my cousin is about to have a surgery where they break her jaw to realign it and she’ll have to suck food thru a straw for the following 4 weeks. so nick and i devised a cookbook of pureed soups that will hopefully give her a bit more choice than just pudding and chicken broth. here’s the front cover – my first book since … 1993 i think.
last sunday i was elected as the newsletter lady for the Canberra Calligraphy Society. i’m so excited!!!!
the wedding is in just over 4 weeks. i can’t wait to post all the cool crafty stuff i’ve done for it !!! but not until after, so you’ll just have to wait.
best news of all, however, is that i got my first ‘commissioned’ piece (no $, just as a favor which is perfectly fine). a friend asked me if i’d do a portrait of her daughter and i gladly accepted. what a great feeling to be asked !!!!!!! wahoo!! more on this too after the wedding.
24 Aug 2010 | 2:36 pm | art |
my first non-art post ever, but it’s important so …
today is my 4-year anniversary of quitting smoking. wahhoooo!!
i remember the day quite well …. i was doing some (northern-hemisphere) summer cleaning and washing all my blankets, wall fabrics, bedsheets, all jackets, bathrobe, and etc. since i was such a heavy smoker and smoked in my house, all things in my house stunk quite a lot. i had been trying (unsuccessfully) to quit smoking for years, each attempt left me so angry that i decided to smoke rather than be so angry. i had told myself that i would quit smoking when i returned from europe (on 3 july of that year) and when the day came, i really truly forgot! so, here i was, 18 days later, washing nearly every single thing i owned and scrubbing the entire house even window sills and as i was walking up the steep stairs carrying another load of clean clothes back up to fold, i realized “i only have 4 cigs left”. before i finished climbing the stairs (only one flight of stairs mind you), i had decided “ok, i’ll just go smoke them now and that’ll be the end of it”. and that’s precisely what i did.
i went out on my porch, smoked my 4 cigs straight in a row, getting that oh-so-familiar feeling of nicotine poisoning. (this wasn’t a new feeling for me. each time i tried to quit smoking in the past, i was under some impression that if i made myself sick from cigs the day before, that the following day i wouldn’t want to smoke. let me tell you now, it didn’t work. not only did it not work, but it backfired. because i would end up smoking even more than i did before trying to quit that time. so at times i was smoking nearly 1.5-2 packs of cigs a day! yuck!) after that 4th cig, i emptied & cleaned the ashtrays, cleaned the porch, took the trash out, folded another load or two of laundry, and glued my a$$ to the couch. i watched three movies starting around 5pm and ending when i was nearly deliriously tired. but i didn’t smoke.
for the next 30 days, i promised myself that i could succumb to ANY craving i had – anything was better in the short term than a cigarette. my friends were soooooo supportive – i remember one week in particular when a different friend picked me up every evening and we would go get frozen custard (yeah Ted Drewes!). (frozen custard every day for a week certainly isn’t what the food pyramid suggests, but in the short term, it’s so much better than smoking!) in those first 30 days, i watched lots of movies, ate lots of onion rings and frozen custard, and didn’t hang out with smoking friends. after the 30 days, life returned to normal, except i didn’t go outside every hour during the day for a 5-min break.
the best part about quitting smoking this time was that i wasn’t angry at all. i was certainly a bit out of it for a little while (i attribute it to all that extra oxygen my brain wasn’t used to!), but you can get used to anything.
i still mourn the absence of cigarettes in my life. and at times, i actually miss smoking – there’s nothing better than going to a dark dingy coffee shop, finding a quiet table in the corner, pulling out a good novel, and exhaling as you relax back into the chair. today i think it’s the smell that really makes me STAY quit. even tho i miss the sexiness, i hope i never go back (and so does my fiance!).
21 Jul 2010 | 10:22 am | ramblings |
i made this cake for our last woodworking class… we’re practicing for the wedding cake!!
14 Jul 2010 | 3:08 pm | food |
last weekend i went to my first calligraphy class – at the Canberra Calligraphy Society. i had such a good time! how wonderful to spend several hours with other people who like playing with fonts just as much as i do :) they have a workshop at the end of each month and i am definitely hoping to go back again and again – maybe i’ll even join up! here’s what i came up with last week.
(can you tell i’m getting married soon?? hee hee)
2 Jul 2010 | 10:33 am | art |
for the last 6 months, i put down the charcoal and picked up a few other things: wood plane, beading needle, embroidery silk, wedding invitation design, photography, and calligraphy. but believe it or not, there hasn’t too much to show here … (after the wedding, i’ll put a pic of the beading and embroidery that i’m doing for my dress, but not yet ! )
my woodworking class finished a few weeks ago and i have a mostly-finished cutting board made of beech and jarrah. here are a few pics of its unfinished state (with my gluey fingerprints all over it!). i still have a bit of work to do on it, but i’m quite proud of my first woodworking effort since 1994. i’m not taking the next semester class because there’s too much stuff going on with the wedding, but i think i’ll take woodworking again in feb 2011 ! it was so much fun!
here’s my gumball machine that i made in 1994. i gave it to my uncle (who is a prof wood worker) and he’s kept it all these years! he’s definitely been quite an inspiration for my fledgling wood working career… maybe someday i’ll go be his apprentice for a month – that would be so much fun! if only i could get him here to AU so he can see some of the gorgeous eucalypt wood here ….
28 Jun 2010 | 5:35 pm | art |
life has kept me busy and away from drawing. it has been sorely missed.
here is something i did when i was maybe 12-13 yrs old.
and then here is a portrait of Fluppy that my little sister (10 yrs younger than me) did at the same time.
now i’m going to try my hand at a picture of my friend’s adorable little baby boy.
19 Feb 2010 | 8:14 pm | art |
from life drawing last week, here’s natasha. i suppose i should have paid more attention to the size of her foot, but i was clearly concentrating elsewhere. oh well. let’s see what i do this week.
17 Oct 2009 | 10:05 am | art |
i just got back from another few-week trip to outback central australia. what fantastic landscape! it was the first time i felt compelled to draw the landscape. when leading a trip with several workerbees however, there is very little time to do things outside of work. we did spend a fair bit of time drinking beer and creating new constellations, but at the end of each day my eyes were way too tired to really *see* and draw. so i have very few sketches to share.
here are three sketches. one is a really rough sketch of uluru just before it rained (i was too busy smiling, feeling super lucky, and taking photographs to draw the waterfalls). the color one is of a tiny part of Kata Tjuta, my first time using my new color pastels that i bought specifically for the Red Center. both of these i drew while sitting on top of our troopy (a tall 4wd). the last one is a sketch of two of my workerbees relaxing at the end of the day. i was quite pleased with the last one, having not done trees from life in >15 yrs. without further ado.
24 Sep 2009 | 9:43 am | art | No comments
” … the world is my concern only insofar as I have a certain debt and obligation so to speak – because I have been wandering about this world these thirty years – to leave a certain something in memory of me behind, drawings or paintings, out of gratitude – not made in order to gratify some fashion or other but to express an honest human feeling. That work, then, is my objective …” ~ van Gogh, letter #309, summer 1883
i received a very nice compliment about this 20-”minuter” from life drawing class tonight. thanks john.
some 10 minute sketches from life drawing class tonight.
2 Sep 2009 | 8:44 pm | art | No comments
… i present to you heston blumenthal, a present for my fiance, to match gordon. now sweetpea you can hang them side by side in your office.
heston has a really cool face. nothing is symmetric, not only is nothing symmetric, his nose is totally off centre and lips are crooked. so much fun to draw! the hardest part for me was the reflected light on the left side of his face.
i also had a hard time at first because i didn’t know his personality at all. i’ve been reading all these portraiture books lately and there is quite a bit of discussion about whether or not the artist needs to know the personality of the sitter in order to create an ‘accurate likeness’. well, theoretically i think you shouldn’t need to know your sitter (at least at this point in my life i believe that), but in practice i found it extremely difficult to draw his expression until i watched the first 35 seconds of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvAJeJ5B5Ms , and then i got it. the quirky science chef. his personality reminds me of a bizarre article i read once about a restaurant chef who made everything using edible ink in an inkjet printer – super strange and i can’t believe that printed paper would taste as good as peking duck. but then again, i suppose if i had a money tree in my back yard, i’d like to see what it tastes like, and so i would book a table for an evening meal. ‘nuf said.
this portrait of heston was certainly done for the patron. my adventure with gordon ramsay (below) was fun and i did it for me, but this style isn’t quite what i am looking for. i’m much more drawn to the loose wispy broad stroke style like my “after picasso” or the “after van dyck” (both below). but, if i could make a living doing commissioned portraits in the style of heston and gordon, would i ?? definitely.
30 Aug 2009 | 11:29 pm | art | No comments