Toby!

Toby arrives tomorrow.  I've made a few preparations but I won't know until I meet him.  I know I could be a lot more scared.  I hope it'll be fun.  Here's his "cage" in the bathroom.  He'll have to stay there when I'm not home until I know he won't eat everything in the house.

Life Drawing

This is the last week of the winter term and it's mostly been a week of review.  Today I did some life drawing with ink and white paint on painted watercolour paper.  I like the last one I did which is a good way to end the course.

Altered Clothing

For our last project in Collage we were to alter a piece of clothing in some way.  The guidelines were very broad.  I brought in a silvery sleeve-less top and turned it into this!  Kind of looks like an animal to me.  Maybe a happy crazy celebration of Toby's arrival which is less than a week away.  One more week to this term.

Life Painting (Old Masters' palette)

Yesterday I added colour to the under painting I did last  week.  I have so much to learn about painting but it's such a great challenge.  I photographed my work area at TSA and the painting there on the easel.  Many other students had already packed up and gone.  I see I just missed getting the teacher in the first shot.

The Last of the Macintosh Roses?

Here's the fabric piece I was working on.  Maybe this will be an end to that project.  The best thing I made were the stencils.  They worked way better than the linocut which I seldom used.  Some of these pictures I really like.  Tomorrow we present the term's work in class.

Give-away Sculpture

Near me on Wellesley there is an empty lot that used to be the Salvation Army.  The building was torn down a couple of years ago.  For a while there was a sign about a condo but that never happened.  Then there was a sign saying an application had been made to turn the site into a parking lot.  That sign was altered to ask why not a park?

A few weeks ago, I could see from the bus that something was going on.  There were photographers and 10-15 other people all looking at the empty lot.  The next time I walked by I saw what the commotion was about.  There were sculptures all around the area.  The largest in the middle included a shopping cart.  Most of the others were piles of stones.  Gradually over the coming days they were dismantled and scattered again until one day last week when some less formal stone piles appeared again.

Our new assignment in sculpture class is to place a sculpture in the world and see what happens.  I knew what I wanted to do.  I made two small stone piles.  Cairns.  They're glued together with my handy glue gun.  I included some shells.  I placed them yesterday and so far they haven't been moved.  The photos below show some of this story -- I missed photographing the first sculptures.

 

Life Painting

I started a figure painting in class yesterday.  We have the same model in the same pose next week.  This is my under painting.  I needed the three hours to try for correct proportions and work on the composition.  I don't know how it will work out next week but it's fun to try.  A challenge to try.

Roses Again

Charles Rennie Macintosh and his rose designs -- soon coming to an end.  On Monday we present all our work in history class.  I've added to the paste paintings.  I'm still working on another fabric piece.

More Dry Brush

We used ink again in life drawing this week.  I felt horrible about my work but now I think I was just feeling horrible.  The technique is new to me and not easy -- not exactly drawing or painting.  Next week I want to try and free it up more if I can.  Only 2 more classes left.  The first 3 below are conte warm-ups and then 3 with ink.

Nightmare #3

I had a nightmare this week.  I was in a hospital that was also a children's home.  An elderly woman had been admitted the night before.  The nurses pulled some curtains so that the children couldn't see what was in the hall outside her room.  On a plastic sheet were her arms.  They'd cut them off.  No explanation as to why.  The curtains were useless.  I saw and the children saw -- we all saw the severed arms.  There was no blood.  I'm not sure what this is about.  Of course I think of my mother in the hospital where she died.  I remembered today that the nurses tied her arms to the bed one day so that she wouldn't pull at her feeding tube.  She tried to convince my sister and me to untie her by cutting the ties.  They'd used pieces of cloth.  My mother thought there were nail scissors lost in the covers on her bed.  That was the day she was hallucinating.

Baying

This week in painting class I copied a Paula Rego painting called Baying.  She did a series of works using herself as a model in various dog poses.  Dog poses!  Maybe that'll be my next move too!  I'm pretty sure I picked the picture because of the colours and the composition -- both very appealing to me.

Dry Brush

This week in life drawing class we started using ink.  We used a brush full of (diluted) ink but with the tip dried off.  We only got as far as simple shadow -- all one value.  We used white acrylic paint to cover any lines we didn't like.  We did 4 drawings in this way -- they are below in order.  The first three are on cartridge paper and the fourth is on watercolour paper.  (And the photo shows a small vase that I brought from Switzerland for my mother holding down the paper.)  Next week we're to bring 3 pieces of watercolour paper that we've already painted over with acrylic paint.  I guess it should look like a sheet of coloured paper before we begin the drawing.

Warm & Cool Colours

We've reached Impressionist colours again in painting.  Warm and cool colours.  Colour in the shadows.  I did a still life this week.  I'm still working on it but here it is for now.

Rope Sculpture

Our new sculpture assignment is to make something from rope.  There were other instructions but they aren't that clear to me.  Seems a lot like making an organic form from non-organic material as in Assemblage class.  Here is mine.  Kind of a hive with flowers or butterflies or bees or something.  That glue gun sure helps though I tend to burn my fingers.

Life Drawing

Our model this week was new to me.  He was incredibly flexible and strong.  Next week we're to bring ink and white paint.