9-29-10 Start of airbrush painting of "Kitchen Tarot Café" ... and some puppies!

I've been slowed down in my studio work: both by my birthday celebrations for turning 60 yesterday, and by catching Dog Fever! First I'll show you some pix of me airbrushing the starting painted drawing for my piece "The Kitchen Tarot Cefé: 4 of Wooden Spoons," aka "4 of Spoons." I started this painting on Sept 23rd, and I think there's too much going on, with the birthday stuff, to get back to coloring in the painting til next week! Yikes! Good thing I only have one 60th birthday! I'll do a blog of all the partying, once it's all done, by mid next week. Jeepers, sorry!

I did a few more drawings on paper, before I started painting though, so here they are. In this one, I went back to thinking about Denny playing a violin, for elegance!

Then in this one, I shaded the drawing with my bic pen. I added our cats and Denny's, and got Denny back to helping me hold up the tray of the KT suits. I like having him writing about the KT on the table, with some cards laid out.

I'm including my 2nd drawing again here, because in looking over all the drawings, I liked a lot of what was going on here. But you'll see that I really only kept the lamp from this sketch.  :)  It's hard to decide, and sometimes I wonder whether I might be better off just drawing the first thing that comes into my head, like I used to do with my big pieces.

Here you see that I've got my big fabric panel sewn together, to be something like 86"h x 79"w, and that it goes out onto the floor, which is bad for ease of painting. But I don't want it to be shorter, so I'll have to hike up the bottom part, each time I work with a different color of paint in my airbrush.

This is the big colored sketch you can see on the floor above, and I really liked referring to it, while I was freehand drawing my black lines onto the big cloth piece.

Here's the start, tho I didn't shoot the very start. I think I began with the table top this time. You have to settle on something to draw first, and that image's size will set the scale for the whole piece. It's a little scary sometimes, but I wasn't so scared this time that I had to go get me a tad of wine!  :)

Jimmy was sick that day, so I took most of my pix myself, so this is the only picture I have of me painting the drawing for this piece. Usually Jimmy stops on the way to his own studio, grabs my camera, and shoots a few pix for me, of me working on each stage of the airbrush days painting.

Here's the drawing, after I hiked up the bottom to draw in the images down there. This involves pinning the whole bottom part up higher on the piece, making a big tuck out of it.

I squeezed in the fringy lamp, a couple of the café windows, the palm trees, and the big café curtain at the top, but I ran out of room for some things.

I didn't draw faces on the spoons yet, but I got all the suits images into the tray, which coulda been bigger, but then I wouldn't have had room for the floating windows.

See, it's the 4 of Spoons!  :)

You can see I need more time with our future puppy, so I can draw her better! she's kind of a pinhead here!

But on Monday, the 27th, we went down to Yesteryear Acres, below Newark, Ohio, and spent time with Renee and Darwin, the owners, and played with 4 girls from the six week old litter of 8 Double Doodle puppies.
Their mother Lola is a golden doodle: half golden retriever and half poodle. Their father Tigger is a labradoodle: half labrador retriever and half poodle. So the puppies are half poodle, one-fourth lab and one-fourth golden retriever. They should be very smart, friendly, and shed very little.

There are 3 people who'd made deposits on girls from this litter before we did, so we had to choose 4 girls, one of which we'll get to take home on October 8th. So now that's only 9 more days away! We've got a new cage and a gentle lead collar and a big beef hank bone, all set for our Baby Girl! We'll find all of Hattie's dog toys and wash them up. We haven't had a dog for three years now!

Enjoy watching the little video I made of the 4 girl puppies yesterday! Thanks a lot, Renee and Darwin, for raising such wonderful dogs!


I think now I like little Green Collar Girl the best! She has some blue yarn hanging down in front, so it's confusing, but she's the little one, who says goodbye at the end here! OK, I will be very happy with any of them.

Here's my Jimmy holding little Green Collar Girl.

You can see all the puppies in this litter at Yesteryear Acres here. Be sure to scroll all the way down the page, since Renee keeps adding pix of the pups as they grow older. At six weeks, they have lovely little portraits.  :)

I'll let you know, when we know, which one we'll be waiting for!

Love, Lucky

Drawings for my next piece: "Kitchen Tarot Café: 4 of Wooden Spoons in the Kitchen Tarot."

I started sketching for this next Minor Cards piece, the 4 of Wooden Spoons (Wands, in  normal tarot parlance), for my Kitchen Tarot deck, right after GEM went with us to the Wayne County Fair on Sept 11th. This 4 of Spoons will be my 7th minor card quilt, out of 56.  Cookin' right along, huh?!!

So here are all the drawings I've done to help me figure out what to put into the piece. So walk with me down my garden path, where I choose which way to go next, based on what I've just drawn each time. Most of these are in my sketchbook, which has 9 x 12" pages, so the double wides are 18 x 12". The colored drawing at the end is much larger, 20 x 26."

I made most of these drawings with black Rub-a-Dub markers and blue Bic pens.

In this first drawing, made three days after we went to the Wayne County Fair with GEM (Gretchen, Eva, and Mike) and my niece Aimee and her daughter Calise, I focused on the girls on the Merry-Go-Round, but merged that idea with them both riding the real, live ponies, which they also did.

In the 4 of Wands card in most tarot decks, the idea is of a very good place to be, being protected, happy, and satisfied.  Very good news, getting this card, even when it's upside down. It's also considered to be the Venus in Aries energy, so loving, good things going on, in an assertive way. Some decks show a structure (the 4s are all about structure, stability) that's being built with the poles/wands.

So in this sketch, I was going with the idea of the girls at the Fair, and the four big wooden spoons are holding up the tent or Merry-go-Round, so they're creating structure.  But it was just too cute for me. It's really hard to make little kids be your main characters in artworks, without having the whole thing turn too sweet.  And you know I'll be writing about all kinds of stuff here, so I don't want that sweetness to be the main event.  Sorry, girls. You have to remain in a drawing, not a quilt.

Next I got to thinking about how Denny Fairchild, my co-author for the Kitchen Tarot, made a Facebook page called the Kitchen Tarot Café, and started to think muse over how it'd be to have this card, the 4 of Wooden Spoons, be about the cafe, with us as the cook and waiter.

Here you can see the drawing above better.  After making the rest of the drawings, I can tell you that I still like this table and fringed lamp really well, and may end up using them in my big painting. So hold that thought! Now the four spoons are on the set table.

In these sketches, I jumped outside, exploring how it'd be to show the outside of our conceptual café, instead of it's imagined interior. The spoons are here and there ...

Still outside, but I'm exploring giving Denny big pockets in big pants. I was looking at using the pockets to show how he's got gobs of stored up knowledge of the Tarot and Astrology, since he studied them from about age 7, when he went to live with his professional astrology grandmother, who taught him very well.

I also brought in Jimmy and some cats of ours and Denny's one cat Kami. (No dogs in the drawings yet, but you'll see one later, as I have Dog Fever bad now!)  I put the café as a tiny building on the serving tray.  Hmmmm. Gave Denny a big old bottle of Merlot to serve. The four spoons are looking almost like measuring spoons here.  I like that, as I've done measuring spoons in a lot of my kitchen artworks!

I started drawing our feet as really tiny here.  I like that.

Then we went back inside of the café, giving me a tray of tArts and Denny a violin, so he can be a musical waiter! The spoons are floating around in the drawing on the left, then I put them into a big bucket, which is how I saw them in a pub in England in August.

At the Little Owl Pub, they have painted wooden spoons, with numbers written on them, in a big bucket at the bar, where you order. They give you a spoon to carry back to your table, so they know where to bring the order of that number.  I loved that pub!

I guess I gave up on this very small drawing before I even got around to drawing in the spoons.  I like how Denny's body is wiggling around in tune with his fiddle playing. May hold onto that posture for the painting.

OK, so then I tried putting the spoons up on a serving tray, but they look like goblets. So that was a flop. I stuck four more on the table, to make up for the flop!

Back to the spiraling table setting with the spoons, not as good as in the second drawing though. Put fancy feet on the table and added a rug. Moon in the window. Like that, and the portrait on the wall of St Quilta the Comforter, who probably owns the café.

Now: this is my great big drawing on 20 x 26" paper, that I colored in with markers and crayons. I like it, but want to probably do another drawing that's this size. I don't like the palm trees, that look more like weird little third arms sticking out of our shoulders. ick. I like the spoons on the table in the Little Owl Pub bucket and I like the tray with the four suits of the Kitchen Tarot on it. I like Denny writing on the table and me being ready to paint. I like the dog on the floor, since I'm in the grips of dog fever (dog-buying fever, that is.)  And I like making St Q be a full blown buddha girl, sitting on the floor, instead of just being a portrait on the wall. I like the tablecloth and the café curtain at the drawing's top, and the windows with curtains, etc. But I don't like Denny's hair (looks like a helmet!) and those palm trees, etc.

I started personalizing the symbolic images in this drawing more, partly because the drawing page is so much bigger.

I also added some of my Peace Roses in this drawing.  I love to twine them around in my work, to show how Peace needs to grow in our lives, all through our day's activities, big and small.  See that doggie?  As I write, I've discovered a wonderful breeder of Labradoodles and Golden Doodles, Yesteryear Acres, just south of Newark, Ohio, less than 2 hours from our place.  OH MAN! Labby personality with very little shedding!!!! Could be our dream come true, now that we've got dog fever for the first time since Hattie died, three years ago.

Above is Belle and one of her puppies in a litter they have now at Yesteryear Acres. 7 boys and 7 girls!!!!  :) Her pups are F1b, which means they're one fourth golden retriever and three fourths poodle. VERY little shedding. They'll grow to about 50 pounds, which is smaller than our black lab girlies were.  More middle sized.   I am so smitten!

But I digress! Today I'll make one more big drawing, then sew together a big piece of white cloth, so I can start airbrushing maybe tomorrow on "Kitchen Tarot Café: 4 of Wooden Spoons."

If you're thinking about taking a class from me, check out my  Valley Ridge Art Studio drawing class near Muscoda, Wisconsin. October 26 - 28, 2010. This is a 3-day class in life drawing, drawing realistically from things you're looking at, mainly people (in their clothes). Taught more formally than my usual classes, but not AS formally as a lot of drawing classes. If you make art, you really should know how to draw, and it IS learnable! Valley Ridge is out in a beautiful and scenic rural part of the southwest tip of Wisconsin. It's an amazingly cozy but elegant place to work at!

And my 4-day class at Art Quilt Tahoe: Zephyr Point, Lake Tahoe, NE will be Nov 7 - 13, 2010. I love AQT, and this time we'll be right on the lake itself! My class will be my usual thing, teaching you to open up and make unguarded art, using markers, brush and fabric paint, optional airpen, and machine quilting.

Back to the drawing caper for the 4 of Spoons!

See ya, Lucky

Eva's Fifth Birthday - Oct 22, 2009

Happy Fifth Birthday, Eva!

This blog is the story of our granddaughter Eva's fifth birthday party, which was held by her loving parents Gretchen and Michael at their home in Lakewood, Ohio, three days after her actual birthday, which is October 22. They had had several parties before this one, for the family. For instance, they gave a big party for kids for her the day before our old folks' party, and it was at the Rocky River Nature Center, where there's a planetarium! But our party was as much fun as we could stand! Above is Eva, thrilled with her birthday cake, which Mommy Gretchen had managed to make and keep hidden from Eva until now!

This was Jimmy's prize: He found a card with a groundhog on it, for Eva for her birthday. He and Eva have a groundhog thing going, which actually started when Gretchen was young, and Jimmy Daddy announced to her and her friend Heather, from across the street, that he was going to barbecue groundhog burgers for Groundhog Day.

This is the big sketchbook page drawing I made and sent to Eva, for her to start coloring, before her birthday.  We mailed it with Jimmy's groundhog card.

The morning of her birthday party, I finished Eva and my project we'd started on May 1, 2009: The Doll and Bunny Blanket. It's the piece we started on our new Hello Kitty sewing machine.  I was looking at the back of the quilt, and decided to surprise Eva by using my airpen to draw cat faces all over the pink print backing fabric. I got this idea after I'd put one kitty face next to my note about us making the quilt project together.  I was also holding the mama leopard we'd gotten for Eva, as Gretchen had given her a baby leopard, and Eva's into pairing up Mamas and Babies in her toys right now.

This is the note I'd written in a corner of the quilt and stuck the first cat head on.  You never know when an idea is just going to go wild in your head: Pretty soon I was squeezing in kitty faces anywhere I could, in that print! It was a blast!

After drawing a ton of kitty faces with my airpen, I decided it would be fun to stick in just ONE bunny face!  :)  (She found that bunny face pretty fast, when she first saw the finished quilt, when she opened it later that day.)

I wrapped up the mama leopard and some twist-up colored pencils in the Doll and Bunny Blanket, using some fabric trim lengths to make Eva's bows. Time to go to the party!  Yea!

Here's a view of our house in Wooster, Turtle Moon Studios, as we were leaving for Eva's party in Cleveland.

When we got to GEM's house for Eva's party on Sunday, October 25th, the sun was shining, and Eva was up for another celebration.

Gretchen had worked all morning to create this lovely birthday brunch, including Mimosas for the grownups.

Eva was happy to show her Aunt Kristi how to play her new birthday game, that came with lots of princesses and jewelry, and one crown.

Here's the birthday cake that Gretchen made for her little Eva! Yummy!

OK, this is right before she blew out her candles, making her wish! Happy Fifth Birthday, Dear Eva!  Gretchen looks so happy, too.  :)

Nana, Eva's other grandmother Eileen, is enjoying snuggling up to our little sweetheart!

Then we all settled in for the opening of our presents for Eva.  Frank, Jimmy, Kristi, and Gretchen are ready.

She's starting to rip the first one open! Kim, Michael, Frank, and Jimmy are waiting to see what goes on.

When she got around to Jimmy and my gifts, Eva pulled out the mama leopard, but kept looking at the kitty faces on the Doll and Bunny Blanket's backing fabric. Oh, goody!  She gets it!  :)

This is the drawing I'd made of Eva and GEM's cat Cricket (Otis and Ome's sister), in the front of a new sketchbook we gave her. It's one of those Hungry Little Caterpillar books, in which you can draw pictures and write stories underneath the drawings.

She soon pounced on that book, getting into making her own drawing in it. Yea!

After opening all her gifts, Eva took us all outside, to demonstrate how well she can ride her new pink bike, that her Mommy and Daddy had given to her on her birthday morning. They had also let her ride it a bit, before she had to leave for school that day.

What a sweet little family, my Gretchen, Mike, and Eva!

Before we left for Wooster, I got a good hug and a little quiet time with Eva, who was about ready for her nap. It had been a lovely day!