faces

I teach at CSULB, and arranged for a guest speaker to come into my classes one day. I have the same two classes back to back, so the 2nd class I'd already heard the material. Thankfully, I had blank atc cards and a charcoal pencil with me. I did the original drawing, and then later added watercolor, oil pastel, and text.

Baby blanket

I will be 28 weeks pregnant with my son on Saturday!  Right now I am lying on the couch enjoying feeling him wiggle and kick. This is a picture of some of the squares for his blanket. It's a miniature version of the king sized blanket I am making for my own bed.

desert atc

I have a book club of 6 women from my MS cohort. We meet all over about once a month to talk about books! One month, we met in Claremont and took a little fieldtrip to the Prison Library Project bookstore. They had a bunch of books for $1.00 each, and so I grabbed some to alter and use in collaging and my therapy practice later. 

These are made with some of those books, acrylics, sharpie, and metallic watercolors. I was in a desert mood when I made them. I had never read the book that I took the text from, but I was intrigued as I did it. Someone died in the first few pages. They lived in New Mexico. It all fit.

vessels

When I was 14 years old I started taking ceramics at Cypress College. I took all 24 ceramics classes they offered at the time - and then got hired as lab technician and got paid to be there. I loved it, and have probably written other blog posts about it before - it was more than about ceramics, and it was more than a class.

One of the assignments we had, every semester, was to create a postcard - it should incorporate visuals and text, have our portrait on it somewhere, and illustrate what our artistic mission statement was. I did a set of postcards one semester, the semester I was also taking printmaking, and did a bunch of wood blocks with different cups and vases on them. Since then, it's been folded into part of my unconscious doodle repertoire. 

Part of it is that the first semester of ceramics you only made one thing: cups. Cups, cups, cups, cups, cups. We'd watch slideshows of Ron Nagle cups, go to exhibits focused on cups... and have trash-ceremonies if someone brought in a cup that was machine-made. It's the perfect vessel. It's so much more than you think it can be. It can also be so simple, beautiful, and functional. 

My instructor said - to get a C, make 6 cups. To get an A, make 30. So I made hundreds. I made so many I gave them away to anybody who would take them. I frequently visit people all over the country and am surprised by a vaguely familiar looking cup in their cupboards. 

So.. in any case. I like cups.

Sharpie, metallic watercolors. 

vapid faces

I don't love these atc's. I'm putting them up here to remind myself that sometimes it is about the process and not the final product. I still might come back to these and do more. They seem vapid to me. But I still love what watercolors do, and the 2.5 x 3.5 space of an ATC card...

simple trees

Sharpies and metallic water colors. Somewhere in my project stash I also have these embroidered...