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There is no particular theme for today, nothing particularly noteworthy going on just now, but I’ve done two paintings today, and made chicken tortilla soup (I can heartily recommend this recipe from the Pioneer Woman). Both of these things make me happy. Oh, and I’ve (finally!) finished grading my class’ papers, so…hooray! FREEDOM!!! (I’ll just ignore that they have another paper due this week…) I’m not exactly blown away by either painting, but enjoyed the process of painting nonetheless. This painting is just another variation on one of my favourite subject matters – underwater scenes. There are actually a lot more colour variations in this, but I can’t capture it via photo apparently.
Up
The second painting is another entry for Virtual Paintout‘s Iceland location this month. I liked the kind of duo-chromatic thing going on in this scene. This was just a quick, wee painting.
Iceland 2
Hope you’re all enjoying your weekends and doing things that make you happy too. 🙂
I know we’re well into the new year now, but happy new year anyway! I have been so swamped since Christmas with PhD work. I’m still completely overwhelmed with all the stuff I have to do, but I am about to go completely crazy bonkers mental doing tedious transformational complexity ratings (don’t ask…), so I’ve decided I need a break. I thought I should prove that although I have been remiss in my duties as a blogger, I have nonetheless been quite creative, at least in the run-up to Christmas.
You see, I’m a broke PhD student now, so my gifts had to be relatively cheap, so I decided to make most of them this year. Yeah, just like that…as if it didn’t cost a lot in time, if not money. What a numpty I am. But I think it was a success all round. My thumb got so chafed from all the crocheting that it hasn’t really been the same since, but I was quite pleased with how far I’ve come with the crochet-work. I’ve expanded into the amigurumi stuffed animal arena, which I’ve been thoroughly enjoying, and did my first lacework shawl, which was quite a task, but came out better than I’d anticipated.
However, my loving husband gave me a t-shirt for Christmas that reads: ‘Just because you can crochet something doesn’t mean you should‘. I’m still not entirely sure how to take that – he swears he wasn’t saying my crochet was the problem and was instead referring to hideous projects like this, but I think it’s a sign that maybe I ought to cool it a bit with all the octopi etc… especially when my sister-in-law said, voice full of horror, that she’d seen someone mention crocheted jellyfish and how pointless that seemed to her, and I remembered I had a crochet jellyfish pattern or two saved on my Pinterest crafts board… oops! I’ll just leave it at octopi, whales and little Cthulhus then… that’s normal, right? Right…?!
Anyway, in addition to the crocheting of hats, shawls, blankets, slippers, mittens, wall decorations, and stuffed animals, I also decorated an oil lamp, painted a portrait of my sister’s dog for her birthday, and baked up a storm. Whew! Just as well there’s another year before the next Christmas…
(Christmas 2012 in a nutshell)
First of all, a heartfelt thank you to all of you who have jumped in and given me your TBC ideas, it is so gratefully appreciated! Of course, it’s dawned on me slowly but surely that I now have to find a way to make some of these into paintings, which is harder than it first seemed! Eek! But, it’s a challenge, and I’m looking forward to it. 🙂 Something a little different for me…
Although I really ought to be working on stuff for my upcoming shows, I have taken a little break to take part in the Virtual Paintout competition again, after skipping a couple months. This month’s location is the Brit/French Channel isle of Jersey. My first impression of Jersey is that it has a lot of very pretty tree-lined drives, which you might recall I am awfully partial to. However, I did a tree-lined drive for the Ireland challenge, so thought I should do something different this time. After a lot of searching, I finally settled on a slightly minimalist/abstract view of a beach scene. I was struck by the shape and colour of the wall in the mid-ground particularly, the little S-shaped curve and the stark blue shadows. I just thought I’d do a really tiny little painting and it would take me no time…
How wrong I was! It took me HOURS. I don’t know why I keep thinking that small paintings are easy and quick. They almost never are. I think it’s the fact that such fine detail is required in such limited surface space that makes it fiddly and tedious, like trying to draw a portrait on the head of a nail or something. All I can say is that I was not meant to be a miniaturist, nor was I meant to be an architect or anything else that requires the ability and desire to draw straight lines. I ended up having to go for a soak in a hot bath to soothe my crooked, screaming spine after sitting hunched over a tiny canvas all evening. But I’m pleased enough with the result. I am considering doing at least another Jersey painting, as there were a couple interesting scenes that I wanted to try and paint. Here’s the Google Streetview reference.
Jersey Shore
That was not my only creative endeavour last night, oh no! I have a bunch of over-ripe bananas in my kitchen and have been wondering what to do with them for a few days now… I didn’t want to make traditional banana bread, because that’s boring. But I remembered the old vegan challah bread recipe I tried a while ago, and thought that might be nice. So I made a loaf (just half this recipe). At first I thought it was going to be a disaster. The only dried active yeast I had was… erm… so past its best before date that I’d probably give health & safety officers a heart attack if they knew. I doctored it a bit with a sprinkle of new fast action yeast, to hopefully give it a little kick, and just prayed for a minor miracle, that my yeast still had some oomph left in it yet. So I kneaded and got it in a bowl and waited an hour for the first rise. When I finally checked it, it hadn’t risen… at all. Well, it was kind of too late now, so I just decided to soldier on. I punched it down and braided it and got it on the baking tray and left it for its second rise cycle. When I checked it… same thing. Hadn’t budged. I nearly cried. But then I figured, well, it might come out as hard as rock, but I can use it as a doorstop or something. So I baked it. And it came out beautifully! The yeast gods were looking favourably on me that day, I guess. Or at least with pity, in the end… Mmm. I’m looking forward to trying it out as French toast this weekend! 🙂
Vegan Challah
Gah! I took about 20 pictures of this painting and got ONE that was even semi-useful. The rest came out blurry, completely the wrong colors, shiny in all the wrong places, or showed none of the texture. Probably partly my fault for trying to photograph something at nearly 7pm with very little light in the room. So bear that in mind, this photograph is the best of a bad lot…
Crash
I have been working on this painting for the Wet Canvas acrylic forum’s Different Strokes January challenge, which was to paint this reference photo by Kathrin Guenther. It is supposed to be mainly in acrylic – it being the acrylic forum’s challenge and all – but I decided to try out something from my cupboard of artsy-crafty delights, given the almost abstract quality of this shot. I bought some acrylic medium with tiny glass beads in it a while back. At the time I wasn’t sure when I would ever use it, but this painting seemed like the perfect excuse to try it, so I tried it out for the water to give it some bubbly texture, and I’m really pleased with the effect. It feels nice to be doing something slightly mixed media again – it’s been a while. It’s also a little bigger than I have worked in for a while now – about 16″ x 20″. Here’s a detail shot:
Crash (Detail)
In other news, I realised I still (!) had cranberries from Thanksgiving left in the fridge. Luckily they still seemed fine, so I thought I’d make something with them. I didn’t feel like faffing about with my usual cupcakes/muffins, so found this recipe for “Thanksgiving Bread” that sounded good. I halved the recipe, replaced the oil with applesauce, and added about 1/3 of a bar of white chocolate, chopped. It is to. die. for. Despite the applesauce cutting the fat, it sadly still does not fit in with my diet, unfortunately, so it’s been torture trying to resist eating the whole loaf, sadly. REALLY addictive. Would be lovely toasted with a little butter on top or fried into some French toast, if anyone feels like trying it out.
Trees - season unknown...
I’m starting off this post with a couple questions for anyone reading this, I’ll explain after. Please take the polls before reading on. Thanks.
Now, this painting is my rendition of a photograph taken by another American expat, Kelli Hughes, of a frosty street near where she lives in England. I tried and tried, and no matter what I did, I could not get the look of the frost and light right. I’m disappointed. I think it looks a lot more like cherry trees in bloom in Spring, which is fine, except that wasn’t what I was going for.
Also, my husband doesn’t like the bottom half of the painting. As the original photo was taken in the morning (I think), the light is low and therefore the street is very shadowy. I quite liked this about it, I thought the top was quite busy and it needed a sort of calm bottom half, although I was hoping for a little more color variation there, and I think I may go back and try to work in some more tones of color in there, but still leaving it pretty blank. There is actually a little more variation in the color in real life; it was just really hard to get a good photograph of this because I was using a lot of metallic gold/bronze hues in this to give it that low light quality. But I think I like it pretty plain like it is. But maybe that’s just me being arty and too avant-garde about it…
I also did another watercolor, but I’m not happy with this one. I wasn’t really in control of this one, and I don’t like it overall. But I’ll post it anyway, as I really ought to post everything, as this is a diary of all my creative endeavors, not just the ones that don’t bomb.
Cherry Spill, watercolor on paper
And lastly, I have found the perfect muffin recipe: cranberry & white chocolate. Although, I think next time I might replace all the oil with applesauce instead of the half that I did and use a bit less butter in the crumble topping because it turned out slightly too greasy at the bottoms. But still, oh my, these are to die for. Cranberry and white chocolate, a marriage made in heaven…
Cranberry &white chocolate muffins
One of my all-time favorite poems is Neutral Tones by Thomas Hardy. I’ll admit, it’s a seriously depressing poem, one discovered back in my teen goth days, but I still love it to this day. There’s something about the rolling cadence, the word choices, and the bitter tone that just send shivers down my spine. It’s one of those poems that creates such a vivid atmosphere and mood that you feel you’re actually there and can feel the chill of the wind and see the grey of the sky.
Today is one of those dreary days here in lovely Scotland, and the feeling reminds me of the way this poem makes me feel. Only throw in some gale force winds and pouring rain. There you have it! Glorious autumn.
While apparently my parents in California are having an Indian summer with 100F temperatures, we in Aberdeen are having fog and temps in the 50s. It is firmly and most definitely Fall here. And in honor of the change in seasons, I have been working on some autumnal creative projects.
First off, I’ve done a watercolor drawing of some pumpkins.
Pumpkin Patch
It was also my turn to bake for a weekly cake day we have at work, so I went for something seasonal and did gingerbread cupcakes with chocolate frosting & chocolate chips. They taste like Lebkuchen, the German gingerbread cookies smothered in chocolate that you get at Christmas time. Yum! Plus, they were healthy – I used apple sauce in place of the butter… See? TOTALLY healthy ;)! In case anyone’s interested, I used this recipe for the cake (replacing the cocoa in the batter with extra flour, the butter with applesauce, and baked 15-20 min. as cupcakes, filling cups about 3/4 full) and this recipe for the chocolate ganache frosting.
Lebkuchen (Gingerbread & Chocolate) Cupcake
There were a lot…
Lebkuchen Cupcakes Galore!
I have also started crocheting again – am attempting to make my first pair of socks. I’m just a wee bit rusty and these are going to be some wonky socks if I ever finish them!
We were supposed to go to Fyvie Castle today, but the husband wasn’t feeling well, and the weather turned, well, Scottish. So instead, we stayed in and were lazy. My kind of Sunday.
Well, I wasn’t entirely lazy. Physically I was a sloth, yes, but I did quite a bit of writing, for me. Another 1,700 words under the old belt, and having looked up the average length for your typical novel, and found it to be anywhere from about 80,000 to 150,000 words, 35,000 is looking like I might actually be able to finish this thing one day in the not too impossibly distant future. Imagine that! Finishing a novel! The mind boggles.
I’ve also heard it said that authors often find themselves happily writing along, tralala, when a character will hijack their writing and do something the author totally wasn’t expecting them to do. I thought, yes, what a quaint little anecdote, and dismissed it as one of those smug things successful writers say to put the blame for anything wacky onto some mystical ‘other’. But, it happened to me today! I was writing about my Norse character’s journey across the North Atlantic and suddenly… they became cannibals. Okay, not like berserk mmmm-tastes-like-chicken cannibals… Donner-party type cannibals. Respectable cannibals. The kind of cannibalism that comes of necessity and the desire not to starve. My story is turning into such a soap opera…
To be fair, I can see the subconscious influence behind it. The hubs and I watched ‘The 13th Warrior’ yesterday, the Michael Crichton film about the Muslim scribe who joins a band of Vikings to defeat a mythical Beowulf-type tribe of neanderthal-type predators. The original Crichton title is ‘Eaters of the Dead.’ Hence… cannibals!
Another thing that explains the cannibals suddenly turning up in my story is possible heavy metal poisoning. In art therapy on Friday we did some work with Fimo clay. I’ve had a couple of blocks of the stuff at home for quite some time now, but never really got around to trying it out. I’m more a 2D kind of person I think than 3D, but it was fun to see the sorts of things you could do with it, so I figured I’d give it a go. Who knows, maybe I could produce some pretty cool beads or something and maybe start selling some jewelry as well as artwork!
Uh, no. Unlikely. I am not a Fimo natural, apparently. Either that, or my clay was old because it was quite crumbly. I added some metallic powders to it too, which only exacerbated the crumbliness. Plus, whilst rolling these metallic-powder-encrusted beads around in my hands I realised I probably shouldn’t be rolling these about with my bare hands, as these powders can be absorbed through skin… Oops. My palms started to itch (alas, I doubt it’s because I’m about to come into money; more like I’m about to keel over dead of heavy metal poisoning), so I went and washed them as best I could, but they still itch… 😦 But I did produce a few beads and baked them and now I’ve got some beads. I’m not sure I’ll ever use them, but it was an interesting experiment.
Fimo beads
Also, on a totally unrelated topic, can I just say that Israeli couscous is possibly the world’s most delicious food? I finally bought some online (because Aberdeen is hopeless for anything that isn’t chips and pies, apparently) and made some up with some chickpeas, feta, red pepper, mint, and chilli, and oh my goodness it was divine. And that’s what we’re having for dinner tonight too. And possibly every night thereafter for the rest of our lives… 😉
It’s been a while, I know. After the mad dash to get my paintings ready to go for the Aberdeen Artists’ exhibition hand-in, I sort of took a painting hiatus. Well, that’s not entirely true. I have been working on the Polypolly painting albeit sloooowly, and I did another sky paintinglette, but that turned out so bad it will never see the light of day… So, things have been a little slow lately, but now that I’ve given myself a slight vacation, it’s time to get back to work.
But I did want to just drop by in the meantime and show you what’s been going down. First of all, I did drop off my babies at the Aberdeen Art Gallery last week. It was a little odd and anti-climactic. I handed all my forms and money over to the woman, while all the art students from Gray’s sort of hovered warily around each other and me, sizing each other up…. not the friendliest of atmospheres. Then as I was filling out the self-addressed envelope for them to send me my rejection letter in, the woman who was processing me saw some friends and started a conversation with them. I just sort of stood there thinking, ‘Uh, is that it…? Am I supposed to get a receipt or something? But the woman totally ignored me, so I figured that must be it, so I left my paintings and hope that I actually did enter them and they aren’t sitting there only half-processed or something.
I put the Aberdeen painting in a chunky but plainish frame, and while I wasn’t sure at first if I liked it, I think given how kind of busy the painting is, it needed that sort of restful edge, so I think I like it now.
Paintings framed for AAS exhibition 2010
The judging isn’t until this coming Thursday… as the date approaches, I get more and more nervous. If I’m honest, I have a lot invested in this show emotionally, as it’s my first sort of foray into the Aberdeen art world, and I know a rejection there will make me feel like it’s kind of pointless to go on trying, as silly as that is. But I know I’ll just have to allow myself a small period of moping and then suck it up and try again somewhere else. That’s the plan at least.
And here’s the (still a work-in-progress) next step of the Polypolly painting… all the pretty birdies all in a row now. There is still some mixed media work to be done to it though. I’m thinking collage and crackle varnish in parts.
Polypolly (WIP 2)
And I baked blueberry muffins this morning. Unfortunately, the recipe I used had the flour measurement in both metric/weight measures and volume, and I used volume, not realizing that she converted the volume incorrectly, and was actually double what it should have been. I thought it looked a bit thick and dry when I put the batter into the cups, so added a little extra milk. They ended up a lot less hard-rock-like than I’d feared, but they’re still a bit dry. They look pretty though and actually taste okay as long as there’s a cup of coffee or milk available simultaneously… Uh, yum?
Blueberry Rock Muffins
I’ve been working on a couple paintings lately, but my, are they tedious! One is the huge one for the bathroom, and the other is a small one but super detailed and fiddly, which is not my usual style at all and quite interesting from a try-something-different perspective.
Atlantis Olive (in progress 2)
I was just getting used to my small little paintings that I bashed together in one evening no bother, I’m not used to working on a painting that takes longer anymore! Apparently I’m an artistic sprinter and keel over panting when it comes to longer cross-country distance treks. So I suppose it’s good for me, like artistic calisthenics. Feel the burn!
So, unfortunately I just have ‘in progress’ photos at the moment.
The bathroom painting is coming along, but I have big plans to embellish it with mosaic tiles and beads and other pretty shiny things (I swear I was a magpie in a previous life!), so there is more fiddly tedium to come. I’m going for a sort of Pompeiian ancient fresco mural look.
The Black Swan (in progress)
The second one started out as color concept only (I was in a red and black mood). I asked my friends on Facebook for subject matter suggestions and got ‘evil ladybirds’, ‘Dinosaur Jesus’ and pomegranates as suggestions. But I was thinking more along the lines of old Russian lacquer decorations – detailed and folk arty. I started with the swirls and it turned into a black swan, which sounds like the name of a fairytale if ever I heard it. Is there one about a Black Swan? Seems like there ought to be, if there isn’t. It takes a LOT of concentration, hunching over the canvas peering myopically at the details, and a VERY steady hand (which, for the record, I don’t have). I downed brushes yesterday feeling like Quasimodo with a migraine. Ugh. But I’m pleased with how it’s turning out so far. It’s unfortunate the photo turned out so blurry. Still getting a hang of my camera, I guess.
In other news, I made strawberry, rhubarb and mint compote. The mint was an addition I got the idea for from epicurious, and I think it really works well! Yummy! Spring is here!
I also went to the Inverurie Art Show this past weekend. It was interesting to see the sort of range of work being done out there in the local area, and also the prices they were going for. There was quite a spectrum – two paintings the same size and kind of style: one £35, the other £900. Some really lovely pieces in there, and by a couple people I knew or my husband knew, too, which was an extra bonus. I’ll have to look into the Aberdeen show, which should be coming up soon… wish information was a little easier to find on these things.
The title is some free association on my part, a stream of consciousness thing. I have combined two of my very favorite things in the whole wide world tonight: ’80s music (is that song even from the ’80s? Or is it really a ’90s song? Ah well. Still all nostalgic for me…) and Byzantine-inspired art (metal paints galore!). I have always adored Byzantine art – the metallic paints on the religious icons, the jewels and mosaics and decadent richness and color of it all. Yum.
I’m sat here listening to my favorite Californian radio station, KSCU 103.3, via live web stream, and my favorite show, the ’80s Underground, which is why I love love love Wednesdays. (It is ALMOST taking the edge off the mad homesickness I’ve been experiencing lately… almost.) And I have just finished another painting! Life just doesn’t get better than this.
Silver & Gold
So I pulled out my metallic paints again after a hiatus of about a decade. They were a little thicker than I think they were supposed to be. I suppose that’s what 10 years on a shelf does to paints. But it was ok, because I wanted a pretty texture-rich effect anyway for this painting. It’s a painting I’ve been plotting in my head for some time. And I was really digging the metallic sheen of it all. And when I was finished, I threw on some metal beads as well. Why not, eh?
In unrelated news, I made Pho Ga yesterday because (see above note re: mad homesickness, which includes certain Bay Area restaurants) I had a SERIOUS craving. A lovely friend sent me a super easy and yummy recipe, so thanks yet again, G!
Pho Ga
And I tiled the area around our drying board in the kitchen. So no more crumbling walls! Hoorah!
Kitchen tiling
Summoning of the Muse 
