Writing Samples

This page is where I've tested several different markers, especially to see how well they show up on darker painted pages. For white, my favorites are gouache, Sharpie Poster-Paint pen, and Uni-ball Signo in that order. The worst is the Permapaque, the Gelly Roll, and the Gell Xtreme. I'm just talking about white. I like these brands in other colors.

This spread is an example of "featuring" a mistake. While the paint was still quite damp, I somehow managed to pull on the right side and a hunk of the page tore loose. Instead of thinking I had ruined the page, I picked a contrasting color to paint the underneath page (purple) so that it shows through the torn place. When everything had dried sufficiently, I used a lilac colored pencil to create feathering around the edge of the tear. I could have also fixed the problem by gluing on a border.

At a class I taught a couple of weeks ago in Austin, one of the students had a magazine cut-out where she liked both sides. I thought she was very inventive when she tore a hole in the middle of a page and positioned the picture so both sides could be viewed.

Mockingbird

I don't usually use this many different colors on a background, but it's fun to get wild and crazy sometimes. I added the flower just because I thought it was pretty and reinforced the bits of purple in the background. The picture of the mockingbird is to remind me of just how sassy they can be. Recently, as we drove up to the house, we saw a squirrel running along the power line and a mockingbird was flying behind nipping at his butt. I've seen them dive at my poor old cat who was just minding her own business, but this is the first time I've ever seen one harass a squirrel. Maybe it got too close to her nest, although I would have thought it's too late in the year for her to be raising young. However, now that I think about it, it was just two weeks ago that I saw a mourning dove sitting on her nest in Missy's pear tree.

June 20-22

This spread is to remind me of some memorable meals that we had when we last visited my sister and brother-in-law.

Spirals

This spread was painted with raw sienna and cad yellow. When it was good and dry I swiped a couple of rubber stamps with white acrylic paint and randomly pressed them on the page. Just a note of caution...be sure to wash your stamps well immediately after using them with acrylic paint since it dries permanent. I colored in some of the spaces with Prismacolor pencils.

Camp Cheerio

In May, I went to Camp Cheerio, which is a breath-takingly beautiful place in the mountains of North Carolina not too far from Winston-Salem. However, it was remote enough that my cell phone couldn't get service and too far up a very winding road to rule out dashing into town. My friend Jennifer Phillips and I were there for a calligraphy workshop. The organizers tried something this session that I feel sure they won't repeat. They had engaged two instructors as usual. But instead of assigning half of us to one and half to the other for the whole week, or dividing the week in half with each teacher...they divided each day in half so we had to totally shift gears in our thinking because the subjects being taught couldn't have been more diametrically opposed. Worst of all, the students had to move instead of the teachers. So here's 40 mostly middle-aged to elderly women, and even a man in his 80s, packing up and moving our multitudinous art supplies up and down stairs every single day and sometimes twice a day!

They said they had to do it this way because the techniques that Brody Neuenschwander was using needed drying time, so dividing the week in half would have been a problem. But as it was, no one finished their projects anyway. His class needed full days all week long. The things he taught were extremely intriguing, and he has such a brilliant mind, along with being a wonderful human being. It was a joy to be exposed to his techniques.

As bad as not having a permanent situation in class was, the food almost made up for it. Camp Cheerio has lucked out by accidently hiring a fabulous young chef. Martyn, who is English, was between semesters in college and not looking forward to spending a summer at home, so he applied to be a camp counselor in the States. At that time, Cheerio had a cook, who by all accounts, made school cafeteria food seem downright tasty! Martyn insisted that he could do the job when the first cook left...and was everyone pleasantly surprised.

Since most of the time, he is cooking for teenagers, he goes all out when he gets the chance to cook for adults. The ingredients he used are what you would expect in a 4-star restaurant and each meal was more amazing than the one before. He served such things as a leg of lamb, baked salmon, grilled strip steaks, portobello mushrooms, fresh asparagus, and parsnips, in addition to a 30 foot long salad bar. Breakfast was French toast with fresh raspberries, blueberries and strawberries; bacon & sausage; Belgian waffles; real whipped cream, cheese grits (not sure what the Yanks thought about those, but we southerners ate them up.) And he always had a fabulous dessert at both lunch and dinner. There was a mixed fruit cobbler that was better than any I've ever had. The crust did literally melt in your mouth. The bread pudding was to die for (and I'm not even a bread pudding fan.) If all this wasn't enough, there was a coffee machine with about a dozen selections that could have competed with Starbucks.