Chicken Teriyaki Bowl #7

I’ve been meaning to tell you about this beautiful book I finished reading about three weeks ago - Peony in Love by Lisa See.  I’d seen it at the bookstore several times and finally bought it when it was on the buy one, get one half price table.  It is not really a love story, but a story about love and what love is.  Absolutely wonderful, like reading a dream.

I do have one confession.  At one point in the story, fairly early, I stopped reading temporarily - call it a lapse in faith.  I picked it up again, though and finished it in one, very long sitting.  If you read, or have read, the book you can probably guess at what point I almost gave up.

That was the good.  The bad is what “they” did to another of my favorite books, The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory.  I finally got the movie on Netflix.  I knew not to expect much because it didn’t even get to the theatres in my home town and I saw maybe one ad for it - an obvious indication of a bad movie.  Oh My Gosh!  It was terrible.  How terrible, you might ask?  Bad enough that I couldn’t finish watching it; and that says a lot.  Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johanssen were fine, they just couldn’t do a thing with the plot or the dialogue.

The problem is that the director tried to cover the story as a whole, hitting highlights here and there.  The book is actually about family - the three Boleyns - how family is defined, how duty to family changes them (and England) and, for Anne and George at least, takes everything from them.  Mary manages to escape because she is faithful to her own family - her husband and children, rather than to the Howard and Boleyn families.  If the writer and director had taken this view of the story, it would have been much more cohesive and interesting.

Shadows and Clouds

The pattern is from the 2008 Autumn Somerset Workshop magazine.  It is embossed aluminum with cardstock overlay surrounded with maribou.  I love how this turned out and am already planning a design of my own, more moon-shaped.

There are some orange highlights, which are from the camera - the aluminum is just embossed, with no color.  Here are some details:

I love the eyelashes!

The embossing was simple and took only about an hour.

So, I’m avoiding work and instead going through my bookmarks when I find this one, a tutorial on drawing wings.  So, I draw a pair of wings.  The wings obviously need a body to go with it, so I draw an angel.  She looks silly all by herself on a white page, so I draw a border.

Keep in mind I’m not the angel-drawing type.  I’m not cutsy at all.  But I like how this turned out, considering I’ve never drawn wings before and only drawn two other figures.

My first angel

I’ve added a widget that shows my word count total for NaNoWriMo.  So far I am right on track with over 5,000 words and, wonder of wonders - I’m neither tired of the story nor running out of ideas for it.  I’m actually surprised, it is coming together pretty cohesively…for a first draft…about ancient Sumeria.  By the way, they DID have beer then, didn’t they?  I know they had fermented honey drinks…. And did they take baths?  Never mind, in my ancient Sumeria they did.

I’ve always had trouble with dialogue, especially with my main character, so I made it easy - she doesn’t talk much, but is a really good listener!  Dialogue with other characters isn’t a problem, just the main character…don’t ask me why.

I’m finding Wikipedia a great resource for little things like the name of the canal that Uruk was located on (Nil) and what other city-states were around Uruk, and where were they located, up or down-stream.

I also stopped mid-paragraph today because I know where this particular scene is going and I want a good, strong spot to start on tomorrow.  There’s nothing so terrible and sitting down and trying to figure out what happens next!

I guess I am going to start doing updates on Monday of the art I did during the weeked.  This last weekend, inspired by the latest issue of Somerset Workshop, I made two piece: Mystery and Suspense.

Suspense

Mystery

You know, one of these days I’m going to take some really good photos of my art.  The problem is I have such terrible lighting in here!

The backgrounds on both pieces are crackle finished with Alizarin Crimson over Burnt Umber.  The ads were free clip art and I used $1.00 gift tins from JoAnne’s aged with dark bronze and blue tarnish.

So, I’m sitting here, reading my RSS feeds and the dogs are going nuts outside.  They have this particular high-pitched bark when it is something really important, like Roxie getting out of the yard (Rosie always tattles on her, but never tries to get out herself).  I got up to check and I see all three dogs with their noses through the chain link fence staring at something and barking excitedly.

Now there’s a picture for you - barking with their noses through the chain link.  Anyway, I just couldn’t see what had got them all frantic.  No cats, no birds… the last time they were this excited a little bird had been stunned by a car and was sitting in the road.  So, I put on my shoes and go out with them.  They are so intent on this thing they don’t even come to say hi, not even Sheila, which is very odd.

But I still can’t see what they are looking at, so I go outside the fence and follow their eyes and then I see it… a leaf.  It is very cold out and the leaf was stiff and had fallen so it was sitting straight up, balanced on it’s stem and the edge of the leaf.  That is what the dogs were barking at.  To make sure I picked it up and floated it over the fence to them.  They went nuts trying to get it and eat it.

Brittney spaniels are soooo strange!

I feel like an artist this morning because last night I worked on a collage piece which I had in my head, but didn’t turn out the way I liked.  So I started doing some doodles on it with gel pens and it made it worse.  I slept on it and, guess what, I still hated it.  So, I started over.  Went right over the top of the old piece and started from the beginning.

This makes me feel like an artist for several reasons:  I didn’t give up art altogether just because something turned out bad.  Laugh it up, monkey boys, but there was a time where I would have retreated from art altogether.  I also didn’t get mad at myself for not making something perfect or for screwing up even more something which might have been salvaged.  Finally, I shrugged and just used the old mess as a base for the new work.  Now how is that for a life lesson?

I’ve been subscribing to Julia Cameron’s philosophy of taking care of the quantity and letting the gods take care of the quality.  This means lots of poems, art pieces, doodling, sketches and you know what?  I’m noticing an improvement in both how I view things and in my work.  I see detail more, but at the same time see how the detail is just made up of patterns, like doodling.  I see color.  Actually seeing colors always reminds me of the part of the Girl with a Pearl Earring where she looks at the clouds and finally sees how they are made up of all colors - they aren’t just grey and white - and realizes why Vermeer can’t paint a blue gown with blue paint.

And a cool thing happened this week that made  me very happy.  I told my husband that I was starting a list of stuff I want for Christmas - all of which are art-related.  We always give our parents a list to choose from.  Anyway, I was saying how I wanted to try working on canvas and he said “I’ll buy you canvases.  I want to see your list, I can get you what you want.”  This is huge because I always feel like he sneers at my “crafts”.

I finished two more embossed metal art pieces featuring loteria cards to go along with the first one - ‘Amor‘. I just love how they turned out and I’m thinking of going back and getting more of these frames from the dollar store to make some as gifts.

Vida

Paz

As soon as I find something I can use as a hammer, I’m going to put these up, one beneath the other on my office wall!

Today’s art journal page was very interesting, both from a technique standpoint and from what it revealed.  I started out with a large image of a carved door and did layers of acrylics and stamps with rubber cement resists.

For the last layer I just went nuts with the rubber cement and coated the entire page with Payne’s Grey.  The result made the carved parts of the door look like little god figurines.  It made me think of looking through the mists of time, which I envision as seeing on a TV set, so I drew a TV set and journaled inside it.

What I learned is that you need to have all the layers to understand the bottom layer properly.

With Each Layer More is Revealed

Closeup of left side

I found this tacky plastic pencil box at the Dollar Store yesterday:

Tacky Pencil Box - Closed

I really liked how it slid open, though and thought it would make a cute box if done in cardstock.

Inside slides open. A lip on the sliding part hits the snap on the inside and keeps it from sliding all the way out.

So, I opened the parts up flat and took measurements.  First problem - the inside is too big for a single sheet of even 12×12 cardstock.

Laid out flat

So I created a drawing of both parts in Illustrator to scale and then scaled them down equally to fit onto 8.5×11 sheets.  I made at least two prototypes, trying to get the fold lines correct so that the inside would slide smoothly.  Finally, I made a prototype in actual cardstock:

Closed

Open

Side View

I glued a regular magnet to the flap and inside the box.  Note - you want to glue the magnets in after you slide the box together.  I didn’t do that and kind of goobered the box getting it past the inside magnet.  The inside magnet keeps the insert from sliding all the way out.

If you are interested in the pattern it is here (inside, outside) in PDF.  Make sure you print at 100%.  I don’t have any instructions with it right now but it should be pretty self-explanatory.