Who Are You Again?

Hi!  Welcome back!  To me, mostly.  I've been deep in the throes of starting my new career over these past two months, to the point where I actually took about a month off from the 365 project just to stay functional.  But today is the day I get back to it, and to celebrate that, I wanted to share what I did from 04/22/18-05/19/18 (which is when I accepted things would need to be put on hiatus).  I took pictures of pages rather than individual pieces, in an attempt to actually get this whole thing done today, so commentary will be shorter than usual (although, obviously, the entirety of the post will be somewhat longer).

Greenbreathing.

I spent several days trying to capture the way that being in the woods brings me peace.  There's a poem in the left image, and here's how it goes:

Steps slow and burdened/Searching for the way I’ve lost/I pace the leaf floor

Following the path/Dark and light and dark again/Deep into the wild

The weight of sorrow/Pressing on my lungs: exhaled/Gathered up by Them

The Ancient Ones, still/Breathing with me in silence/Lifting my burden

From poison to life/In the space between heartbeats/They transmute my pain

Out and in and out/The one becomes the other/The other the one

My balance restored/Light and dark and light again/I find my way home

Sweet Things

I'm super into The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.  You should be, too.  And then I found a pretty pittie who had wandered away from her home, and she was so sweet I called her Dulcinea.  Happy ending: she was reunited with her family after I took her to the Humane Society.  Also Happy Ending: I painted her without drawing first.  Progress!

Unfinished Business

I love what I've got going here, with my maenad and her satyrs, but I spent several days on it and it refused to progress.  I'll probably come back to it, someday.

Blue

I finished the first sketchbook on the last day of April.  I'd been reading a book that dealt with whales (Deep Wizardry) and it inspired my doodling that day (and I quoted it up there in the upper right corner).  (The lyrics in the lower left corner are from a song by Young Summer called "Waves That Rolled You Under", and I highly recommend you go listen to it right now.)

X Factor

Just a little green study of Madame X, because I was still working on painting without drawing first.

Jackalope Got Me Down will be the name of my first album.

More paintings without drawing, with limited success.  The Jackalope thing is because for some reason TLG took it into his head that anytime he fell down it was appropriate to say, "Jackalope got me down!" We have no idea where he picked that up from, but obviously we find the idea of blaming things on random jackalope attacks hilarious.

Damn good appetizer

Not much to say about these, except that I put a million layers into that cherry tomato and I think it looks awesome.  Also, the quote "He's my Wade and I'm keeping him!" is from the last time I played DnD (waaaay too long ago, now), and my character Severan sort of accidentally picked up an NPC squire and basically he's the Podrick to her Brienne now.  I'll hear no arguments.

Rainspheres (as opposed to bows) over the Grand Canyon, and also some Geese.

Red lips and purple ties.

Feet silhouetted in the pool at night, Super Professional Face.

These are all from my trip to Tempe at the beginning of May, where I had maybe five minutes each night to sketch something out before I dropped into bed, exhausted.

Love Undying

This last one, you'll notice, has a whole lot of dates next to it, and no color whatsoever.  That's because after nearly a week of making incremental progress, and feeling super stressed out about it, I realized that I needed to give myself a break.  So I did.  Which brings us to today, and this blog entry.  And once I finish this blog entry,  I'll start laying in some colors.  So stay tuned, Gentle Readers, and thanks for sticking with me for this long.

To the Nines

First of all, Happy Anniversary to Me!  And Nathan too, I guess... nine years, and still kicking.  Woo, go team!  That being said, let us jump into the many days of doodling since last we met.

First off, I got into a serious Salt Experimentation Phase from March 23rd-26th.  Behold:

What's going on here, white balance?  Who knows...

Thaaaaat's better.

Black and White!  Black and White!

It was fun, just to play around again, let whatever wanted to happen, happen, rather than being concerned with representation.  And you can see up there in upper right-had corner where I took the playing back to sketching, which in turn brought us the offering for March 27th:

But who is this mysterious lady?  The world may never know...

A conversation with my mom, combined with missing a certain friend, and my hair being ridiculous, led to this little sketch of Anne Shirley on the 28th:

The wind must be up- look at those chapped cheeks!

And then missing my brother and his boys took tangible form in my sketchbook on the 29th.

The trouble with trying to draw the people you love is that it never, ever looks right, because you know their faces too well...

We're going to skip ahead a few days to April 1st, and Easter, where I had another bit of "fun experiment times", but this time with wax resistance:

Super Fun Bright Colors Time!

And now we back up (but also go forward) to a bunch of line drawings of the Ladies of Firefly.  None of them are colored yet, because I need to run a copy of them so that my nephew has a chance to color them the way he wants to.  So you can fully expect to see them again someday in the not-too-distant future, only with color.

I know, I know... River's face is too narrow... oh well...

Speaking of color!  TLG has been super obsessed with letters and numbers lately, so I thought I'd make him a little treat in my sketchbook:

Phoning it in?  Maybe.  But it's my sketch book, and I'll phone if I want to...

He liked it so much that he wanted to keep it, which of course he could not do, so I promised him I'd make him one of his very own, which I managed to get put together before he came home today:

Plus a few words of Especial Interest to him right now.

So that's where I stand with all of that.

As for my studies, they're also going well!  I managed to bump up my timeline again, so I'll be taking the Series 66 on Monday (yes, this coming Monday- eep!) which I'm pretty excited about.  After that I should be halfway through the process!  Woo!  As much as I've enjoyed this time of learning (and getting to be around Nathan for most of the day) I'm read to get out in the field and start doing, you know?  You know.  Yeah you do.

Cloud Splatter

I had a bit of a "happy accident" with yesterday's piece (check out the lower right corner) where some paint got splattered.  I'm not quite sure how I did it- or even if I did it, since one of my cats is kind of an Art Terrorist and loves getting up in my business when I'm working on things.  But I figured it was either a result of being brushed or being blown, so today I experimented with blowing on wet paint.  It was fun!

There's more, but this is probably the most "picture-like" portion of my playtime.

Sometimes it's fun just to play with no specific goal in mind.  I find  I'm less likely to be disappointed if I've left myself open to possibility, rather than fixating on a desired result.

Wisdom!  Ish.  Ahem.

Jenny O Does Maui

Okay, right off the bat I need to admit that I am not going to do a post for every day I was gone; I am going to cluster them all into one loooong post.  Which is to say, this post.  Because Momma's gotta sleep, ya'll.  Plus I still need to do updates for "post-Hawaii"...  those might happen tomorrow... anyway...

01.21.18:

It was a 12+ hour travel day.  I did a very quick ink sketch on the plane.  It's not worth sharing, so I won't (no wait I lied: you can see a bit of it in the corner of the photo below).

01.22.18:

The view from our lanai

I don't normally enjoy landscapes, but this one?  This was an absolute delight to paint: sitting in the warm air, smelling the plumeria, listening to a variety of birds chatter, and watching whales spout their little hearts out.  And the nice thing about painting a scene rather than photographing it is that you can automatically edit out things like telephone wires and cars.  Winning.

01.23.18:

A quickly sketched impression.

Did I say a variety of birds?  I should have used a capital V: Variety.  Hell, maybe even all-caps VARIETY.  So many beautiful birds.  Pretty sure that if I spent more time in Hawaii I'd turn into a bird-watcher, I was that charmed.  I splashed down the color for this little guy, and then added some questionable line work later:

The surrounding splotches were me demonstrating things for the niblings.

01.24.18

Love that color combo.

I managed to make it into the ocean every day except the last day (more on that later), so it shouldn't really be surprising that I also spent some time trying to capture it with my brush.

01.25.18

There's even more experimentation over the rest of the page.

I tried to capture some of the brilliant sunset effect, with considerably less luck.  I need to circle back around to this eventually, but it's really had to capture both vivid color and the bleeding effect.  Challenge!

01.26.18

This is the day we drove the Road to Hana.  It was amazing.  I swam in so many bodies of water!  Hah!

The first place we stopped at was Twin Falls, and I snapped a photo of Malachi that I then sketch-painted once we were back at the condo:

I mean it's not bad, per se, but I craved more definition.

It just wasn't doing it for me, tho', so I added in some line work to the foreground, and now I like it much better.

Those roots were too cool not to define.

01.27.18

SUPER king-ish!

I had a story seed plant itself in my brain this day, but I wasn't in a position to write, so I painted one of the characters, instead.  He's the High King.  And he's totes gonna' die.  Sorry High King.  Don't worry: your baby sister will avenge you.  Probably.

01.28.18

The day started out promising, with Nathan and I heading down to the beach at 0700 for our snorkeling date while his sister watched TLG.  But instead we had a date that consisted of me spraining my right ankle on an ocean-hidden rock and ripping open my left shin (on the same rock!  Talent!) and then driving to get pain killers, hydrogen peroxide, and so many bandages.  ::sigh::  I spent the rest of the day with it propped up, reading my book.  I did not sketch, I did not paint.  I feel zero guilt over this.

01.29.18

I had hoped to swim the morning before we left, but the previous day's adventures ruled that right the hell out.  Damn it.  Anyway, Sunday was another 12+ hour travel day, made extra miserable by my inability to carry things or really walk at all (thank goodness for airport wheelchairs!)  I didn't even manage a sketch.  Again: zero guilt felt.

I do, however, have paintings for the past three days, but they're going to have to wait until tomorrow, because Bedtimes, she is a'callin'.

Glazing Over

Tonight I did a glaze chart:

One of those times when the camera phone really, REALLY doesn't convey the actual affect.  OH WELL.

It was a pretty useful exercise, and gave me some nice insights into some of my paints (I had to limit myself to seven colors, because SANITY).  I look forward to putting some of that knowledge to work this weekend, but for now?  For now bed, because I'm frigging tired.

Awash in Flattery

Tonight I tried my hand at flat washes.

The artist prepares her page (pay no attention to the green splurt left over from last night's efforts).

(See, it's practically invisible now...)

As you can see, the results were mixed.  After I did the green, I knew that I simply didn't have a large enough brush to be effective on a area the size I was working with, so I made smaller areas, and although it got betterish, I learned that some colors ::coughultramarinecough:: just had no intention of cooperating.  But really I need to be using the proper tools to get the effects to work the way I want them now.  Except that for the moment I'm restricting myself to what I can do with my Travel Kit.  Womp womp.

So then I did some free-hand ink drawings...

Linewoooooork

...although I only "finished" (by which I mean screwed around with) one of them.

I have no patience for my impatience.  ::SIGH::

I might "finish" the others at a later date.  Hopefully I'll manage to channel the patience that was lacking for my "plant medusa", as Nathan called her, and thereby avoid the whole not-letting-it-frigging-dry issues (which just scream at me every time I look at this).  ::sigh::

I want to try more flat washes, but with even more diluted color.  But I'll probably try my brush at a gradient wash, next... whee!

A Warm and Watery Welcome

Ah, it's here at last- 2018!  Which is an even-numbered year!  Which means... 365 Project Time!

Thanks to some prodding by my beloved Lifemate, I've decided that this is the year I stop saying, "I sure do wish I was better with watercolor," and actually do something about it.  He even supported me in this endeavor by purchasing a nice little travel set, complete with a fancy-shmancy water-brush, so I have no excuses.  I actually already had a good travel set, but to be honest I like the one he got me better, especially now that I've played with the water-pen (I was a bit skeptical at first, but I'm a convert now).  It's definitely going to Go Places with me.

Now, having spent the past two years adjusting to my role as Parent (in addition to my roles of Individual and Spouse), I knew that I'd need to bring that very specific balance of Structure and Flexibility to this project.  More structure than 2016's Blog Project, because I've got a better handle on things now, but also more flexibility than 2014's Photo Project because Life.  So rather than say, "Oh I'm totally going to do a painting a day!" I rather more reasonably said, "I'm going to do at least one painting a week, and on the days I can't get to painting I will at least do a sketch that might be used for a painting, or a skill drill."  And then, because past experience (ie 2012's Art Project) has taught me that there are days when inspiration just isn't there, I created a bit of a Table for myself, to prompt me on those days when I wail, "I don't know what to draaaaaaw!"  It breaks down as follows:

Monday: still life

Tuesday: portrait

Wednesday: landscape

Thursday: an illustration from one of my stories

Friday: architecture

Saturday: animal

Sunday: fan art of someone else's story

January: Pacific Islands (this is very specifically because we'll be in Hawaii later this month)

February: Polar/Nordic Regions

March: British Isles

April: Eastern US

May: Western US

June: Mediterranean

July: South America

August: Africa

September: Australia

October: Asia

November: Eastern Europe

December:  Germany (because ancestry!)

Week 1: monochrome

Week 2: ink first

Week 3: no ink

Week 4: ink last

So if I don't have a hankering to draw/painting a Specific Thing on a given day, I bring out the Table and figure out what my prompt for that exact day is.  Thanks, Past Jenny O; I know Future Jenny O will be grateful for your anal retention.

That's that.  But what did I do today, you might ask?  Well, I made myself a very basic little color chart, to let me see what exactly I'm working with:

I started with the three primary colors from the set Nathan got me, and made a proper little deconstructed color-wheel out of it, then I laid down the rest of the colors in the kit, and finally added in the colors from my other kit that weren't already represented (with a bit of blending for good measure, just to see...).

Needless to say, I'm feeling quite accomplished, and much more comfortable with the water brush.  I'm excited to see what the year brings!

Losing Six Inches

My hair has been getting absolutely out of control, lately.  It's the longest it's ever been- long enough to sit on- and while it is lovely and definitely fulfilling a girlhood dream, it's also a giant pain in my ass.

So today I decided to do something about that.

PS behold my awesome socks.

 Melanie (my amazing stylist) said, "So you're wanting to take about four inches off?"

"Four or six, whatever it takes to keep it looking healthy and full.  I trust you."

Melanie decided that six inches what what was needed, and snicker-snack, off it went.  (Well, snicker-snack after about an hour of applying/setting/rinsing dye).

It was incredible how much lighter my head felt!

My nails are shameful.  Please don't judge too harshly.

What's even more incredible is how... short it feels.  I mean I look at my reflection and I honestly feel like I have little girl hair.  I run my fingers through it, or brush it, and it's like... "I have no hair!"

That, of course, is ridiculous, since I very obviously have hair that still-qualifies as "ultra-long".

And yet.

I'm looking forward to settling into the haircut, when it just feels "normal" instead of "cropped".  I think it'll take about two weeks to adjust.

(That being said, it is awesome that I no longer have to be suuuuuper careful in the bathroom.  Also that it's no longer dragging all over the floor any time I sit or bend over.)

Azrael's Children

It's getting to be That Time of the Month Again:

Nathan gave me the Highest Praise on the special one in the corner: "I'd put that on a Trapper Keeper"

Dark Bling

It's been a good week for Lady Time.  Last Friday I hung out with my Katie, on Saturday I spent the day with my dear friend Anna, and today I got together with the so-lovely Laurel to get a manicure, and then picnic in the park.

Now, I haven't had a manicure in years- and in fact I haven't even had polish on my fingernails since before Neeps was born, what with his tendency to chew on my fingers- so I was pretty excited by the prospect.  Especially since, seeing as how I'm not climbing much (::coughatallcough::) these days, I actually have really nicely shaped nails.

As Laurel and I walked to the nail salon, catching one another up on our respective lives, a small portion of my brain was running down what color I might want.  I decided I would go autumnal, maybe a grey or possibly a rich copper.  I do love a dark grey nail (so sophisticated!), but I was also feeling the need for something flashy, because I'm me and I love autumn and that calls for celebration!

In the end they had the most amazing dark-grey-shot-through-with-iridescent-glitter, just exactly as though the Universe was looking out for me.  I feel very Magical now.

Seriously it's so awesome I sort of wanted to steal the bottle.

Bonus: it matches my mermaid bikini!

Rainbow on Rainbow Action

In keeping with the whole Rainbow Nebula Fox Theme:

(Is it bad that I refer to this thing (and others of its ilk) as my son's "chew toy"?)

Sparkled So Green

Hey, remember this piece?  Well I started actually working on it.  Behold!

Not much to look at just yet.

Greeeeeeen! (and a little blue)

Now I let it percolate for a while, as I decide how I want to illustrate the seal, and whether or not I want to embroider any part of it.

Proy G. Biv

Holy stars, I'm back to being Ahead on Neeps's monthly portrait cards.  Woo!

Rainbow Dragons!

I will tell you a secret, if you'd like: see those two little dragons, down in the right hand corner? They are babies, which you can tell by the way their horns aren't as developed.

Next up?  Drawing nine cats, because obviously.

Four for a Boy

I'm working on a couple of longer blog entries (both of which also have to do with Very Strong Feelings) but I thought I'd take a break from all that intensity to share some more of what I've been doing on the visual-arts front:

Really it's amazing how much art and writing can be squeezed in when you're not at an office 40 hours a week.

These little guys are part of a series I'm doing (hah!  Series!  Pretentious Art Major alert!) for Neeps's monthly portraits.  I may scan and post them properly once they're all done, which hopefully will be before I go back to work in March.  I'm trying not to have any illusions about "free time" once that happens, and I really would like to manage a coherent twelve-portrait-collection.

I've also been noodling around with a children's book idea, and I've been using these as a way to sort of play with a style that appeals to kids.  Big eyes and pretty colors- really you can't go wrong if you include those things, right?  I haven't gotten to the illustrative part of that project yet, but once I do (if I do?  ::sigh::) I'm sure I'll be sharing more process on here.

Seasonal Saturation

Now if only there was some snow to set it all off...

you can't handle the red

Tangled in Amber

I have my favorite colors, I suppose, for jewelry and hair...

pretty things

Jack Was Here

The ice wasn't as bad this morning...

see, you can see the glass!

...but I still had to use my library card as a scraper.

Prepare the Way

Tomorrow night is my Katie's bachelorette party, which I am hosting here at the house.  It's going to be a co-ed Murder Myth-tery party (that I wrote myself because I can't ever seem to do things the easy way), complete with shiny "gemstones" to be used as in-game currency.  And because I had to know how many there were in order to divide them evenly amongst the players, I had to count them.  And obviously if you are going to count rainbow-colored glass ingots (or "dragons' tears", as I grew up calling them), you lay them out in proper color order.  And this is how you discover that Orange is the rarest color (less than half of the next rarest color, which was Red in case you were curious) and that Light Blue is the most common color (by about ten more than Green don't judge me) and that the Greens and the Dark Blues are considerably larger than the other colors, like to the point where your lines won't go straight WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE MANUFACTURERS?!

::cough::

Yeah.  Anyway.  They're pretty.

It's okay: I want to put them in MY mouth, too.

Bribery

When you work in certain industries, vendors bring you swag:

If the vendor remembers your office manager has a dog, and brings her poop bags, chances are he's going to make it back on the schedule...