A Few More Neighbourhood Homes

I've continued to sketch some of the homes in my neighbourhood. They are all unique and of varying ages. As with the other sketches, I am delivering a copy of each sketch to the home's owners.

This is a house across the street from me.

This house was part of the Grubb farm that was built on the land our homes now sit on. It used to be a barn that housed pigs. It  is situated just down the street from us.

Our house.

A home on Riverdale Road

A home on Barker Avenue

A home on McGillivray Ave.

New Painting on the Easel

The last few weeks, I have had the itch to paint again so I went through my photos from last year's kayak trip. It is always so hard to choose what to paint from all those beautiful photos. I usually look for some drama which most often comes from the skies in July because there is no snow or the colours of autumn at that time of year. On our first evening at our camp site, after dinner, a few of us paddled up the bay to explore. As we paddled the sun was setting and the sky filled with dark clouds that were edged with pink and purple. The rocks became grayer in the waning light and the sky was reflected here and there in the water of the bay.

I decided to make this painting about the sky and so I cropped out a large section of the foreground water and took some other liberties with the design. As I learned last year in my acrylic painting course, I started with a black canvas instead of white. I really liked the result doing it that way. Every time I start painting it seems I have to learn all over again. The paint just doesn't go on smoothly and the first brush strokes are not at all beautiful. I always have to tell myself that it will come as I layer paint on.

My subject.

Blocking in the sky.

Starting to blend the sky.

As I type out this blog, I am noticing that those clouds have to be much darker to move them in front of the light blue sky behind  and above them and the yellow above the tree line needs to be more subdued. Having said that, I will make some artistic decisions that will enhance the painting. I do not want to copy the photo totally.

People Drawing People

I recently enrolled in a Sketchbook Skool course called People Drawing People that starts next week. It's an online course and I'm really looking forward to it since I'm really bad at drawing people. Today, one of the founders of Sketchbook Skool, Danny Gregory, did a live you tube instruction to prepare us a little for that course. We drew our selfies along with him and people all over the world who tuned in. So cool. It took me a while to find the live feed on my computer so I only had about 15 minutes to get my sketch done. I'm not making excuses since I don't think more time would have improved it.

I brought a mirror from one of our bathrooms and set it up on a desk easel next to my laptop and sketched myself while I watched Danny Gregory sketching himself.

Neither the photo nor the sketch are very flattering so I managed that part of the likeness well.

Perpetual Calendar

I have always used several perpetual calendars to remind me of birthdays and anniversaries. I always thought they were a Dutch thing but I'm noticing them in our Canadian stores as well. I made one several years ago with images of my fabric cards on it. It has become somewhat out dated since many friends and relatives have died since. I have been wanting to make another and I've finally come up with a plan.

Since writing out that plan, a few things have changed which often happens in creative ventures. You get into the creative part and the plan you made just doesn't work in reality. I had planned to make this calendar 4.25 inches by 11 inches. The reason for this was that if I want to print it this size would cost less since I could get two pages out of one 8.5 X 11 inch sheet of paper. Well, I've had to rethink that size since I've decided to make the pages out of fabric and stitch the designs on them. I've decided to use the full 8.5 X 11 size.

I would also like to stitch a bible verse on each page and when I began with January's page it was evident that the size was too small to be able to stitch the bible verse on it as well as the date numbers such that they were legible.

I am keeping a planning journal for this project to keep my ideas in one place. I have some themes for each month but the whole project is not yet fleshed out. For January, I'm stitching fireworks on a black background. All the stitching on this page will be white and silver. Below is the beginning. The body will be covered with dates and lines for writing names next to. On the bottom I've already stitched where the text is found and I will add the words of the text as well.

For February, I chose the above fabric to represent ice and I hope to stitch snow flakes on this page. This was hand painted by myself but since I've cut this fabric for the smaller page there isn't enough left for the new larger page so I'll have to paint another piece.

Below are my notes for the project. If there are any suggestions for themes for future months please help me out by sending them to me.