The Good Witch Glenda

This is another page from my little Art Journal.....I started doodling again....it all seems to start with a doodle....and then my thoughts and my drawing seemed to go to witches...good and bad. Good are best, of course...and the best good witch I know is Glenda.

Whenever I think about the movie 'Wizard of Oz' I always remember how I felt when the screen went from the familiar black and white to TECHNICOLOR!!! I remember the collective gasp from the audience. It was the mid 1940s and most of us had never seen a color movie...or those dreaded flying monkeys that made me hide my face in my hands and just peek at the screen through a crack between my fingers. Quite wonderful, it was. Movie Magic

The Art Journal

Well here we are again...but this time with a couple of pages that I just did in my Art Journal. You'll notice that there are very few words and lots of color and stuff...that's why it's called an Art Journal, I guess. On the top...the one I call Canary Fandango....is my version of what happens when you have a male canary and add a sweet little female to keep him company. In our case three eggs happened....and then three chicks...and then a much larger canary "condo" to house them all. The Dad's and Mom's names are Twitter and Tweet. I keep referring to the little ones as Huey, Duey & Louie...but I think that only one is actually a male: the one that sings. And sing he does...Wow is all I can say about his singing. It's pretty impressive to say the least...he trills, yodels, and chirps while balancing on the little swing at the top of their Canary Condo.

The page with the two little girls/females/women (take your pick) is how I feel about my sister. Neither of us is as young as I pictured...except in our hearts and heads. I'm a short & chubby brunette and she is taller, much thinner and a blonde...but hey, I can take artistic license and show me with purple hair and her with orange....and....get away with it. Cause I can use any color that I want when I play with my paints, pencils and crayons. So that's that. Except to say that I once upon a time about 40 years ago had a dress exactly like the one that I dressed my "cute self"...on the left...yes, the one with purple hair...in. (isn't that the worst sentence...gramatically...that ever was?) I made that dress on my little Singer...and it looked exactly like that...except that the red dots were actually red strawberries with little green tops. It's funny how things...way out of the past...come back to you from their storage compartment somewhere in the brain. Things that existed once but were forgotten (so you thought). I only noticed it (the dress) hours after I had completed the drawing. I wonder what else I might have stored in the deep recesses of my good old brain. More pictures could unveil more memories. Interesting thought. But enough for now. Blog at y'all later.

A Little More Carving

Well, here I am again. Carved a carrot yesterday. This might just become one of a series of vegatable stamps that I make. Who knows, I may just wind up with a giant rubber salad. No carving today...at least none as of now (1:30 pm Pacific Time)...I think that I'll try working on my Art Journal. I always have plenty of stuff that I want to draw and paint...I don't always have a lot to say. I might have whatever it is that I draw be a prompt for my writing. I know for sure that I'll be able to squeeze out a word or three....just take this blog, for instance....I'm writing a lot but have said very little. When I was about 12 I decided that I needed to have a diary (now it's called a journal...makes it sound more important somehow). I was overjoyed when I got a diary for Christmas. Decided that the 1st of January was going to be the day when I started writing about my daily doings. On New Year's Day I opened my wonderful, new diary...and on the first page wrote: Dear Diary....and that, was about the extent of it. I think that I was intimidated by the blank page followed by just a whole lot of other blank pages...and gave up right there and then. I would have probably written a lot of stupid stuff....but it would have been fun for me to read later...like now. It would have been fun to see who that 12 yr old girl was back then. As it is...I can't remember a thing about what I did or thought about then. Sad, isn't it? But a good reason to try again...without the "Dear Diary" part.

A Little Carving

I did a little carving last night while watching TV. I love the look that hand carved stamps give to a piece of work...card, collage, or painting. I especially like the little wispy lines that appear around an image because of not carving deeply enough in spots. These images show the finished stamp and the first proof. I did just a tiny bit (a teeny, tiny bit) of clean-up carving after the first proof.

I recently visited one of my favorite art stores...Dick Blick...and bought several sheets of their 1/4" thick rubber, which carves like butter and is as easy to work with as the way more expensive brand name carving blocks. I usually carve just on one side of the 1/4" stuff. When I do buy the brand name rubber (1/2") I usually use all flat surfaces for carving. Thinking with the cheap side of my brain here.

Bye for now.

Haven't been around lately.

Well...it's been about a month since my last post. That's because 1st: I was getting ready to go on vacation...2nd: I went on vacation...and 3rd: I came back from vacation. I announced my joy to my journal on May 1 when I drew this silly little picture of me all excited about leaving on the 15th. Between the 1st and 15th I did a lot of thinking and reading about cabins, log houses, and what to do with our existing one-room cabin (12x16...propane stove and heat, dry sink, ice chest cooler and sleeping loft)...the best part being the 8x16 covered porch and the pair of rocking chairs that we set out there to watch the sun go down. So I day dreamed a lot...and just before we left I decided to picture the cabin in collage. There it is, porch and all, on a heavily wooded lot in North-Central Washington. The drive from Las Vegas to our cabin is something in the neighborhood of 1200 miles! We take all five dogs and our cranky, old parrot (who has, during every one of our three trips there, turned into a sweet old thing...during both long, long, long, long, car rides and for our entire vacation...go figure...when at home, she's a screechy, demanding, evil-green-thing...and on vacation, she's an entirely changed bird. Just a luv.) This spring we managed a three week stay at the cabin...and...hired carpenters to build a second room onto the cabin....it's now double the original size....and so is that even more wonderful porch. At 32x8, we have room on the porch for several more rocking chairs. Our little cabin has even sprouted a smoke stack....that connects to a new wood stove! I feel like I'm living the dream. The cabin has been joined by a couple of friends....a nice big storage shed and a tool shed for my husband. A regular compound, we have there. We'll have a well drilled in October....and maybe....just maybe....get a start on our little retirement-cottage-in-the-woods. I get excited thinking about it....and then worry when thoughts about the economy and housing market creep in. Oh, well. In the movie, "Field of Dreams", our hero says something like: "If you build it, they will come"....I figure that I'll just take a lesson from him.....maybe if I dream it (really, really hard) it will happen. We'll make it happen. Our vacation wasn't without it's adventures....the third entry in my journal (top-center) explains all.