Ady!

I'm hoping to win a spot on Dreamy Faces with Ady Almanza. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=4633600290437&set=a.1174914905464.2023097.1605837004&type=1&theater

Triptych in My Little Journal

All part of a fantasy triptych for Juliana Cole's class! This sketchbook is almost used up. I'm not going further with this at the moment. I'm enjoying the process, though. It's fun and rewarding. I like making fantasy faces from my imagination. Ignore the wonky perspective on the castle walls. I sketched it quickly then said, "Eh." It's all for fun. Koh-i-noor woodless pencils do not work well on mixed media paper covered with craft paint. They certainly aren't Prismas. Usually they're really rich in color, but over painted surfaces...nope. The angel was done in Col-Erase by Prismacolor. They're softer colors and the leads are a bit harder than regular Prismacolors. They're awesome for erasing, though!

Mother's Day

Got my first Mom's Day gift in the mail from Michael and Vince. They live in CA and I miss them both so much! Thank you, thank you! You brightened my already pretty good day! I love you guys!

Sidhe

Sketch in progress for a possible larger work...

Field Notes...#2 Completed for the MOMENT

I managed to complete the Touchstone exercise for the moment. I know I'll alter it more as time passes, but for now, I'm at a stopping point.

Beautiful Charleston

Just a few lovely shots from a spot on King Street on a cloudy, windy, GORGEOUS 62 degree day...Thanks Holly and Sly for these.

Field Notes: Mixed Media Sketching/Chapter 1 Exercise 2 Examiner Extraordinaire

Chapter 1: Assignment #2: Examiner Extraordinaire Enjoyable background making from "Field Notes: Mixed Media Sketching" tonight. I enjoyed working on the first layers of a natural background. This is one awesome course!

Acrylic paints in Lush Foliage, Tan and Climbing Vine, metallic paints in two different golds and bronze. Tim Holtz Distress Stains in Peeled Paint and Vintage Photo. Selected nature photos from my collage stash. 

WIP...

D&D Character

Hey, this was supposed to be my D&D Character, not ME! LOL...


I Am A: Neutral Good Human Druid (7th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-10
Dexterity-19
Constitution-13
Intelligence-18
Wisdom-17
Charisma-18

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment when it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Druids gain power not by ruling nature but by being at one with it. They hate the unnatural, including aberrations or undead, and destroy them where possible. Druids receive divine spells from nature, not the gods, and can gain an array of powers as they gain experience, including the ability to take the shapes of animals. The weapons and armor of a druid are restricted by their traditional oaths, not simply training. A druid's Wisdom score should be high, as this determines the maximum spell level that they can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Viking Girl

Last night, I spent about 20 min...maybe 30 drawing, painting (with watercolors) and scrubbing pan pastels on this girl I liked her. One arm is too big, but who cares? She's a sketch and was a fun one at that. You can see the difference between the one with and without a touch of pan pastels...

 

Field Notes - Sampler!

Yep, I took off making a sampler for Juliana Coles awesome class "Field Notes: Mixed Media Sketching and I did a neat, organized mark-making review of most of the tools in my "Journal Mobile Unit." Juliana, who is a major part of the class and is very involved on a one-on-one basis gently explained that she wanted messy, yummy, juicy and experimental. Mix them up, play and discover...so my pages went from this...

and this...

to...

Yes...and amazing, delicious, outrageous, riotous exploration of the things that I wanted to use and carry everywhere. I settled on some alternate markers, Golden Fluid acrylic Titan Buff and Turquoise (Phthalo) and Folk Arts' French Vanilla and Patina. (Obviously my fav colors are black and turquoise!) I'm still working through the marks and I'm sure my kit will be changing based on what I need and since I have one box already set up for life drawing, I know that this will evolve further. 

I'm having great fun in her class and after Initiation, I have to say that I'm hooked! I doubt I'll ever miss another of her classes and I'm hoping to lure her to South Carolina, to piratey Charleston, for a class! (Fingers crossed!)

Moonshine!

http://effywild.com/moonshine

The ever-wonderful Effy Wild is doing this majorly awesome workshop and I so want to be a part of it! It looks like much fun...hmm...

March - In Like a Lamb, So Far

Wow, it's been a tough couple of weeks. I'm in the midst of a wicked flare (thanks MA for teaching me the meaning of the term "Wicked") and it's been hell. Stress over stuff always blows. One of my kids has nasty cellulitis and I'm worried about that. Worried about taxes. Worried about interpersonal relationships. Worried about money. The usual...LOL.

Anyway, trying to keep the focus of this blog to art and spiritual exploration...that's what Lothian is to me. It's where Gawain was born (possibly). It's a spiritual place in my mind. It's one of those Other Side places where I might reside in some form. My Ka or my Ba or parts of my soul are possibly there.

Check out the mermaids. I had a lot of fun with these! More to come. Between drawing folk art face from my imagination and life drawing, I'm enjoying the process. I'm also attempting to embrace the "Extreme Journaling" concept, but I'm finding my own path.

Anna

Anna

Anna

So, lets add some art. I did some life drawings recently at a Meetup (those are awesome for quick, couple-of-hours of art) which I consider an Art Date for Myself. I'll toss those up and possibly some other stuff.

Ann Bonny

I did a really fast layout that had it's focus on pirates and it's the result of my "Letter in a Bottle" exercise. I have always been fascinated with Ann Bonny.

I did a two page spread on pirates...focused on Ann Bonny, the female pirate out of Charleston, SC. The locals rumors is that she was a debutant from South of Broad - the richest part of town. She fell for the wrong kind of man and took to a life of crime. Her father tried to send her to the plantation he had outside of the city, but she escaped with her lover (possibly Calico Jack Rackham) and went onto a life of crime. Rumor also has it that after she 'escaped' her death sentence for piracy, she returned to 'high society" and to a life of being a wife to her originally intended betrothed. Hmmm...fascinating. I had a past life in Charleston/Bermuda just after the heyday of piracy and it's always fascinated me. Nope, I wasn't Bonny. My last name was Tucker in that lifetime - one of the only ones I've discovered via an indepth past life regression. Irony...I had my youngest son in this life in the hospital founded by my son in that life!

Initiation Extreme Journaling Workshop

An amazing thing happened on the way to the day after...Jule Coles gave me the chance of a lifetime. I signed up for her Quickdraw workshop and she wrote to me and said she was giving me the opportunity to join her in Initiation. Amazing woman. It wasn't the cost difference. The fact that there was $150 there between the said and unsaid was and is huge, but that's the sign that she's an amazing soul...a warm soul. The thing is I've bought stuff from her before - as many of her booklets as I could afford so that I could learn the process, never imagining that I could actually take a workshop with her responding and helping me along the way.

That being said, I found a book months ago...and set it aside for some future altered art book. A book with purpose that hadn't found it yet. I chose to go so far as to even thin it to prep it for future use. One of the first assignments is to start finding pics to collage of your perfect studio. What's amazing about this book was that it's title "Style for Living: how to make where you live you" says it all. It has awesome line drawings of incredibly artful spaces all through it. It was published in the mid 70's so it has yellowing pages yet the brownish ink makes it all the creamier.

I did a face. She turned out to be the green-haired Goddess of the book. On the page opposite, last night, I found some K&Company sea-themed cutouts and found this amazing palm tree. I'd looked through a Rolling Stone that was headed for the garbage and found this crescent moon necklace that was stamped and I tossed it in with a gear ring picture. The palm went alongside this. (Not realizing I was making the SC Flag...). Ghost Adventures was focused on the Charleston City Jail and it's art school in the background and I opened the only travel mag I could find (I bagged up my mags and hid them from myself) and pow! There was a two page article with a map of downtown Charleston. I found other pics that related and before I knew it, I had a collage with 'my' studio. My world.

Using intuition, I started blind and the God/dess said something very important - you are here now. You. Are. Here. Now. Oh...and Begin. I did a prayer page to help me get everything done I need doing and to protect my loved ones. I had already done a page on pain and that's hidden below my beautiful (if far from 'perfect') Goddess.

My art will start popping up here along with some photographs of my world. I need to be mindful and I'll use the camera's eye to find a way to do that. I need to blog. I need to start making this count. I have a wonderful, free opportunity here and it's time.

Sir Gawain

For those of you who know me, you're not surprised I'm fascinated with Sir Gawain. I have studied Celtic lore for over 40 years and I'm 50. I checked out my first books from the library at age six. I've never lost the yearning for the Quest. At present, I'm re-reading "Sir Gawain: Knight of the Goddess" by John Matthews. Sir Gawain is a fascinating book. I'm doing research for NaNoWriMo that starts in three weeks from today and the subject may be a form of Gawain. I can only hope that I can do the subject justice.

A Simple Sunday

Today was a lovely, quiet family day. Watching football with Holly and Sly became the focus or really, playing with Sylvester was my focus. I enjoyed watching him learn - ranging from him using cool little Melissa and Doug tools to saying some states and coloring them on awesome mats to watching him figure out the trigger system on his dad's weed eater (no, it wasn't charged). The most precious moment involved him cuddling me, letting me hold him to me and he used his foot to push off, creating a rocking back and forth as we sat/cuddled together in the floor while I sang nursery rhymes and songs to him. That's like a gift. My soul just glows with love for all of them. I'm a very blessed woman.

Monday

It's been a quiet day. Made an appt. with the CPA for next week and found my errant glucometer. Had a busy weekend, not as busy as the baby who partied two days in a row, one at the Highland Games and the next at his cousin's b'day party. He was wonderful.

I did manage to do a page yesterday related to the Games. On the left and not pictured is an ephemera page related to the games and what I bought for self/family. It was a lovely, warm day. Saw a few friends. It was also wonderful in that family was able to drop me off close to the wonderful shade trees! Oh the joy of listening to bagpipes and seeing the dancers! I heard but couldn't see the caber toss from where I was, but I did enjoy the parade of Clans.

Highland Girl...not the best pic, but, hey! She resides in my journal.

Painting Girls

My watercolor sketchbook is filling up with girls. I plop most of them and the progress on Facebook (Morgan Belinda Watson) and forget that I have a blog that could use some fancying up. So, here goes with a few pics from recent endeavors:

Binding Watercolor Papers

This started out as an adventure to make a watercolor journal for under $24.95 or approximately $15 after a coupon and to have double the paper in the commercial ones. It worked...perhaps not as I wanted, but it worked. I took two 11" x 15" pads to the local Staples to have them cut them in half, use the backboard for covers and bind with at least a 1.5" spiral binding. Ahem. What I got was a "substituted covers" mess and a tight 1" ring. Fortunately, even the manager couldn't figure out why they futzed the job this badly and refunded me for the cost. Somehow they wanted to charge me for cutting each sheet of the much thinner and too small cover product with the cuts costing $2 each.

I didn't invest much in the pads. They were on sale for 50% off so they cost $7 each. The binding should've cost no more than $6 each. So, for $13, I was going to have heavy covers, 60 sheets of a usable 7" x 11", 140-lb, watercolor page and the ability to decorate the covers to the high heavens. For folks old enough to know what that phrase means, it means "wildly" to me.

Instead, "Nick" substituted thin cardboard and bound the paper too tightly. Yes, I could un-spiral the bind and remove paper...but I'm risking damaging the spiral itself to do this since he cut it sooooo damn short it can't be bent back to hold. Why use 1" binding spirals on thick stacks of paper? Ugh!

Anyway, I did end up with two journals, sadly for free since they messed up the cuts and binding so much that even "Dan" (General Manager) didn't just refund the extra money for cuts I didn't order, but for the whole thing since it was pretty obvious that it was a mess. The key here is I had them note on the order to call me if there was a problem or any added costs. If you decide to make any of these for yourself since they cost so much less than buying two $25 journals to equate to each one, make sure you ask your copy store to put that on the order form.

In the end I have two, futzy, 60 page journals. I'm going to try to strengthen the covers, form some sort of a wrap-around covering for the bulging pages. All-in-all, I'd go back to Office Max where they seem to be able to do this sort of thing. Good news is, for around $13, you can have double the paper, bound with a cover of your choice, awesome watercolor journal...if you choose your office supply store carefully.

And, if you're so inclined, you could mix it up with wonderful, heavy scrap paper to give yourself some  already-made backgrounds...just for fun and inspiration!

The 20 Min. Pic