We woke up to a magic wonderland this morning. Everything was coated with hoar frost. Hoar frost takes special conditions to form. THe air has to be very still to let the ice crystals grow, and very moist so there is water to form the ice. Usually it form on a cold foggy morning. And, of coarse, it has to be below freezing. When that happens, tiny ice crystals grow on everything, making it look rather fuzzy. I decided to play with the macro focus on my camera. I think I still hae a lot of learning to do, but here are a few of the results:
I think the little branch on the left on the photo above looks like a tiny little man.

PSU drawing part 2 of week 3

Well, we got our "feedback" on our first two drawings. Basically there was a very general rubric, and we were assigned points based on that - does it fill the page (sort of a stupid thing to grade from an electroncaly submitted drawing - after all, I would guess we all know how to use the crop tool!), was an above, average or below-average amount of time spent on the drawing, was the drawing neat or sloppy, etc. There is a place for comments, but no comments were offered. I received 23/25 points for the rose because there weren't enough details. The ironic thing was I had drawn a daisy first and decided not to use it because it had too many details compared to the sample illustration they provided. Oh well. I got a perfect score on the ivy drawing. But absolutely no feedback on either one.

So my feeling right now is that this web drawing class is not worth the cost of Penn State tuition. I will stick it out through the semester - sitting down and drawing on a regular basis will still help my skills. But I won't count on learning a lot from the instructor.

For our next assignment, we were to use pen and ink and show shading with cross-hatching. I started with a drawing of our soap dispenser but then decided that it didn't show enouh shading. The instructions had suggested a bowl of fruit, so I thought I'd try that, too. That's the one I ended up submitting. But I still like the frogs...

Folk School 2009

Right after Christmas this year, my two daughters and I went down to spend a week at John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina. Great place if you are looking for a relaxing week learning new things. (www.folkschool.org). We each took our own class.

Karen was studying advanced hammered dulcimer with Dan Landrum. He focused on using drum rudiments when playing a dulcimer - so technique, not songs. But Karen and James did learn to play a Rich Mullins song. I didn't get the full performance recorded, but here they are playing it with Dan playing his drum at the student exhibition the last day. The things in front of them are carved mantles from the woodcarving class.






Meanwhile, Janet's class was Drawing and Painting Botanicals with Watercolor Pencils taught by Rodenta Soprano. She really enjoyed her class, and created some beautiful flowers.





My class was "Realism in Felted Imagery" taught by Lisa Klakulak. We learned to make pictures using carded wool. I had several ideas in mind, but my classmates convinced me to make penguins. I made a little trail version to try out the different techniques we were learning.

Then I was going to incorporate those into a bigger piece, but I only got the main characters finished.

The reason I didn't get much of my main piece done was that on Wednesday afternoon our poor car while minding its own business in the parking lot, was totaled by an "impaired" driver. Not only did she total our car, she took out a sign (which went into her windshield), slightly damaged another car, lost her tire, drove home 2 miles on three tires, and when they came to get her, never even knew she had been in an accident.

Eventually we were able to rent a van, and got home in time to get the girls back to their schools. And now we have a new car in our garage that I am slowly getting used to driving. Hopefuly in the not too distant future, I will finish what I didn't finish there, and post it here.

Drawing at Penn State

As part of my goal to get more creative outlets in my life, I am taking Introduction to Drawing from Penn State this semester. The course is kind of strange becasue it is offered through the web. For each lesson, we watch a video or two introducing the topic, then have two practice drawings and a main drawing due each week. We submit them by photographing them and then posting them to the course website. So far I am finding the instruction rather superficial - sort of along the lines of "go draw this", as opposed to anything telling us about what we should be looking at, or how to make it better. We are supposed to get feedback on each of our drawings, but as the due date has not passed yet, I have not seen how that works. I wish we could see what other students are submitting, sort of like if you were in a classroom you would see what your classmates were drawing.


So here is my first practice drawing. We were to start lightly drawing the outline of a flower or leafy branch (tricky to find in mid-January in PA!), and then when we had an outline we liked, darken the outline as one line.
For my second practice drawing we drew the outline of an object with an interesting contour. Then when we liked the outline, we were to fill it in with a watercolor brush and India ink to create a silouhette. I might have cheated a bit by leaving hints of white, but I liked the effect. I'm not sure how a watercolor brush counts as drawing, but that's part of what is left out of the instruction I guess.

I will keep you posted on my drawing adventures.

Looking for Eagles

It was 17 degrees out today. Rick and I decided that would make it a perfect day for birdwatching. Well, at least we had a new warm car. Our plan was to drive down to below Raystown Dam, where we often kayak. But not being too crazy, we opted to do our looking from the car, not from the kayak.

We approached Raystown from Huntingdon along the main branch of the Juniata. One of our first sites was a stately old Sycamore in the middle of a field. Someday I want to be good enough with my painting skills to do this tree justice. It would be fun to live close enough to it to it to photograph it in many seasons and moods. It marked the beginning of the river views for us. Our first bird sightings were common mergansers with bright red-orange bills and brilliant white bodies - rusty read heads on the females and green on the males. Unfortunately, we were too far away to get really clear pictures. We also saw some hooded mergansers, but not close enough to photograph.

Then we turned up to the the top of the dam. There is a park up there where you could look out over the frozen lake. We were struck by how totally silent it was, except for deep low groaning coming from the ice. It almost sounded like trapped whale song.

When we got cold, we got back into our warm car and went down from the dam to the Raystown Branch of the river. Where there was open water, right below the dam, Rick said, "This is where I was hoping the eagles would concentrate - just like that one, there!". And sure enough, there he sat on cue. Again the picture was far away so rather fuzzy, but he was there!

We also enjoyed the winter views of the dam and the reflections in the water of the ridges on the other side. As we drove down the Raystown branch, we were treated to lots more common mergansers, a few hoodies and a couple of grebes, to small and too fast to get good identifications on.

Then, right in front of our car, there sat another eagle in a tree. Just as we both saw him he flew, landing in a tree closer to the water. There was a nature path right there, so we stopped the car, and Rick went ahead of me on foot. He got the best photo of the day.

On our way home we stopped near my old sycamore to photograph giant icicles on the cliff. They were well over our heads, and very green. Maybe algae in the ice? We weren't sure.

It was definitely a fun day to be out.