SOCK IT TO ME

Fear of failure looms.  I have been downright afraid to get back to my art dolls for some reason. Probably because I now belong to a couple of doll clubs and I am cowed by the expertise there.

So, since I can't keep my hands off material I decided to start with something simple just to get my feet wet again.

Sock toys.

These will eventually find their way to the local Salvation Army Family Services or perhaps to a local couple that  takes medical supplies and toys to Africa and South America.

At least this way you know that your efforts are getting directly to the people who will enjoy them. I am always leery of  just how much of the money we sent to Charity actually goes to NEEDY people and how much goes to GREEDY Administrators.

Salvation Army has a good reputation and one of the lowest paid Administrators I hear.

This scary couple are not actually made from socks but their hoodies are made from a pretty striped pair of previously enjoyed socks. They probably will not be going to children as even I could not be that mean.

I sacrificed a new pair of socks I had never worn  for this little zebra.

At this point I concluded that all had to be made from new socks and stuffing.  Thank goodness the local Giant  Tiger had a great sock sale on.

 A monkey, a pink elephant and a tiny bunny made from a child's sock came next

 Br'er Rabbit was fun. I have since stopped using buttons for eyes and noses and now all features are embroidered.

 Like the features on these two little kittens

A puppy with his bone

Several glove rabbits..okay so I got bored and made one with two heads

 Kitty with her ball

 Same kitty front view Painted features on this one. Not my favorite as they soak in.

 Same design, looks very different in striped sock

 GladN'Sad Bunnies.  How many bunnies do you see?
 I will let you in on a little secret about these bunnies later.

 Not quite sure what this is but I loved the sock pattern.

And last but not least a funky little Apaloosa horse.

I started out by looking at how other designers had made their sock toys but now I design my own patterns.  They change regularly from toy to toy it seems. Even the second of the kittens above (made from one pair of socks) changed design.

Since others have been so generous in sharing their patterns and instructions on line for free I will include mine as well. You can see them on my next post.

Takhi

December 18, 2011

Ever since fall turned green fields to gold I had been haunted by how much they reminded me of a herd of buckskin horses.  As time went on I realized it was not the taller, silky maned buckskins I perceived but more like the tough little Mongolian horses I had seen in movies about Genghis Khan.

Fall's muted grays and tawny browns, punctuated only by fringes of black bushes and trees, are more horse-like than the greens of summer.  The feeble, intermittent dusting of snow accents their curves this year.

While I am driving to and fro this horse/field image pounds in my head like hoof beats.  At home I find myself distracted by descriptors - tawny, golden, bristling, rolling, undulating, muscular, pounding, thundering, tossing, -  and wondering how I could paint this trompe l'oeil I see so clearly in my mind's eye.

Some research revealed that the horses I sought could be the only direct descendant of primitive horses; the Takhi.  They were forerunners of the Mongolian horse and before that often depicted in cave drawings.

If you care to know more I have included a link on how the last nine were discovered and the efforts made to bring them back from the the brink of extinction. Not all efforts were easy to understand. There was one really weird experiment where these endangered animals were put out to pasture near Chernobyl AFTER the disaster.  I guess there is a skewed sort of logic at work here; if they didn't survive we wouldn't either so they would not be missed.  I believe they survived though what future defects will be found I do not know.

Today I began to think perhaps I was looking in the wrong hay stack. What if it is the ghostly presence I felt was that of our own original horse?

Wikipedia has this to say: "Indigenous modern horses died out in the New World at the end of the Pleistocene, about 12 000 years ago, and thus were absent until the Spanish brought domestic horses from Europe, beginning in 1493. Escaped horses quickly established large wild herds." These escapees formed the herds of wild mustangs still found in Colorado and Wyoming today.

Another source states : "North America was the original home of the horse species. They evolved here, and thrived here for over 57 million years. The plant and animal communities of North American ecology evolved with horses playing an integral role. About 8,000 - 10,000 years ago, for reasons not yet fully understood (meteors, climate change, pandemic, and human hunting pressures are among the possibilities), horses are believed to have become extinct in the land of their origin. Luckily by that time they had migrated to Asia, where they spread into Europe and North Africa."

So my research has taken me full circle!  James Mitchener explains it eloquently: "Why did this animal that had prospered so in the Colorado desert leave his amiable homeland for Siberia? There is no answer. We know that when the horse negotiated the land bridge... he found on the other end an opportunity for varied development that is one of the bright aspects of animal history. He wandered into France and became the mighty Percheron, and into Arabia, where he developed into a lovely poem of a horse, and into Africa where he became the brilliant zebra, and into Scotland, where he bred selectively to form the massive Clydesdale. He would also journey into Spain, where his very name would become the designation for gentleman, a caballero, a man of the horse. There he would flourish mightily and serve the armies that would conquer much of the known world."  - James Michener

At the risk of sounding a little Woo Woo....(those of you who know me will be used to this) I can't help but wonder if somehow the Takhi are calling out to me and I am supposed to get involved with endeavours to save them?

But wait! Not so Woo Woo after all.  My research has led me to an article on the planned culling of the wild mustangs of Colorado. It brought forth a buried memory. See the link below.

And so the sad story repeats itself.  All that is beautiful and free must be felled by the bloody ax of what is profitable and convenient.

I know this tiny effort won't change anything but let me start here and maybe you will lend your voice too.

The following prose poem was carved out roughly and then underwent scrutiny and suggestions from an editor friend. Thanks Joanie for helping me arrive at this:

Frozen Fields

  

Undulate to the horizon

Like a galloping herd of Mongolian ponies.

Flanks the color of dried grasses

Necks fringed with bare black bushes

Wild and free

For now

Dedicated to the few, true wild ones 

And here is a stab at depicting this visually.  This is the progression from a photo on the net of two of these lovely animals.

I then transferred the photo to Corel Draw and using Wacom Bamboo Fun Tablet I began to add in other shapes to suggest a herd.

Added  the brushy manes that so remind me of bare trees, sprayed the green hills brown  

Still not happy.  Back to the drawing board.  I am going to crop out the bottom of the foreground.

The necks could have a gentler curve. And I could sharpen up some the of the foreground details but not today. I seem to want to put in one horse somewhere with an uplifted head, nostrils flaring.  You may see a further version of this.  For the moment it is as close as I can come to conveying what the fields have been whinnying to me as I pass.

Here are the links I mentioned above as my sources.
www.takhi.org/
wikipedia.org/wiki/Przewalski's_Horse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_horse
http://www.mustangs4us.com/historyA_pre-history.htm#PRE-HISTORY_OF_THE_HORSE:__
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/07/wild-horses-are-again-losing-their-home-on-the-range/242587/

The Young Moi

Here is the first whack at a portrait of Moi Enomenga.  By the way Moi rhymes with soy.

He is older in his photo than I remember him.  For some reason my painting has made him young again.

I am not totally satisfied with it and will be fiddling some more in the ensuing days.

There is another technique I want to learn whereby the painting is approached using layers... as near as I can understand it would be like having three or four transparencies on which you would paint various parts of the work.  Background on one, blocking out the painting on a second one, color blocking on a third and then details on the last one. When all the layers are merged you have a complete painting.

Naturally if you are receiving these emails or following this blog you cannot escape my telling you all about my adventures in that in the days to come!

But for Moi I simply saved the various stages before I continued.
So when that prissy mouth really bothered me I was able, painlessly, with the Wacom Bamboo Tablet to go in and make changes to my digital "painting". Now I am happy that the mouth is right. This really is the final one......I think.

The almost complete painting is here:

Here are the various stages I went through to get to the almost finished version above.

Background and original sketch

blocking in some preliminary color

Even out skin tone, deepen shadows

deeper shadows, war paint and moustache added

Finally add some feather details

Brown fleshy bits

Okay so it seems there were a few folks who thought that brown fleshy bit hanging down ...the one by the side of his face...was some sort of rubbery earring.  

I looked at some pictures of the other Huaorani and it seems only a few use the ontoka (a wooden disk).  I saw no one wearing them when I visited in the mid 1990’s so I wondered if they were only used on heydays and holidays.

I found a description of how the piercing is done by another author who visited with the Huaorani and holds them in high regard as do I.  I have written for permission to post it. 

Suffice it to say for now that it seems that the Huao prefer the pierced lobes to swing empty.

At any rate here is my updated version of the Warrior 

Warrior

Found this handsome profile in my picture book of the Huaorani tribe of the Yasuni National Forest in Ecuador.  You can see many posts about this fascinating tribe on my other blog  http://featofclay.blogspot.com/)

I am a little concerned about his lips.  May go back in tomorrow and masculinize them.

Here we go. I lost those luscious lips and made them more masculine. Also cropped out the extra background.

I think I have come a long way since the old gray man last week.  I am happy! But still learning.

Water element

My friend Joan sent me a wonderful power point presentation today with many undersea photos.  I loved the unusual points of view that the photographer used in many of the photos.  One of them struck me so much that I had to try and reproduce it on the tablet.

I don't have the computer savvy to cut and paste the original photo from the power point presentation but here is the link so you can enjoy the whole thing  http://www.daviddoubilet.com/

And here is my first rendering. I call it  Row

But when I was looking at the original again I saw that I had missed several important elements.  Here is Row 2
Can you see what I have added here?



  

Another day another few drawings

Real life intervened and I had some things to attend to yesterday. Fun things like having lunch with a bunch of old friends.  Plus I didn't want my obsession to fill up your inboxes.

A few of us, well more than a few of us, myself very high up on the list, are having trouble with our memories lately.

To overcome this problem in part I did a self portrait to help me recognize myself in the mirror.  In the past I have gotten quite a start when I catch a glimpse of this fat old lady in there.  Note that I have substituted hollowed out cheeks for wrinkles. Hey it's called artistic licence.

This one I did with "chalk."

YO

And this portrait of me was done by my friend Shell as she talked me through the use of the drawing tablet a couple of weeks ago. She was a lot kinder to me than I was to her.





Everything is grist for my mill. This garish number is from the Vesey's Seed Catalogue. It's called Climbing Lily

And last but certainly not least is TV personality and scourge of small claims court Judge Judy.  Her mother probably never told her that she was much prettier when she smiled.  She would have been wrong anyway. Judge Judy's occasional sharp-toothed smile sends fear into my heart.   

I also attempted some changes to the portrait of the old man I was wrestling with the other day. But now when I went to download them I don't think they got saved.  Try try again.

See you soon with more offerings. Be well.