Under the Influence

 I'll get to the meaning of the post title in a bit -- first, I'm sure you all want to see how Pippin is doing.

On Wednesday he got his sutures removed -- yay!

The vet did some basic neurological tests, and said Pippin looked great.  However, he still has another two weeks to go in the pen just to be sure he doesn't have a relapse.  This does not make him happy.  He howls every morning between 3 and 5am to make sure that I know how unhappy he is.

The pen is next to the dining table where I work on my art, and he gives me these guilt-inducing looks whenever I'm over there. 

Sometimes I let him out for brief breaks on the sofa, closely supervised.  Here he is trying to tell me that he would rather chase real squirrels in the yard than this poor substitute.

Meanwhile, Truman has been lobbying for equal photo op time.  

So here he is on the recliner, showing how well he coordinates with the new throw.

Okay, enough with the Hounds.  On to art!  I'm almost to the post title explanation, but first, there are the usual sketch practice pieces.  At one of our sessions we drew this European street:

Then one day I did some experimenting on my own, and produced this weird thing that I made up as I went along, just for fun.  I was testing how to use a watercolor medium called Gum Arabic, which can produce some cool effects when used wet-in-wet.

For another sketch group session, I painted this lovely canal in Denmark, and was quite happy with the reflection of the clouds.

All right, that's it for the usual stuff.  Now, finally, the reason for the post title:  Under the Influence.  What does it mean?  Well, basically, it has to do with how easily influenced I can be by Other People's Art, which sometimes results in large expenditures on supplies that get used once or twice before winding up in the Closet of Forgotten Obsessions.

Here's an example:  last year, after becoming a diehard fan of Good Omens, I was looking at art produced by other fans, and saw some stunningly beautiful portraits by a fan who used black, gray, and white colored pencils on toned paper.  And being easily influenced, I thought, "Hey, wonder if I could do that?  Only I'll use all the colors!"  

And the next thing you know, I had spent $$$ on colored pencils, paper, sharpeners, erasers, solvents...just because of seeing that one fan's work.  Luckily, this turned out well, and the colored pencil pieces I did were pretty darn good, if I do say so myself.

So what happened next?  Well, a few months ago, I ran across another fan who was producing stunningly beautiful Good Omens portraits in oil paints.  And I thought, "Wow, wonder if I could do that?"

Uh-oh.

Yes, I went and bought $$$ worth of oil paints, brushes, canvases, mediums, palette, etc.  And managed to create nothing that I liked at all.  Sigh.  I mean, the whole colored pencil thing had turned out great -- why hadn't oils?  

Well, I'll tell you.

The thing about oils is that they take time and patience.   And it turns out the reason I like working in watercolor and colored pencils so much is that they're quick and immediate.  And while some patience is involved -- it did take three days to draw Crowley's silly throne chair -- it still doesn't take the patience required for oils, which can take days and days to dry between layers. 

I hated waiting for paint to dry.  

Also, the solvents are toxic, and the non-toxic alternatives available for cleaning brushes don't work very well, and I really really hated having to struggle to get a clean brush between every single color change -- when painting a portrait, there is often a constant back-and-forth between colors.  It got frustrating very fast.

So, I decided that oil painting is not My Thing.  Sigh.  The next time I see another piece of cool art using a medium I don't currently own, I do hope someone will stop me before I say, "Ooh, wonder if I could that?"

Anyway, it was fortunate that I bought only a handful of oil paint colors.  After failing badly with oil portraits of Crowley and Aziraphale, and not having a lot of paint left, I decided to go ahead and use up as much as I could on something completely different:  a copy of a master work.

You might recognize this as Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring:

I drew it onto a canvas that I'd painted with a mid-tone yellow ochre ground, not entirely accurately (as I'm sure you can tell), and used up lots of burnt umber and ultramarine blue on the background and on a value study.

Then I spent about four hours painting the face.  This is not how Vermeer would paint a face.  Nor any other master oil painter, probably.  No, they would spend weeks and weeks doing layer after layer and glaze after glaze, and they'd spend lots of time waiting for paint to dry.

Here is my set up on the dining table, with the original on the laptop.  I wanted my dining table back for other art work (in WATERCOLOR and COLORED PENCIL which is what I should STICK to), so I did not paint this the way one ought to when using oils.  

Instead, I just did it alla prima (wet-in-wet without letting earlier layers dry).  I did the whole thing over two days, in around eight hours total. Then I put what was left of the oil paint supplies into the Closet of Forgotten Obsessions and called it good.

I am now happily back at work on a colored pencil portrait of Crowley sitting on his throne chair.

Whew.

That's all (that's enough) for today.  May you all have lovely weeks that are free of howling dachshunds, and may all your obsessions be fun ones.

Three More Weeks....

Pippin thinks he is fine.

He is not fine.

That is, he seems to be feeling really good, because he whines and howls at three a.m. wanting to get out of his pen, and he whines and howls every day at 7:00am wanting out of his pen and he WHINES and HOWLS every night at 10:00pm because he is bored in his pen.

But he must spend a minimum of four weeks in the pen from date of surgery, which means he will be whining and howling at me until mid-June.  Yay.

He does get outside for short, on-leash walks to do his business, and I'm SO GLAD it is May and not January.

Once outside though, he thinks that he gets to stay out there as long as he likes.  If he doesn't move around that's fine.  Lately I've taken to bringing my iPad out on our excursions.  It gets a little tricky if he sees a squirrel, or the neighbor dogs want to bark at him -- grab that leash!  But on the whole, he's pretty calm.

This week his pain meds are being reduced a little, so we'll see how he feels about that.  I'm just happy that he is recovering quickly.

I haven't been able to go out, because he gets upset and tries to escape from the pen, especially when I go next door to visit my mother and brother -- he used to go, too, and now I take only Truman, and that does not go down well. So I have mostly stayed home, and that meant finding ways to entertain myself at home -- gee, what a lot of practice I've had at that over the past year!

You can probably guess what I did.

Yes, I drew Aziraphale from Good Omens again.  (I had already drawn Crowley from this same pic.)  This promo poster shows him looking rather anxious over the impending Armageddon:

I wanted to try drawing those wings (something new!) and those books (challenging!), but I didn't want to do that expression.  So I decided to give him a more contented look, as if it were after they saved the world, and he was pleased about still having his precious books.

Giving him this new expression proved challenging -- it went through at least three iterations before I felt it was right:

The wings turned out to be fairly easy -- all those bird drawings I did in February proved helpful!  

As for the books, I got to try out a technique I'd read about for doing light on dark areas.  There were lines and decorations on the spines that were lighter than the book color, and they were so thin and detailed that I couldn't simply draw in the darker color around those lighter lines. Too small!  

The new technique I tried was indenting the paper with a metal stylus, which I didn't have, so I used a blunt-tipped sewing needle instead.  The darker color was then drawn over those areas, and it skipped over those indented areas, sort of like doing a charcoal rubbing.  Fun!

For added entertainment, I also decided to add some gold leaf to parts of that background pillar thingy.  It's been over 20 years since I did any gold leaf work, but I still had my old supplies to hand.  The old glue was rubbery but luckily I had ordered a new bottle recently.

It's a painstaking process.  You can only do small areas at a time, around 1/2".  First, apply the glue ("metal leaf size") with a round sable brush that you don't care much for, as it will be useless afterwards:

Use an X-acto knife to cut a piece of 22K gold leaf, larger than the area you wish to cover (because applying it is an imprecise process).  

These super-thin sheets of gold are very fussy -- they will blow away at the slightest air movement, and will try to stick to your fingers or other surfaces you don't want them to be.  To transfer the piece of gold to the picture (after waiting 30-60 seconds for the glue to get tacky), use the special squirrel hair brush.  First, wipe it across the forehead to pick up a little oil, then touch it to the cut piece.  It will stick!

While holding your breath so as not to cause any air movement, carefully transfer the gold to the glued area. 

Wait around 3 to 5 minutes for it to completely dry, then brush away the excess gold with a stiff bristle hair brush:

Use an agate to burnish the gold, with wax paper for protection:

I learned all this sometime in the late 1990s at a workshop in Medieval Manuscript Illumination techniques.  I was a bit rusty at first, but soon had the method down again.  I did not cover the whole decorative arch thingy, just selected areas (actually a bit more than can be seen here, as the light doesn't pick up the gold everywhere when taking a photo).  I'm pleased with the way the whole piece turned out:

I shall continue to find ways to keep busy at home over the next three weeks of Pippin's recovery.

Meanwhile, my two new Funko Pop figures arrived!  The first ones I got had Crowley holding an apple and Aziraphale holding a book.  This "special edition" set has Crowley holding the tire iron from his Bentley, while Aziraphale has his flaming sword.  

And they have WINGS! Whee!

They are going to hang out in my car.  

Have a great week out there, everyone!

The Ten Thousand Dollar Dog

This is not a normal post.

If you read last Monday's blog, you may recall that I decided, after not one, not two, but three landscapers failed to give me a new garden, that the universe was trying to tell me something.  Such as, perhaps, "don't put in a big garden right now -- maybe you're not ready for it."

Well, what the Universe was actually trying to tell me was, "don't spend thousands of dollars on landscaping right now -- you're about to be hit by a huge vet bill."

This is poor little Pippin.  On Wednesday morning he started dragging his back legs, a warning sign for spinal disc disease, which is common in dachshunds.  I am very familiar with it, and got him to the vet immediately, where they determined he needed surgery. Had to drive him to Seattle for that.

He had a laminectomy for two herniated discs that were pressing on his spinal cord.  Everything went smoothly and his recovery was so fast that they were able to discharge him Friday afternoon, and we were back home on Saturday.  He needs to be confined for 4-6 weeks.

Truman is tuckered out, too -- I had taken him over to Pullman on that Tuesday to the vet hospital there for a scheduled cardio workup to see what was causing his murmur (a mitral valve disease, fairly mild stage).  He came to Seattle with us, of course, and he is very happy to be home again, as am I.

Hopefully, my regular posts of art and nature and whatnot will resume next Monday.  

Until then, stay safe out there!

Catching Up

Last week I had too much stuff for one post, so I'm starting off today with something that happened over a week ago -- a brush fire that threatened one of my favorite walking places!

I'm talking about Columbia Point, a natural area (meaning "lots of sagebrush") where the Hounds and I enjoy a lovely loop trail leading to where the Yakima and Columbia Rivers meet up.  The fire burned 85 acres nearby.

We went for a walk there a few days later, and you can see the burned area from the farthest point we reach before heading back:

The fire did try to get up the hill to the walking trail we use.

And it did get over the trail in a few small areas.

I was sad to see the burned area, where there were a lot of trees, but also glad that it avoided our walking trail for the most part.  

I spotted some more wildflowers in bloom -- this lovely lupine:

And this Desert Globemallow:

The Hounds cooled off in the river afterwards.

Truman went out quite a ways!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (home), I finally figured out what to paint on the new gate/fence.  My first idea had been to paint a fancy faux gate on it with lots of flowers intertwined in and around it, but that seemed too complex.  Next, Devon the mail carrier suggested painting colorful fish, which did seem simpler, but somehow it failed to inspire me.

Then one day two thoughts collided in my brain and the light dawned.  I was looking at the mural on my living room wall, where I depicted a Great Blue Heron by a pond with reeds, and the first thought came:  I could paint a heron on the fence!

But herons are nowhere near as common here as are Great Egrets, and I had recently taken some fabulous photos of an egret catching a fish, and the second thought came:  I could paint an egret from my own photo!

It definitely inspired me, because I painted this in about three days:

Slightly closer view without the surrounding distractions:

I even got in the fish that it caught:

 So that made me quite happy, although it also made me quite stiff and sore and tired, what with getting up and down on my knees to do the bottom portions (my knees and back do not spring back into fine fettle the way they once did, alas).  It really ought to have a few cattails or a turtle or something, but oh well.  It will do for now.

And now for a report on my landscaping woes.  Not sure what I reported in the past, if I did, but in any case, the basic idea is that I wanted some sort of garden in the back yard, and decided the 600sf lawn space between the patio and the outbuilding would work well.  Having dug up a lawn before, I very much wanted to pay someone else to do it, along with bringing it lots of good garden soil, and changing the underground sprinklers from lawn to garden heads, and maybe putting in some nice level paths.

Well, Landscaper #1 came out 8 weeks ago, promised a bid in 2-3 weeks, failed to do so, told me he'd have it in another 2-3 weeks, and failed again due to not having enough workers at his nursery/landscaping business.  Sigh.

Landscaper #2 came out 7 weeks ago, failed to provide a bid, and failed to return my follow-up message.

Landscaper #3 was more promising (suggested by my lawn mowing service guy).  He turned up promptly, and said he could do what I needed. But then I made the tactical error of asking about the faux cobblestone path between the lawn and the would-be garden -- it had grass growing between the stones, and I thought perhaps a weed block or some sort would be good, or even better, take the path out and just put in a bark mulch one with some stepping stones.

Well, he explained why a concrete path, stamped with a pleasing pattern, would be ever so much better, and under the influence of his enthusiasm and his confidence it would do the job of keeping grass out of the garden, I said, sure, put that in the bid.  Wrong.

The bid came in three days later at $7,000.  Oh, dear.  $3,000 of that was for removal and replacement of that danged path.  Suddenly the faux cobblestones looked ever so attractive to me, even with the grass growing between the gaps.

There were a couple of confusing items in the bid, so I replied via email asking for clarification, and for a new bid without the concrete path.  That was 8 days ago, and there has been no reply.  I suspect he now believes that I am a) trouble and/or b) too small a job to bother about.  Sigh.

You know, when one landscaper flakes out on you, it's probably nothing more than an anomaly.  When two landscapers fail you, it might suggest a trend.  But when three landscapers opt not to work with you, then it's just possible that the universe is trying to tell you something.

Such as, It's not the right time and/or place for you to put in a garden.

I decided the Universe was trying to tell me to hold off on that particular plan, and to do some gardening elsewhere instead to see how dedicated I was to the whole notion.  Which brings me to the Back Forty:

There is a planting strip against the back yard fence which I call the Back Forty though in fact, it is only 38 feet long.  It's five feet wide, and the previous owners put in a lilac, two barberry shrubs, two hostas in containers, and then covered the rest with weed block fabric and a million rocks.

They are horrid rocks.  Big (average 4 inches), sharp and chunky, and utterly impossible to work around.  But, this is GARDEN space, with GARDEN sprinkler heads.  So a few weeks ago, after getting tired of waiting for landscapers to give me bids, I went ahead and started planting things in it (after laboriously yanking out those two barberry shrubs).  Planting new stuff required removing the rock and the weed block. 

I've managed to clear enough room for, and to plant, three roses, a penstemon, a geranium, and some peppermint.  I want to plant tons more stuff, but the rocks are EVIL, and perplexing in their abundance.  I've been dumping them into the dog run area, which is never used, where the rocks seem to multiply by magic.  You see, so far I have cleared off areas that amount to around 45 square feet.

Yet this is what the dog run now looks like.  Clearly this is much more than 45 square feet of rocks!  How do they do it?  The depth is the same as that in the garden area I cleared out, and in fact, the rocks are actually piled deeper in some parts of the dog run.  

How is this possible???  How can I have removed all the rocks you see above in the dog run, and yet have only a few small areas of the planting strip cleared?  Where am I going to dump the rest of those rocks -- I have to keep the middle of the dog run open for access to the heat pump.  

Oh, dear.

Well, I shall just have to keep shoveling rocks, and perhaps build a wall with them somewhere, or perhaps the yard needs a rock mountain as a focal point.  

Meanwhile, the roses that I inherited are looking ever so lovely:

Unfortunately, they're in the front, where I only see them when I come or go.  My main living room window looks out on the back yard.  Sigh.

Well, I am plowing ahead, so to speak, and will continue to post updates as I go along.

So that's it for last week and a bit of the week before that, and I am caught up!  Whee!

Have a great week, everyone!