Chalk Art on the Street

Our community will finally have it's first Street Painting Festival! I have jumped on board. (Over 10 years back, I did a festival in San Rafael, and really loved it.) I've always dreamed of a chance to do this again. This morning about 20 (out of 150 total) artists met to discuss tips and techniques for the event, then met in the parking lot to practice. Artist Melanie Stimmell is shepherding us along, and she's been really generous in sharing methods, photos, and generally helping pull the event together. Melanie does street painting all around the world. If you've never seen her wonderful work, there's lots online, including video of her at work on really large pieces.

To see other street painters, search under madonnari.

One of the tenets of doing street chalk art is to accept the surface, and work with it. Melanie showed us ways to minimize holes or dips in the pavement, and how to make cracks work in your favor. She showed how to layer chalk without drowning in powdery residue. She demonstrated blending thin layers to create an underpainting, and when to stop blending. It was soooo much fun!

One thing I learned today was to build my design with larger images.

Rough texture can make delicate rendering pretty difficult. The close-up test drawing shows the problem I was having. My actual square will be 6 x 6 feet, so there should be no problem in upping the scale. This face was about 8 inches chin-to-hairline. I'll need to make the main figures larger than that I guess. Haven't decided on the image yet.

She Waits

This idea might work as a mural. I need to develop it a bit more. The bird is supposed to be a gull, but doesn't quite make it. As usual, the wrong paper was at hand when the idea arrived. Even so, I kind of like her.

Late Night MeetUp

Driving home from working late, I notice the street light with its halo of moths. I invented the people and the barrel because the light all by itself didn't seem "lonely" enough. (I'm sure there were people there earlier, so I put them in.) Maybe they are ghosts.

"On-the-Fly" @ the Library

Like many of you, I sketch in random moments. At the library, when a book isn't in the system but we need to check it out to somebody, we catalog it "on-the-fly"- a phrase I like. It sounds so liberating. "I am on the fly!"

Wish it were that easy with people, to let ourselves be on the fly when the day just isn't working out for us.
Time once again to scoop up these sketches and share them.

Sunday Inversion

I've been visiting Margaret's blog and watching her adventures in inverting images. Here are two of my products from this fascinating procedure.

I have been wondering how it would work, to create a drawing in exact reverse colors, so that when inverted it would create a positive image. It seems as though this would be a good exercise in color theory, understanding a color's complement. It also tempts you to think about the sense of "oppositeness" and what that means.

Sometimes life's dramas have me imagining some other-world running parallel to this one, all the time. We can step over into it for a completely different perspective on things. Inverting a drawing in Photoshop is just a metaphor for that.

Screen Capture: Edward Olmos

This sketch was drawn from a freeze-frame while watching Battlestar Galactica. Edward Olmos was pondering something in his good, steady, patriarchal way and made a good subject. He has a wonderful face for portrait studies because it is so irregular and craggy and human. This doesn't really capture him, (not enough crag) but was a good exercise anyway. I cannot help it: I love that show.

Haiku Lady

Sometimes I just don't want to finish a sketch if it feels nice in an early stage. This little sketch is lime green Prismacolor and a bit of crimson pastel rubbed in. Just for a change, I'm posting it and then I'll post a couple of progressives until (hopefully) I haven't ruined it. That is a definite possibility. But...ruining things helps artists learn too, right?

At this stage a haiku seems appropriate but I don't know any. Do you?

How about this one?

"Pale springtime sketch

Famous drawings crowd my mind

I drop the chalk"

A Word About Wordle

I felt like doing some blog housekeeping, and like hanging a few pictures over the sofa, I used a program called "wordle" to arrange the words in my blog introduction. Allowing the randomized text to sort itself over and over is interesting, and I tinkered around with the black and white one in Photoshop to make it seem hand lettered... well, sort of. Try Wordle yourself.

To save it as a JPEG is a little tricky, but it can be done.

Zohreh in Orange Chador

While reading The Saffron Kitchen, I couldn't resist a takeoff on the beautiful cover photo by David Vintiner. Mine looks a little empty because the book title goes in the archway. I added a misty distant building - perhaps a mosque - instead. The book's setting is Iran and London.

Young girls are told a cautionary tale about a beautiful "wild girl," deaf and dumb (read: heedless of her parents wishes). ..who becomes pregnant. In various tellings of the tale, she is summarily stoned with the help of the village elder or escapes and has her child, or even gets revenge on the cruel village by summoning an earthquake upon them. Everywhere in the world, such tales are told to young women for caution or for subjugation. In the story she has wild hair and green eyes. Since she's turned away, I gave her a rebellious orange chador instead.

If this book appeals to you, here's a synopsis and reader's guide too. Now, to get back to that story...

Futuristic Doodling

Our library keeps reinventing itself, with mixed results. Lately we've been learning to use (and market) various book technologies to the public. The latest is downloading all sorts of books or movies or music. No need even to come to the library. I've been working up a few sketch ideas relating to people, print and mobility. It seems like everything is becoming more mobile, faster, and throw-away. The audiobook I downloaded last night to my Zen Stone MP3 player will expire and disappear all on its own. This paper airplane guy is taking the entire matter of books (as objects of reverence) very lightly.

I tried doctoring the sketch in Photoshop, and liked the one filled with a gradient tone. I added the other 2 for comparison. The one on black is sort of like what the kids used to draw on the blackboard when the teacher had his back turned.

The Hangout

At the library, this twelve-ish girl waited for a parent or a big sister. Claiming a chair near the entry, she casually hung, curled and draped herself in it's cozy arms. Flipflops and backpack went everywhere, just as if she was in her own livingroom...

Oh, I never did "live" in the library as some kids do. But I always, always found one in whichever town we lived. There I found books to carry back in our room or wherever we were staying while traveling. One summer when I was about this girl's age, we spent in Roseburg, Oregon in a small apartment across the street from the rail station. All night long the locomotive engines kept idling...and I read and read and read. It was a waiting summer, and at the end of that long summer we found a place in Ashland and we stayed there until I left for college. But I always remember that summer, and being that age, and the waiting for something to happen.

The Longing to Be Perfect

How many of us there are who build ourselves on a fresh scaffolding each day, hoping each time that what we build will withstand the deluge. The following is from a book by Don Richard Riso

"I now affirm...
that I am independent and capable.
that I can keep my own identity in groups and in relationships.
that I have faith in myself, my talents, and my future.
that I meet difficulties with calmness and confidence.
that I am secure and able to make the best of whatever comes my way.
that I am understanding and generous to all who need me.
that I act courageously in all circumstances.
that I find true authority within me."

Enneagram Transformations Release and Affirmations for Healing Your Personality Types Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993, 129 pages