Redwing Blackbird

I’ve been out of commission for a little over a week. Sickness took me and I was medicated all week. I painted this today for someone. I was pushing myself by doing another watercolor piece.. I know I’m ignoring our assignments.. and I feel bad.. but I felt like doing this anyway. I think I’m starting to get the hang of watercolor.. though I still tend to get very upset when it begins seep into other colors…

I’m really happy with how it turned out. I got to use my inktense pencils again and really test them out. It was challenging to guess how the colors would interact with each other when I got around to using my water brushes because the pencil colors differ from the ink colors once they’ve been watered down. The image is a zoomed in look at a Lion-fish I photographed at the zoo a few weeks ago. I loved the colors and structure of the fin.

Fun assignment! Back to packing and getting dressed… whee!

Oh, shameless plug… keep track of my ventures in Guatemala at this blog… http://mcadguatemala2010.wordpress.com

I tried it out a couple times and just got frustrated.  I didn’t like how the lines were so thick, so dark, how everything was so…huge and obvious on the paper, especially all my mistakes.  I didn’t like that it didn’t stay put.  It smudged when I didn’t want it to smudge, somehow turned into really dark streaks across the image when I did try to blend a shadow or line, and refused to move when I really just wanted to soften one area.  I tried a couple times during the week, each time ending up putting everything away in disgust or getting frustrated and smearing the blackest lines I could across the paper to mask what I didn’t like and couldn’t seem to make happen.

Finally, Saturday I reached a break through.  I brought my stuff to Barnes&Noble with my roommate and just stopped trying so hard.  I finally let go and got messy with it, laying down very dark lines and patches and just forgetting about how I was supposed to draw and wanting to be good.  I finally got caught up in the shadows on the face and not caring if I made a mistake or if something didn’t look perfect.  When I took a step back at it I realized I had just understood charcoal again for the first time in three years, my brain switched into that mode and now I’d love to try it again.  Maybe not a self-portrait, but something big that I just get my hands into and be really messy with.  (There’s only so much mess you can make at a bookstore)

Thing is, I went through a phase of drawing people.  I drew a portrait of every single Zoom member (if you remember Zoom, you’ll know how much of a dork I was back then) in great detail, and was actually pretty proud of them.  So it struck me as I looked at my friend’s portraits, “why can’t I do this?  Why can’t I at least try and figure it out and stop being scared of something I haven’t been close to for years?”  So I did.  I picked a few photos of friends and family and just drew them, all in ink, in my sketchbook.  I liked the ink because while it didn’t blend at all and it didn’t erase, it kept me from making any of the sketches too precious.  I felt like it allowed me to start over if I wanted or keep going even after I messed up because it wasn’t anything important anyway.  And I finally found that I like faces.

This was maybe two months ago, and I still try to draw a new face every other day, to keep up on it.  I don’t love what comes out all the time, really I don’t consider any of them worth hanging on to, but the important thing for me was that I worked through the parts where I hated what came out and I got better.  And I’m still getting better.  And I’m learning to see faces in a new way, see where the planes intersect and how the bones can be seen under the skin and how the tiniest change in skin ‘weight’ (is that even a thing?  I don’t know, it makes sense to my brain) or the angle of a wrinkle can change someone’s appearance or emotion greatly.  I love that.

The Bottom is a similarly styled boy-short panty that will have a detachable pleated skirt covering the back (more snaps!!!) Hopefully tonight I’ll get the rest of the skirt done, attached to the bottoms and get around to making the teal chiffon draped dress that will cover me for the first minute or so of the song…I have a lot to do, little time to do it…and I still don’t know what I’m doing for choreography… >.<

Hopefully no one that’s reading this is offended by the idea of burlesque or me posting pictures of a bra that I’ve stylized and manipulated to be a bit more glamorous. I know this blog is G rated so maybe this is inappropriate. For me, Burlesque is empowering, theatrical, comical and beautiful, it helps me keep in touch with being feminine and reminds me to lighten up. Don’t knock it until you do a little research and see a couple of shows. The Minneapolis Burlesque community is wonderful and I love taking classes with Ophelia and Lili’s Academy. All kinds of good times.

Addendum: the Mannequin modeling my creation is yet another neglected project…perhaps you’ll be seeing more of her as I get the gumption to return to her. But for now, you just get a preview.

I really enjoyed doing these opposite hand drawings! I thought it was a lot of fun, and I wish I hadn’t waited until today to complete them. Hopefully I can do a few more in the future.

EDIT:
Hey! There’s a word for what I am.. I’m not left, right, or ambidextrous. I’m cross-dominant!

But why?  And why did all of us seem to have such trouble actually using this time we gave ourselves?  Granted, Katie did get a lot done on her costume, so maybe it’s just Mike and I that have issue.  I just wasn’t really interested in any of that stuff this week; I wanted to do something fun, something different, and nothing that I had on my to-do list grabbed my attention in any way.  I’ll have to work on that.

Anyway, kinda boring week art-wise, nothing to show, but coming up next week: Macro!  I’m excited, I’m already trying to decide on a medium and subject – plant? animal? industrial?  Should I use something soft and wet or hard and precise?  Maybe something completely different?  I have no idea.  But I know I’m excited to do something new and I’m going to run with it because now I know how much that makes a difference in my getting things done.

When Katie pulled out the scratchboard she bought from her Wild Cat Sanctuary trip, I just wanted to stare at it for ages.  The level of detail and realism was incredible, and beyond being an interesting image, the cut marks and lines just drew me in.  I decided that’s what I love most about it: that you can’t make broad, sweeping strokes like you can with ink or paint or even pencil.  Nothing is soft.  (a couple tools can be, but I didn’t really use them).  Everything, every shade and tone and bend in the light is created essentially with hatchmarks, and they can be incredibly tiny because it’s just really easy to make the teensiest mark with a blade and a black board.

I didn’t really go that route with my image though.  I got into it and realized I was thinking very much like a printmaker, avoiding grey tones and sticking to pure black and white as if I were going to roll ink on it and send it through a press afterwards.  That was my first mistake.  My second, and probably my biggest, mistake was not planning the image out ahead of time.  I drew a REALLY rough sketch in pencil, then just jumped in with a knife.  My third mistake was choosing an image that was simply way too broad.  I didn’t have the time or the patience to deal with all the individual trees and branches and leaves; I think I liked it in the first place because of the skyline and didn’t think about how difficult the trees themselves were going to be until it was too late.

Now that I’ve got all my complaints out of the way, I will say that I like how it came out in the end.  I just had to embrace what I’d started (with periods of putting it away in frustration throughout) and simply finish it.  Now I can see that I like how some of the branches intersect with each other and sort of disappear at time, I like the figures at the bottom, and I like the trees on the skyline at the left.  I’d to try scratchboard again, probably a different image, and take the time in the beginning to plan it out properly.  Ah, well, I’m glad it’s done.

This is a problem I’ve had for years. I’d say I’ve mastered it… But I’m reminded of some words of wisdom I heard from my professor at MCAD in response to the phrase “I work well under pressure”, he used to say, “Of course you do, what choice do you have?”. I think I’ve trained myself to let things go until the last minute, at which point I light a fire under my bum and get the project done. I get some kind of high from the feeling of being rushed, busy and generally under pressure, so I keep doing it to myself. Looking back on most of my projects I realize that I could have done so much better if I planned more in advance, spent more time here or thought something through more thoroughly.

In this case, I knew that I needed to prepare for the performance. I had to pick music, order fans, make the costume and create the choreography. The music and ordering the fans were no problem, but when it took a month for the fans to be shipped, I started losing interest and felt like it was easier to put it off. Now I’m less than a month out and I am only a little closer to having a costume but have gotten nowhere on the choreography itself.  When I started working on my costume this week, I made a couple of time consuming mistakes that really disheartened me. Plus, it’s hitting me that in a week and a half I’ll be going to Guatemala for 11 days, getting back on the 29th, leaving me with little time to get ready. This week during my private lesson with Ophelia, I sat down and told her I couldn’t do it, I was more afraid of going through with it and failing than I was of just not going through with it at all. It felt easier to quit and just run away from it. Ophelia talked me through my options, looked at what I had for my costume and told me that I was farther along than I thought. She said that if I felt strongly about backing out, she would let me, but two other girls already backed out this session, leaving her with myself and four other girls to fill an hour long show… I realized that I made a commitment to her and to myself and that down the road I would very much regret not following through.

So why am I writing a blog and not working on it right now? Good question, I’m sitting at Cahoots with Megan and Mike…while the three of us continue neglecting our projects… Go us… Stay tuned for the Neglected Projects posts…I’m sure they’ll all be interesting…