Late night project

Last night I made myself some dummy signs to post in my house. I call them dummy signs because they're reminders to do things that I shouldn't need reminding about, but I sometimes don't think of them.


They're just vinyl letters on paper colored with market and framed.

Check back in a month and you'll find me fitter, flossier, and with more productive time.

Baby's First String Tree - A How-To Post

I decided to build a string tree in the nursery for the baby I'll be having in May. This post will show in-progress photos of the process and offer tips and tricks to help you make your own string tree.

Supplies:

String (I used yarn)
Pushpins
Felt (green)
Frames and drawings (if desired)
Pushing aid (a thimble, thick dishtowel, a bit of wood... anything that you can use to help push in the pushpins without destroying your thumbs)


If you want to have your tree go through drawings, you'll want to do the drawings first. Draw birds, monkeys, vampires, or whatever else strikes your fancy sitting on the branches. We bought a portable crib with blue and brown owls, so I drew an owl to match.


Felt gets cut into leaves. I bought three shades of green. I didn't want them all the same color because leaves vary a lot depending on how sunlight hits them - they can look dark or light. Plus having a few colors helps add some dimension.


My leaves are just ovals with pointed ends. I made several hundred (hint: cut through several layers of felt to make several leaves at once)

The final mix is above. I had about even numbers of each color.

These are the drawings I'll be using. They're all brown and blue to go along with our nursery colors.
The pictures are also highly suitable as cat chairs. Dopey obviously approves.


First I prepared the wall. It needed a washing.


Next I hung up the drawings in a way I felt would make sense given the angles of the branches in the drawings.

I then began to stick pins into the wall. Don't be too regular, don't just "outline" the tree. You'll want to backtrack a lot to create texture, so try not to be too regimented.

I start at the bottom and work my way up. Here is the trunk, showing the backtracking pattern. You don't have to do it this way, just do what feels right.


The above is the beginning of a knot in the wood. I made a couple of rough concentric circles with pushpins.

Here I started to fill in the knothole by going around the circles, being careful not to be too regular. You want it to suggest a knothole - knotholes are never perfect circles.

The above is the finished knothole.

I frequently take breaks to make sure the tree is shaping up how I want. When I do this I have to maintain string tension so it doesn't all fly off the wall. Below is a closeup for technique on that point.
I pinned across the yarn and then wrapped it around the pin. It creates a relatively secure anchor so you can take breaks. This one held overnight even though my cats found the yarn and yanked on it while playing all night.

Below you will see evidence; cats are an occupational hazard when working with yarn.


Above I'm beginning to fill in branches. I plan out where the branches will go and figure out where the ends should be. when I get to the very ends I'm putting the pin through a couple of felt leaves and then into the wall. Later I'll fill in leaves on the branches so they aren't just at the very ends.

Above, leaves impaled for the greater good.

In the above you can see continuing progress. I used separate pieces of string for the branches on the other sides of the drawings. If I went behind the drawings it would probably be okay. However, it would make the drawings hang away from the wall, which might look weird or be less safe for a kid's room.

More pin-planning and leaf placement

Below is the tree with leaves only on the very ends of the branches. It looks okay, but it's a bit weird to just have the leaves on the edges like an outline.

Above I'm adding a little branch to the left of the blue bird. If your tree seems uneven or not full enough it's pretty easy to just stick some more pins in and add branches.

Above the branch has been filled in. Yay no more big empty spot!

I like how gravity curls up the felt of the leaves. It makes this a very three dimensional tree.

Above is after I filled in more leaves. Basically I'd just skewer pairs of leaves with pushpins and place them along the branches in places where they seemed to make sense.
In many cases I didn't put them on top of the string directly since the tension would pull the pushpin out of the wall over time. Instead they're right beside the string in most cases.



That's pretty much it. Good luck building your own string trees! If you do build one I'd love to see it - email me at kat@kandeart.com with a photo.

Painting

Just a few shots of the process of painting "Sunning". The original can be purchased for $150 over at Kandeart.com.  I just figured out a moment ago that you can click the pictures to see them bigger.  Convenient!


I love gouache more each time I use it. It can do things that are very subtle or very bold.

The above is after many new layers of shadow. I was able to thin out the paint to add it in thin washes. I love the extra dimension this can give to the color, it's much less flat.
Everyone loves whiskers.

Especially ones with lovely shaded contours.

End result:

Something you don't see every day...

The below is a short film done by Salvador Dali with Walt Disney. It was discovered in 2003 by Roy Disney when he was working on the new Fantasia. It's pretty trippy and has many of Dali's favorite motifs. It's very cool to see what two very talented artists could do together.

The Bath

I drew this during week three of Human Resources Management class. I had been messing with a pattern of overlapping concentric circles in my doodles a lot lately, and their general shape made them feel like bubbles to me.

This is actually the second bathing walrus I've drawn, the other being this one:


Something about walruses just makes them perfect for lounging happily in bathtubs.

Variations on the skull

I'm working on improving my drawing skills based on some free pdf-format textbooks. The books are guides to drawing by Andrew Loomis. He's amazing at drawing compelling images and he explains concepts in a very helpful and clear way. I was referred to him by the web site of an artist whose skill with facial expressions had impressed me.

They're so old that they're public domain. You can download them free for your own usage here: link to free books

I'm starting by flipping between "Fun with a Pencil" and "Drawing the Head and Hands". I've been frustrated for a while by my tendency to always draw the same sort of face, so I'm enjoying exploring new information. Loomis is very good at explaining how to bend the "rules" of face-drawing to make faces unique.

How to paint a cedar

Today I'll show the process I used to paint "Cedar", a commissioned piece done in gouache and ink on watercolor paper.

This was a gift from a husband to his wife to congratulate her on finishing her first novel. The shoes belong to the four main characters in the story.

Here is the finished drawing:




I started with the background. Painting sunsets is pretty easy. I tend to keep lighter colors higher up with the most intense reds and oranges toward the horizon. Keep the paint pretty wet and paint side to side. I blended extensively to get a wide variety of shades and to keep the transitions subtle.

I painted the trunk on top of the sunset once the sunset was dry


Like always I'm painting with gouache. Gouache has many of the benefits of oil, acrylic, and watercolor paints. It can be blended for essentially an infinite amount of time, like oil. It can be opaque like acrylic, and it can be translucent like watercolor.


My palette is in the form of a big color wheel, which makes mixing very easy.

Next up, leaves!


I started with a medium green tone and tried to get the general shape of the foliage. This is a cedar tree, which has branches like this:


To get the pointy effect I'll start by blocking in basic shapes, and then make pointy details with ink.


None of the shapes are terribly precise, just blobby and generally in the shape I want them. Once I've done the medium green I waited for the paint to dry, then went in with a darker green to create shadows.


Once the dark green was dry, I went in with a lighter green to create highlights. The image below reminds me of the paint by number kits I did as a kid.


Here is what the effect ends up looking like on a larger scale:



In the above the ground has also had a thin coat of dark green added. I'll dry brush in some grass in the next step:


Dry brush is a slight misnomer - the brush isn't dry, it's a bit damp. This allows the blades of grass to stay sharp instead of liquid and blurry.


Always use a reference if you want what you're drawing to really look like what it is. I like to remove color information so it's left to my imagination.


Before moving on to the ink part the gouache has to be dried completely. Because I'm impatient I use a box fan to speed up the process.


Dry and moving on! I'm using medium and fine pointed sharpie pens to do all the detail in this piece. In the above image I'm making the leaves look pine needle-ish. I don't draw every needle, just various areas at the periphery to give the illusion of pointy texture.




Shoes!



Texture detail is above. I did some cross-hatched shading on the trunks, finally ending up with the finished drawing: