"Demolition!" measures A5 or 5.75×7.5 inches. I did a quick sketch with pencil and then used a Pilot Parallel filled with a mix os Noodler's Black,Luxury Blue and Nikita ink for the darklines and color was added with watercolors and a brush.
Cost is $25 USD, shipping to CONUS included.
"He Must be on Crack" is a satirical piece about @rokali the founder of etsy. Etsy is now being represented in the media as a "flea market." I read the recent article about Rob in whatever magazine he was recently interviewed in and all I could say after each paragraph is, "He must be smoking crack." It measures A5 or 5.75×7.5 inches. I did a quick sketch with pencil and then used a Lamy Safari with a B nib filled with Noodler's Black ink for the black lines and color was added with watercolors, the background and all red in the piece is done with Noodler's Nikita and a brush.
SOLD
However I started a zazzle store just for this image. You can get some shitty post cards, a crappy mug, a badly designed sticker, an eye searing poster and if approved some crack smokin' postage stamps.
This is the 4-1-11 drawing titled “I Need that Color!” It measures A5 or 5.75×7.5 inches. I did a quick sketch with pencil and then used a Lamy Safari with a B nib filled with Noodler’s Black ink for the paint tubes and added the shading with a TWSBI M Nib and Private Reserve Electric DC Blue ink.
Cost is $25 USD, shipping to CONUS included.
I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a drawing/ painting-a-day blog for a while now. I’m still debating doing it for a year. Traci Bunkers (click her name for a great blog link) tweeted that I should try it for 30 days. And well, duh! I’ve been reading her blog with her 30 day experiments for awhile now and think that she’s right 30 days is a good start for my commitment phobia to gravitate.
So for the next 30 days you’ll find a post of a drawing done the night before. I think I’ll working my Graf It pad and my Rhodia Dot Pad, both are A5 or 5.75×7.5 inches in size, acid free and archival. I’ll be working in pen and ink, perhaps with spot watercolor. There will be a paypal button so you can purchase the original work, pricing on these will be $25 shipped via USPS to CONUS in a clear archival baggie with a certificate of authenticity. Should it go well I might extend the project.
Drawing-a-day posts will go up on here at noon EST and will feature work from the day before.
One of the other sketchbooks I received from Exaclair was the Clairfontaine Graf It pad. I’d seen these on several occasions at Artist & Craftsman and passed them by due to the cover being… well, kinda lame*. In addition to the plain black grainy text and images, each cover is made with various colors of card stock that folds behind the staple bound pad. The back is supported with sturdy heavy chipboard. Each page is microperfed for easy removal. The perf is sturdy enough that you can turn the page and it won’t tear out, unless you want it removed, it stays. The pad is often sold on American websites as “6×8.” That may be the outer dimensions of the pad but the actual sheet size is 5.75×7.5 inches. There are 80 sheets in each pad.
I did my usual battery of tests on this paper and it withstood them all. I have to say that this paper is amazing. Though it’s only 90g (41lb) it’s super sturdy and accepts a lot of media without issues. It takes some serious effort to get stuff to soak through. When I say stuff I mean ALL the stuff I’ve tossed at it. See the pic below.
With watercolor it accepts the color well. The paper cockles as is expected with paper this thin. I find this to be a great paper to experiment with techniques and color. It responds well to puddles of water as well as thin washes. Color stays true and doesn’t get muddy on the page.
While drawing with ink I was able put down multiple layers of ink without cockling and bleed through. Heavy layers that would have bleed through many other heavier papers did not bleed through on this paper. Noodler’s black bonded with the paper well enough that I didn’t worry about it lifting much with my water brush. Colors seem to pop off the page.
I did try gessoing the page but I don’t see the point as the paper is tough enough to survive most stuff without the gesso. I also scrapped acrylic paint over the page to see how it would work, and it worked just fine. This paper is also amazing for pencil. It has just enough texture and tooth that pencil feels really good on it and it hold a lot of graphite, so darks are really dark.
My final verdict on this pad is that it’s great. The paper is awesome. The format it’s served in is where it is lacking. I hate perforations (my own little quirk.) I prefer a pad that allows the pages to stay together. The staple binding is crap for keeping stuff together, I made a little folio out of a USPS priority mailer to keep my drawings together. For art journaling it would be a great pad to do drawings in and then cut out and glue into your regular art journal. The paper is thin enough that if you draw a face and cut it out the edges won’t be all that noticeable.
The pad is pretty cheap. I found it online for $4 to $6 the larger size is pretty reasonably priced too at around $9. These are prime pad for binding into a sketchbook. If this came bound like a moleskine or a Rhodia Webbie I’d buy it. I know that the reason this pad is so inexpensive is that its bound inexpensively, 2 staples straight through to a sturdy backer. I like this paper a lot, in fact the next time I’m at Artist & Craftsman I’ll be picking up another one of these in another size. Perhaps I’ll bind the large size into a nice art journal!
Amanda Palmer and I are around the same age, okay so I’m a FEW years older than she is… Not my point. She wrote this blog post about what she thought success was when she was 11. Like so many things that she has written over the years it made me think about what I thought success was when I was 11.
Art wasn’t even on my radar.
I was a geeky kid, my nose stuck in books, a pen in hand and did well in school. I’ll be honest with you, I thought I’d be a scientist working in some lab doing research of some important nature. This idea made my parents very happy. My only goal was to not live in DownEast Maine. In my 11 year old head scientists lived in Boston or New York, or some big distant city. Also, in my head I never worried about money, somehow I thought scientists made lots of money.
I remember in high school my friend asked me, “What do you want to do when you get old, you know study in college, and do for the rest of your life?” I remember that the phrase “the rest of your life” struck fear in my mind and I drew a blank. I realized that though I loved science, I really didn’t want to do it for the REST OF MY LIFE.* I blurted out “art” because it was truly the only thing that through the course of my life I’d been good at and enjoyed. I could see myself doing art everyday and not getting bored. After hastily blurting out art, I added “or write, I like writing.” Even then my only goal was really to go away to college and get out of DownEast Maine.
At that point in my life that’s all I wanted and felt I needed to be successful.
So I went away to college got my degree and… Returned to teach.
When I look back that was probably the most unsuccessful I’ve ever felt in my life. I returned to the place I’d worked so hard to leave, for a job. After that I told myself I’d never go someplace I hated for a job. So over the years I’ve worked a variety of jobs that have little to do with what I deem I need to do to be successful in what I ultimately really want to do with my life- art. I’ve pursued them for health insurance, rent, and an assortment of other things. In some cases I’ve taken jobs to make ends meet and cover expenses that art just doesn’t, yet.
So I’ve set myself a new goal, to not have a DayJob after the next year passes. I want to make ends meet through art. I know it will be hard but I think that if I “put my weight into it” I can make it happen.
I never managed to get the images up for my Webbie review. So I'm putting them up here (and probably in the actual review.)
You can see here how the page takes watercolors and then ink over the watercolor.
And here you can see where I scraped the acrylic and painted on some gesso and then layered ink and watercolor crayons over the top.
I wasn't kidding around when I said I was having a hard time putting this journal down. I have 2 more I need to review and I really don't want to stop using this beautiful thing. I guess I'll have to fill it!
I gave up watching TV over a year ago. I started to watch a few things on Hulu, here and there with sporadic intervals of watching everything at once. About 3 months ago I hadn’t watched anything for close to 3 months. I sat down with a hot cup of tea, my lap top and pulled up my queue in Hulu. I had a serious bunch of Sons of Anarchy. I really enjoyed the last few seasons and the first few episodes of this season. Anyway. I watched on episode and I found myself getting up and doing stuff I like I do with movies I don’t get into. Then a really violent scene came up that involved some torture and I realized I couldn’t watch it.
I turned it off. The violence turned me off. I had no interest in watching it at all.
I deleted it from my queue. I haven’t looked back. I realize I prefer comedies, light hearted stuff, and adventure. I really enjoy shows like Warehouse 13, quirky and funny it explores mythical stuff from history and literature in an intelligent way.
Since I’ve turned off the TV I find myself more open to ideas and thought and the real world inspires me more.
Without TV my world is a little brighter. I’m so glad we turned off the “boob tube.”
Sketchcrawl
Originally uploaded by Caatje's Artsy Stuff
Really love these Sketchcrawl pages. I really enjoyed the Sketchcrawl I participated in last year. I'll have to do more this year!
