Where last weekend and last week were completely artistic weeks this week has not been. My mind is set on the idea that when people visit it's SUPPOSED to be on the weekend not Monday nights! So when my grandmother and father came back through to crash on my couch my mind thought "weekend!" Then I had to slog through a whole week at the DayJob. Every Spring we schedule our days off at the DayJob. Instead of a single full week I had scheduled several random long weekends, and thankfully for me, this Friday is one of the days I'd scheduled off. My DayJob schedule is weird this week too, but thankfully today marks the start of my long weekend. Boy am I thankful!

This weekend is full of good art stuff too which makes it even better. First off, I'm being interviewed on Artistic Biker's UStream tonight, I go on air around 9PM Eastern Time. If you HAVEN'T tuned into the broadcast before you are missing out, Jonathan puts on an art show. It's not about technique as it is a 2 hour romp through his art journaling journey. He talks, his daughter makes art with him ( I love this, she's cute as a button and she's making art.) and people are chatting about art. He'll tell you the type of technique he's working int, where he got the idea and then as he works talks about the art. It is a great UStream and it happens EVERY Thursday night (you know unless kids are being born.) and it worth every minute you spend watching it. 

Saturday the 3rd Connie of DirtyFootPrints-studio.com is posting an interview on DirtyFootprints-Studio.com it's about art journaling and how I got into it and all that fun stuff. Check it out on the 3rd.

I got one of the best compliments I've ever gotten from friend and fellow artist Jane McDonald, who compared my recent portrait work to that of Alice Neel. If you have known me for any period of time you will  know that Alice Neel is a huge influence, inspiration and hero of mine. So the compliment is very meaningful to me and made my day. 

What I love about all these artists is that our art is so diverse and so different from one another and all great in their very own way. (Jane should post more of her art) I love browsing through all of the flickr streams, twitters and blogs of these people. I get the most inspiration from these artistic people far and wide who spend so much of their own time trying to inspire and motivate people to create more art.

Lily's Thyroid Surgery
Originally uploaded by MrtyHrrs1

Another great journaler on flickr. Mrtyhrrst combined screen printing, brushing ink over the top and painting with work done in illustrator. Great stuff, very inventive and definitely something you should go look at.

Rhomany does a lot of cool stuff and this is just one example of her cool work. She does a B&W drawing of a girl, adds a swirl in the background, then layers on some image transfers from magazines and ties it all together with some watered down acrylic paint. Adds oms words and voila! Great stuff!

This is a pretty simple page in an old art journal. The paper is strathmore cold pressed 140lb watercolor paper stitched into a leather cover.

On the left hand page I glued down a scrap of art paper, it's the orange triangular piece on the top of that page. I wrote on top of it with a waterproof fabercastell pitt pen in black. I wrote around it with the  same pen. After the pen was full dry I washed over the top with some transparent watercolors. I didn't like the color so I added some watercolor crayons to intensify the colors.

At this time of my life I was writing brief little nuggets about my day. I'd write a couple of sentences and then turn the page, or block it off. After the page had dried I again added watercolors to add the color to the page.

On the right side I was dealing with some intense personal stuff that I didn't want that person to read with ease as I worked on the page in the common area of our apartment, so I darkened the page with a wash of black watercolor crayon.

I used Leeho 2 way glue to hold the paper to the page.

Pasos pesados (Heavy footsteps). 9-20 Junio, 2010.
Originally uploaded by sharonNYC

SharonNYC is another person on flickr I've been looking at for a long time, she's got this particular style of art journaling that is specific to her, muted colors, earth tones, bones and flesh. I love it. I've never seen anything like it anywhere else.

The first part of the twitter hand experiment went awesome. I got mass amounts of hands to draw and I put a few on canvas. I'm looking for more hands to draw. I've set up a flickr group so people can post their hands there as well. Pics can be tweeted @lessherger or put directly into the group. I'll also post my drawings and paintings to the group.

I can't wait to see what round 2 brings.

Also for a similar project check out 200 Portraits on flickr. You can send her portraits to work with.

Summer ferry
Originally uploaded by wil_freeborn

Click through and take a look at Wil Freeborn's stuff over time, he's really developed a particular style with watercolors, I think you'll find it quite nice.

Well folks it's been a bit of a crazy week here in Comfortable Shoes land. It's been 95 degrees with 80% humidity and I pretty much melt in that kind of heat. All I want to do is sleep in a room with AC. Iv'e been sketching a lot but I haven't had a chance to post any of the pics. I've got some plans to, man the plans.

I'll start with the rough news. I have a lot of family spread out around the north east. Part of my family comes from Buffalo and part comes from DownEast Maine, where I grew up. I live in Massachusetts which makes a good stopping point when family goes out to visit in either direction. It's kind of a nice thing. So I got a  call Wednesday night, after I worked for a 10 hour day and got stuck in traffic for 3 hours, that my father and my grand mother were coming to visit. Now we keep our house clean but not… GrandMother clean. I was unsure of when they would arrive exactly so I left work early that day and rushed home.

It was 95 degrees that day and about 85% humidity. I blitz cleaned the house in a couple of hours. Have you ever scrubbed toilets and vacuumed in that kind of heat? Neither had i, and I'll never repeat it. I swear I lost 20 pounds in sweat. By the end of it I was a sweaty stinking mess. Anyway. I clean ed and cooked dinner,then stayed up until 10pm catching up with the folks. Then got up at 3 AM to see them off the next day.

So I didn't get much work or art done until later tonight. I came home from work crashed and then started drawing and painting. I'm in an art groove today. My pieces are coming out in a way I like. I feel good and I feel confident in them. I've been painting and drawing almost everyday for 2 months now. You can see the difference in my work, I can feel the difference in my brush strokes. I can feel the control of my brush. I'm getting there.

I picked up 2 wooden panels, on hard board and one 3/8th birch plywood. Tomorrow I'm cutting them into 1×1 foot squares to start painting on. I'm also going to show you how to make a cradle for wood panels. It's pretty easy with a few basic tools. I'll get into in a video later this weekend.

Anyway, lots of work going on, I'll get lots of pics and video this weekend.

An art journal flip with commentary by the artist. LOTS of great info in these 2 videos!

Part 1

Part 2

When I tweeted at Amanda Palmer to ask if she'd tweet me a pic of her hands I didn't know what to expect, I certainly didn't expect to get  a very very cool picture of her hands and a Mary of Guadalupe. Too cool. So I waited a bit to draw her hands, I wanted to be sure I was getting the hands mostly right before I made an attempt. I think I did pretty well with this one, even putting in the image of Mary behind her hands.

the sketch with the photo.

close up of the sketch

with most of the background painted in. It's missing Mary's face color, some white and some black

Finished! Let me know what you think.