Lots of sumi-e

I was too lazy all of last week to post my pictures from my sumi-e class, so I have quite a lot of photos. I have to say that last week, I was not particularly interested in continuing with sumi-e. We drew a lot of baby chicks and grapes, which is a nice idea until you try to do that for two whole hours when you normally can't concentrate for more than 10 minutes. On anything. So, I ended up with a progression like this:

Instead of what I was supposed to paint, which looked more like this:

This week, I enjoyed myself a lot more. For starters, we were painting landscapes, which I find more interesting than chickens. More importantly, landscapes seemed to be more adaptable than chickens. When I got bored with the one she had demonstrated, I started to make some up that used the same strokes.

On top of there being more variety, I feel like I had a little more skill at drawing landscapes, which is a nice motivator! So, class ended with me buying some more xuan paper and some colors to try. Hopefully, in spite of the fact that the ink smells like extra strength bug spray, that means I'll keep going at least sometimes with this!

Sumi-e practice

After a whole lot of practice, I'm making some progress....I'm having fun with the different shades of grey, although I'm not very good at controlling them yet. I like the leaves on this, though:

But my favorite drawing so far was done entirely with the small brush that I was only supposed to use for detail. Maybe I'm better on the small scale?

First garden produce!

The rain has really paid off--I got my first real produce out of my garden today! And it was delicious. Not much, but it's a start.

Matting and Sumi-e

It's been a busy week--yesterday was my last matting and framing class, and today was my first sumi-e brush painting class.

The matting class worked out surprisingly well, considering that I screwed up my first mat for each of my pictures. In the end, though, I ended up with two pretty photos that would have probably cost me hundreds of dollars to have custom matted and framed.

And the really tricky one, painted on a ceiling tile:

My sumi-e class was fun, but unfortunately got a little long for me. It's a fun idea, and I did find it easier than regular painting. Next week I believe that we'll get to start using some color, which should be fun. This week we concentrated on painting peonies, which would have been much easier if I had more than a passing acquaintance with what peonies look like. I remembered them being a big, showy flower and otherwise went off my instructors demonstration paintings.

After a few pages of practice, I managed to make some decent flowers. Next week, I believe the plans is baby chicks--we'll see how that goes!

Framing and Matting Class...Pt. 1

Yesterday I attended the first round of a framing and matting class at Dakota County Technical College. It was just a kickoff class, getting us familiar with a lot of the terms and artistic parts of matting pictures, but it was a lot of fun! As a writer, my visual skills are not always my highest priority, which generally shows in any kind of color matching, spacial things or really anything I need to make look really nice. Because of this, the class was a mind-set change for me and it was kind of fun to look at the ways that colors and sizes of mats can change the way a picture looks. I'd honestly never paid attention to the way that a double-layered mat worked color-wise before, but I found out there's actually a lot of thought behind it. The under-layer that only shows a little bit is picked out to bring out a specific color in the photo, and it really does make a huge difference in what your eye focuses on. Also, the color of this layer should not actually touch that same color in the photo (e.g., a red mat never touches the red in the photo) because it's so hard to match the colors exactly--if they touch, it brings attention to the dissonance. The top layer, which is what you notice the most, should really have very little to do with the photo beyond not clashing, and instead should be matched to the decorating in the room the picture will be hung in. Just some interesting thoughts! Next week we'll actually get into the work of measuring, cutting and putting together the mats. I come out of the class with two matted and framed pictures, which doesn't seem like a half bad class project to me!

On a completely unrelated note, I saw yesterday that since last Thursday, my asparagus has sprouted, my peas have flowered, my potato plant is growing so big it might be trying to take over the world AND my raspberry bushes are getting berries! I figured I'd be lucky to even get some berries in the fall, but they're apparently happy where they are and want to let me know that. Give it another few weeks to a month, and I might be getting actual food out of this garden!

Garden progress!

I think I can officially cross my "plant a garden" item off my bucket list. Just when I was about to give up and go buy plants instead of seeds for my broccoli, cauliflower, garlic and green beans, it decided to rain for an entire week and put my gardening plans off. When I came back out to examine the garden after--voila! Everything except for my asparagus had sprouted and was growing by leaps and bounds. I think I may still need to replace my strawberries, as the rabbits feasted on them before I got my fence up after all that rain, but I'm still going to call this garden a success.

Before the rain, all I had going for me was a couple good rows of onions and a single potato plant:

And now:

Hurray!

Books: Miracle in the Andes and Alive

When I was in high school, I watched the movie Alive in one of my lit classes. It was one of a few movies that managed to make an impression on me in spite of being shown in school. The story was gruesome and painful, but absolutely fascinating. I went on to read the book Alive by Piers Paul Read, which was different from the movie but equally impacting.

For those of you who don't have the slightest idea what I'm talking about, Alive is the true story (at least the book is...if I remember correctly, the movie is based on the story but takes some creative liberties) of a rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes mountains in the middle of winter. They were far off course and deep in a treacherous area of the mountains, and searchers weren't able to find them. This group stayed alive for 72 days, before two of them finally walked out of the mountains (I believe it's the second highest mountain range on Earth) to get help. This survival was impressive enough, before adding in the details that the plane was broken in half, many of the survivors were very injured, they were completely mislead about their own position in the mountains and (the gruesome part) they ran out of normal food a week or so after they crashed. (I'll leave that jump in logic to you, and just say that they broke a very, very big taboo.) The story had incredible potential to be sensationalist, horrific and gross; instead, it was handled in a way that can't help but amaze you in the people's incredible will to survive.

Because this story made an impact on me years ago, I was pretty much stopped in my tracks when I was wandering through the library and saw a book about the Andes by Nando Parrado. Nando was the main protagonist of Alive, the young man whose skull was cracked open in the crash, whose mother and sister died beside him, and who eventually led the trek out of the mountains. I picked up Miracle in the Andes and read the whole book yesterday. It had most of the great elements that I remembered from Alive, with the benefit of being narrated first person by someone who had been on the mountain, rather than a journalist. I'm not sure I would love the book if I hadn't already read Alive and been pulled into the story--I really don't know. As it was, though, it was a great continuation of the story for me. It was extremely difficult to put down and if you have a reasonably strong stomach, I would highly recommend it. It's the sort of story that makes you slow down and appreciate how good your life is. When I read both Alive and Miracle in the Andes, I was surprisingly humbled. It's hard to be upset about the little things in life when you're faced with a story of people who had such a horrible experience and still fought so hard to live.