we lay in the grass talking about how great it was to be on holiday.

I picked up a selection of fallen eucalyptus leaves around us on the ground, with gorgeous rusty reds and blushing browns.

Things are good right now. I am ramping up to Christmas, yet managing to ramp up the drawing as well. It helps that Christmas is usually a creative time for me anyway. For the last four years I have been too broke to buy presents (and Owen and I have an abundance of siblings and parents between the two of us), so instead I have made presents. I have stencilled T-Shirts, bottled chutneys, sewed book bags, and stamped badges.

This year I have been a little busier, and with little extra money from work I have decided to ease the pressure and buy some lovely handmade things.  I have managed to keep drawing by finding little snatches of time here and there - after dinner, in my lunch break, or sneakily during a long day of presentations. (I just think of it as doodling, but with a purpose.)

Here are some the products of those snatches of time.

P.S.  - Leave a comment, I love to chat