miniatures in progress

Sorry the photo is so grainy and out of focus. It gets dark so early these days and the lighting in our apartment is less "daylight simulation" and more "three lamps from Ikea." I'm planning on painting them with primer to stiffen them and weatherproof them a little bit, and sell them loose and unmounted.

lavinia and first frost almost complete

I couldn't find my good matte bristol, so I painted the backgrounds for these on watercolor paper instead. It turned out alright. The colors and gradations are more muted than I'd planned - you can see how the gouache seems more saturated on the bristol cutout than the background - but I kind of like it like this, too.



I'm still working on getting a decent full-shot image of this one, but here's a detail. I tea-stained the papercut and the touched up the branches and her "mouth" with gouache, but I think I want to do a little more touching up.

I'm not going to list them yet. I'd like to finish a few more paintings, loose papercuts, and some new things I didn't offer last year before I put anything up in the shop, but I thought I might as well show them here.

first frost of the season

The base of a new silhouette. I'm debating whether or not to add some texturing by cutting out some partial crystals and texturing the yarn in the pom pom on her cap, maybe something to define her breath better.

This was kind of frustrating to photograph. It might have been the time of day and the waning light, but I found it really hard to get a crisp close-up to show the details, even with the tripod.

YES.

I'm so glad I bugged Camden into taking the day off from work so we could go to the polling station together, sit down at the same table to mark our ballots, and that I remembered to keep my ballot tab as a memento.

I'm so glad I tackled a ridiculously complicated recipe for dinner, just to keep my hands moving and my mind on the two square feet of space in front of me until finally I couldn't take it anymore and turned on the radio to see what was happening.

Now that the results are barreling in I'm so glad Camden and I decided to stay home instead of going out to the pub or any of our friends' election parties because right now I want to be quiet. I want to hold his hand and savor this moment that's not just part of our history, but a part of history.

And I'm so glad we bought a new bottle of bourbon, because there may only be two of us but let me tell you: tonight we're going to celebrate for everyone.

the body, and a sketch for the next piece

new silhouette

"Speak, gentle niece, what stern ungentle hands
Have lopp'd and hew'd and made thy body bare
Of her two branches?"







I'm going to name this new piece "Lavinia," after the daughter of Titus Andronicus. I've actually finished cutting the body, I just have some detailing to do and then I need to figure out how to mount it, and whether or not to matte it.

long overdue

I finally finished a pair of silhouettes I promised to a family friend. The boy's figure contains thorny brambles and roots and bare, angular trees with a single crow perched on one of their branches. I forgot to get pictures of the girl that accompanied this one, but her figure contained raindrops and an underwater scene of fish and octopi meandering across her skirts.

I'm getting the hang of my swiveling Exacto. Honestly, I thought some of the vines in the boy were a little clumsy. If the portrait hadn't been so overdue I would have asked for more time to render a smoother version. The girl turned out pretty well, though.


I was afraid I was going to have to buy a new scanner, which would have set my budget back quite a lot, but this picture actually turned out pretty sharp. In fact, that weird stain in the lower righthand corner? That's a stain on the window, not the paper. The sunlight coming through at six in the evening backlit the silhouette really well, even better than my old scanner would, and I didn't have to adjust the color or saturation to accurately show the woodgrain pattern. This has potential, I think.