Thalia and I went to visit the parents in Florida for a few weeks. I just had to get away from this Colorado cold. I didn’t realize how much I missed Florida! Anyway, we had a blast. Thalia loved it. I decided to move my Photo Albums to Picassa. For now it’s just the one album from Florida… but I’ll update the others later. So here it is… Thalia in Florida:

I finished my first book on drawing and have moved onto the next. This book is called “The Natural Way to Draw”, and it is basically like taking a year of art school. It starts from the very beginning and contains strict schedules to follow. You can do it at whatever rate fits your lifestyle. I’m planning on doing an hour a day in the book. Which means I should finish it in 75 weeks. It is soooo hard. But it really is teaching me a lot. I never really learned this stuff before. It was written by a man named Nicolaides in the 1940’s. But it is considered to be the absolute best art tutorial out there. Here’s hoping that I can stick with it.

Unfortunately, most of the exercises are purely learning techniques. So there won’t be much to show off for a long while. I am doing most of the drawings on paper now. It’s just easier that way since my tablet is not very portable… well, the tablet is pretty portable, but my laptop can’t run my drawing programs. So I HAVE to use my desktop pc with the tablet. And it sure as heck isn’t portable.

But in the meantime, I’m learning the new drawing programs I obtained and am doing practice sketches using the tablet when I can. For the tablet I am following another great author named Andrew Loomis. His books are free online (and range from the 1930’s through the 50’s) and they are marvelously fun. His first book is called “Fun With a Pencil”. Very accurate title. It’s loads of fun. The drawings are very cute. Maybe I’ll post some of them when I get better.

Thalia is adorable, perfect, beautiful, and oh so smart.

I think you know this guy. This took me about an hour and a half to complete. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I’m not very good with details yet. But it does look like him at least.

My first digital artwork. I was just following a tutorial, so it really isn’t very impressive at all. But it was SO MUCH FUN. I’m very fond of this little guy now. I think I may use that tutorial to make AL an ALapeño soon.

Anyway, what was so impressive is how dynamic the character turned out to be. After he was completed, all I had to do was click a slider and his colors would change accordingly. No going back in and messing with him. Just click, slide, done. Very cool stuff. Here is the original, which took about half and hour, followed by one of my adjusted versions that took 5 seconds.

I’m still working on getting a portrait done. I’m having troubles with model/location/tools. I’ll figure it out eventually.

We joined a gym this past weekend. We’re not really “gym-type” people. But once we looked into it, we decided it would be great for all 3 of us. We found a very nice gym in town. They have great daycare for Thalia. And by daycare, I mean max 2 hours… which is more than enough. She seems to like it alright. She cries when we leave her at first, of course. The gym also has tons of classes that are included with membership. That’s one thing I wanted to find. Variety and fun! I won’t be taking any until I’m sure Thalia can handle at least an hour alone though. Right now I’m mostly working out in the theater room. That’s right. They show a new movie every couple of days. This past weekend it was Alien Vs. Predator. Today it was James Bond License to Kill. How cool. I love that room. They also have everything else you would want from a gym… a million workout stations (some with attached TVs), a saltwater pool, sauna, hot tub, a eucalyptus steam room, basketball court, racquetball courts… etc etc. We’ve only gone twice so far. But it’s good to be excited about it. Hopefully we’ll still enjoy it a couple months down the road.

I’m starting on portraits next. First up is the side portrait. As a “warm-up” exercise, the book had me copy a painting called Madame Pierre Gautreau by John Singer Sargent (1883). It is just a “simple” line drawing with no colors, lights or shadows. The main point is to teach the proper location of facial features so that heads look correct instead of, what she likes to call, “cut-off-skull error”. I have never been able to do portraits or faces. But the author explains where everything goes… the eye is always halfway down the face. The back of the ear is always the same distance as from the corner of your eye to the bottom of your face. The bottom of your ear lines up with the space between your nose and mouth. After all of the author’s advice, it amazingly becomes rather easy. Or at the very least, it isn’t very difficult anymore. So here is my first portrait line drawing… followed by the actual line drawing done by John Singer Sargent.

The only aid I used was cross-hairs on my drawing to make sure the placement of the ear and nose were accurate. Then I dropped the cross-hairs and sketched the rest while staring at the picture in my drawing book. It came out pretty well. Took me about a half an hour to sketch… then another half an hour to make sure everything was where it belonged… the nose was the biggest pain.

Thalia is having fun in her new music and swimming classes. In music class yesterday, the teacher brought out hula hoops. All of the moms held them up and the children crawled through them like a tunnel. Thalia is by far the youngest in the group, but she went right through the tunnel as soon as she saw it. The teacher was really impressed and said that kids never do that at her age and it shows great independence. I think it just shows how much she loves tunnels…

Bead necklaces!

This next drawing was really a pain. It took me two days. Since I can only devote about and hour a day, this must have taken about 2 hours. I can NOT get the facial features right. But the book says I need to stop obsessing over my mistakes and just do it and learn from it. This was just a picture in the book that she recommended I try to copy. I don’t know if she meant to copy it exactly or just the outline (since that is what the book is focusing on at the moment) but I tried to do it exact. It came out alright. It looks best if you take several steps back and then compare the two drawings.
Alright. First is the actual drawing called Child Seated in a Wicker Chair by Winslow Homer (1874).

And here is my drawing.

And Thalia is doing well, of course. Music class starts up again this week. She moves into the toddler class, which she should enjoy a lot more than the baby class. Swimming lessons start again this week, too. I know she’ll love doing that again.

Thalia rides her big doggie in front of the fireplace.

Got a new book a couple days ago. It teaches complete beginners how to draw. Since I never really formally learned how to draw, I figured this might be a good way to work on my tablet drawing and learn how to actually draw in the process. I’ve already learned a lot. I’m almost halfway through the book. It it organized with lessons that bit by bit teach you what you need to know with the main focus being on portraits. The latest lesson was drawing the human hand, which is supposed to be pretty difficult. And indeed it is. But I got a pretty good handle on it. First you learn by tracing. Using a plastic or glass board you trace on the board with your hand underneath. Since I am using the computer, I just took a picture of my hand and traced it. Here is the outline.

Then you use the outline to frame your next drawing. Once you have the hand shape framed you toss your previous drawing and just sketch your hand line by line while staring at it. The lighting in the office is kind of weird… so I don’t completely understand the shadows (that’s in a future chapter anyway). But I drew what I saw, and it came out pretty well, I think.

New year! So time for me to pick up a new hobby, right? Hahaha… yeah. Like I need another hobby. But I’m doing it anyway. In fact, I started today. AL got me a Dragon Art book for Christmas. I’ve been sketching some dragons these past couple years and wanted to make more to hang in our bedroom (which is dragon themed). When I went through the new Dragon book, I was in awe of the digital art dragons especially. That led to me looking up digital tablets. Which led to looking up digital programs. Which, after a week of nonstop research and stressing, led me to rush into getting a Wacom Intuos4 tablet in order to get a fantastic deal on a copy of Photoshop CS4 before the year turned over. The tablet came with some free software, one of which is called Autodesk Sketchbook. What a fantastic program for sketching!

I was expecting to have quite a bit of trouble with sketching on the tablet at first. Most people seem to. But I took to it pretty quickly. I can’t sketch quite as well as I can on paper… but I’m really surprised at how well I adjusted. I don’t have Photoshop yet, and that’s the main program I’m going to use to learn the digital art techniques. For now I’m just sketching on Autodesk Sketchbook to get a feel for the tablet. I wanted to share my sketches for today.

This is my first crack at quick-sketching. Took me about 10 minutes to sketch them… and about 20 minutes figuring out how to resize the image with the new program I’m using. Yeesh!

This is my second sketch. Of course I had to make a dragon. It turned out alright. I can’t quite get the edges rounded yet, but I’ll be working on it.

We had a wonderful Christmas, of course. Thalia got a billion presents and still hasn’t gotten around to playing with all of them yet. Her favorite present was definitely the tent/tunnel that AL’s dad gave her. She hangs out in it every day. She likes to take her toys in it and play with them there.

We didn’t get many pictures, it turns out. So here one of the few from Christmas day.

Not much to report lately. I was sick for two weeks. Then Thalia got sick with a different cold early this week. Then AL caught her cold and was out of work for a couple days. So we’re all recovering. And we’re all getting ready for Christmas. I’ve been doing a lot of practice baking, too. I made these “Meltaway” cookies today. And they literally do melt in your mouth. OH so good. I also made some fudge this past weekend and some “Mystery” candy bars for AL to take to work. The secret ingredient is bread crumbs. Weird!!

I’ve still been cooking a lot of meals. We had Sausage and Bean Soup yesterday. Turns out sausages are Thalia’s new favorite thing. She ate waaay more sausage than AL and I did. Of course, she ate all of OUR sausages. I also made some fabulous Beef Stew earlier this week served with homemade Fruit Salad and Buttery Biscuits. But then AL and Thalia got sick and couldn’t eat more than a few bites. Le sigh. We’ve also been eating a lot of recipes recommended by Michelle. Shepherds Pie, Spiced Beef Cornbread Cobbler, and some Easy Beef Stroganoff… Fabulous stuff. I love cooking.