Journaling With Calligraphers! June 6-7

Oh my! Where did this last month go!?!
A week of it was spent on vacation in Idaho with my brother (that's him at right). In addition to swinging in a hammock, helping prepare for a family party and larking about in the Owyhee Mts looking for fossils (in the craggy area above left), and lots of other good times, that journey included a 1065 mile road trip. Ouch!

Much of the rest of the month was consumed in an illustration job I'm doing on some interpretive signs showing a coho salmon stream, complete with coho, rocks, eggs, crayfish, assorted snails and other stuff. Plus a cottonwood tree and sedges on the bank. Ayeee!

And then, there is the online watercolor pencil class I'm taking with Kate Johnson with it's multiplicity of assignments (for those classmates who wanted to see the roadside flowers I sketched this Dirty Socks flower from, go to the end of this blog entry) and the 4th of July weekend (I went with Daniel and his mother up into the Siskiyou Mountains yesterday to admire the wildflowers, which are in their prime up high where it's cooler {it was 99° down here in the valley yesterday, and 100+ this last week!}). There wasn't much time to sketch, but I was wishing, wishing! I mean, look at that incredible flowered mountain meadow at left!

Oh, and I forgot to mention the consultation job I'm doing with the Oregon Trail Institute on a proposed publication. Additionally, I'm preparing a brand new workshop which debuts tomorrow at the North Mountain Park Nature Center, teaching Nature Observation and Journaling to kids ~ 12 in all. Of course, you never want to let on to participants that they're taking an untried workshop, so I shall have to appear as though I know what I'm doing....

So, I hope you delightful calligraphers who took my class on June 6 will forgive the lateness of this blog about our riotous and delicious class. I've been trying to get at it for quite some time!

Cynthia, from the local Calligraphers Guild contacted me to ask if I would teach a journaling class for the members. I was a little nervous about teaching calligraphers because, well, they can callig a whole lot better than I can ;^} and I thought they might be, well, you know, snooty about it. But Cynthia was SO nice via email, I decided I must be wrong ~ and was I ever! I don't think I've ever laughed as much in any other class I've taught.

Some students brought hand-made journals to work in, and by the end of the class had made quite a lot of headway in them. The cover of the one above is made of wire "hardware cloth" interwoven with textile strips, ribbon and yarn, a gorgeous thing.

Because the participants were already well acquainted, it was an uproarious class, full of jokes and laughter and experimentation, and the results were remarkable.

Although their calligraphy skills were well developed, and some had art skills and training, others were nevertheless beginners at art and not experienced with journaling. So I went ahead with the usual agenda, starting with the contour drawings of hands, then sketching a leaf, then drawing sea shells.

The next step was designing attractive pages using the freeform shapes I brought to class, and writing descriptive paragraphs about their shells. Things progressed quickly from there with the introduction of the "Fun Font" for adding titles, then we stopped for a break and critique, a cuppa tea or coffee, and ruminations about their progress.

I think because they are calligraphers, they are used to working with art tools, which gave them a distinct edge over the average beginning artist. I passed out the watercolor pencils to add color, and soon they were coloring their shells with great relish, while I trotted around the group offering suggestions, praise, and advice about problem areas.

[Did I mention that when I arrived at our workshop in the local library meeting room I was greeted with my very own calligraphy name tag? THAT's a first ~ I'm usually the one handing out name tags!]

Beginning artists worked slowly and cautiously, while more experienced ones sailed ahead enthusiastically, adding color to their hand and leaf contour excercises. I was delighted to watch their experiments in mixing colors and trying out watercolor pencil techniques.

By the end of the day, they had turned out some beautiful journal pages. Not all were totally finished, but that's the beauty of journaling ~ one can always add to or finish things later, but in the meantime, they still look nice. Here are the first day's results:
















DAY 2
At the end of the first day, I had asked them to bring ephemera to glue into their journals the next day. Few people manage to remember this the second day, so I was gobsmacked when they brought in BOXES of ephemera. It seems that calligraphers like to play around with stuff like this, and they even scrounge around at yard sales to find goodies. I had brought leaves pressed in my little microwave plant press, so our table was a veritable cornucopia of ephemera! They also brought art books and journals and other delights and examples to share. I didn't get a chance to look at everything, alas!

Our lone male student had assigned himself the homework of producing his own Fun Font, and he displayed it with quite understandable pride. I finally managed to get this unruly bunch seated for the writing session, and soon they were hard at work crafting creative paragraphs and haiku, sketching new subjects with great skill, and studying the placement of various bits of ephemera on their pages.

After lunch I introduced decorative borders and initial caps, so the afternoon was a riot of sketching, writing, snipping, gluing, flower-pressing and creating imaginative borders around pages and between elements on the pages.

I think I probably learned nearly as much as they did in this class. My usual classes lean more toward hesitant beginners, so watching these folks at work was quite entertaining. (Don't get me wrong -- I LOVE teaching beginners, helping them open doors they didn't even know had doorknobs on 'em. But this was fun, too.)

In order to keep from interrupting their trains of thought, I tried to keep myself busy doing their assignment along with them (sort of) with examples of borders, shaped creative paragraph, ephemera, labels, haiku, Fun Font and color. The only thing lacking, since I was trying to squeeze so much on the page, is any sort of sophisticated "design." But it's a fun page to look at, and it was GREAT fun to make.

The students shared their paragraphs and haiku with the class, to everyone's delight, and we had a couple of critiques during the afternoon. Since some students were moving pretty fast, a few extra journal pages were created, one on black paper:


I left the afternoon journal page subjects wide open, and some interesting things popped out. There was even gold-leafing (this was done by one of the students, who, at the end of the day, demonstrated for us how to apply the tissue-thin gold)!

Here are some of the products of Day 2. I muffed Kathy's the photo of page -- it came out so blurry I couldn't use it. You can see it in progress here at right. I'm sorry Kathy ~ it was a lovely page, with ferns, pressed plants, and a really excellent creative paragraph.



So here are the second day's masterpieces, minus Kathy's:
















Cool, huh? My thanks to the Calligraphers Guild students who made this such a fun class!

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And here, as promised to Kate Johnson's online watercolor pencil students, is the wild rock garden south of Bend, Oregon, and the sketch and photo I made there. The mosquitoes were siphoning off my blood as I sketched, so I only got some of the flower heads in before I caved and ran for the car, but I sketched more from the screen of my digital camera the next day. I didn't add them all, as you can see, as the number can be variable and I needed to finish the drawing for class.

About that slideshow....

If you were keeping track, last week you'll recall that I had a really spiff slideshow up on my blog, and was trying to figure out how to move it to the right panel as a permanent display. I made the slideshow at Slide.com, and I had read their permissions and conditions more carefully than I usually do, but was still caught by surprise when I clicked on one of my images to enlarge it and encountered this invitation: "Grab the code below to add this picture to any web site, like Craigslist, Myspace, Xanga or your blog!," it said.

I don't want to seem naive here. I KNOW you can right-click on most pictures (ones which haven't been purposely protected from that) to copy and snitch them. I've borrowed a few myself to use temporarily as resource materials when creating an illustration. I've never copied someone else's work or photo straight across, of course, because that's an infringement of their copyright, but I have referred to a borrowed photo to get anatomy or color correct on a piece I was creating.

Actually, I would expect an occasional lift/borrow of a photo of mine. But to see an INVITATION to take it really threw me. It seemed to be a message to any viewer from ME saying I WANTED people to take the pictures, which is not my intention at all since my only purpose was to use the slideshow as a gallery to show potential clients my style and scope.

So I took it down. If anyone who reads this can guide me to the part of the Slide.com agreement that states they plan to do that, I'd really like to read it. I don't have time to plow through that lengthy agreement again just now, but I sure wonder if I missed a paragraph or something -- or if they just do it "because they can."

Nuff ranting, I suppose.

I just finished a two session workshop on nature journaling this afternoon, and I'll be posting the blog about the class (great fun!) within the week, I expect. They produced some really excellent work.

Nature Journaling & Sketching ~ October 3, 2008

My Guilt Index is off the charts. The last time I wrote, on August 25, I was getting ready to promote my workshops, create a "pitch" letter to persuade workshop organizers that they need my workshops, and start sending them out. And here it is October 3 and I haven't written a bloggy word for over a month! Wha' hoppened!

Well, for one thing, The Southern Swamp Explorer is now Hot Off the Press and I've been filling and shipping out pre-orders all week. The rest of the month between the last blog and now, I've been crafting my workshop promotion scheme and creating my two new workshops (a re-do of my Nature Sketching Workshop ~ see below). And in honor of the Book Coming Out, Daniel took me to the theater, for which we dressed to the teeth just for fun (that's us at right)(no, I am not a midget, Daniel is 6'4"). Remember to click on images to see a bigger picture!

And in that time, I actually did what I planned, and I'm very pleased with my first efforts. Here's the remake of my workshop webpage with lead-ins to the information sheets I made up (just click on "more about this workshop" under each heading). They're colorful with artwork, with enough description to pique interest, etc. In the packet along with this two-page sheaf, I send my business card, my Irene Brady brochure, an example of a customized workshop in case my format doesn't exactly fit their needs, and a cover letter. I've sent out about eight of them now.

A week after sending them, I send followup letters asking if they received it and offering a link to my workshop webpage and another link to the workshop descriptions I've sent so they can download more in case they want to run a workshop past their board. I have gotten responses from nearly all the people I sent them too, with assurances that they are interested and they will keep me in mind.

That means little, natch, until someone actually engages you, though. And even THAT doesn't always work out. You may remember that I was all charged up about my upcoming workshop at The Oregon Trails Interpretive Center? Unfortunately, (and not their fault) their promotional campaign fell through when the people that were doing the promotion had to close down their operation and took down the webpage where people were supposed to sign up for the workshop..... But our contract said that if the workshop were to be cancelled, it was to be rescheduled within the coming year. So although I'm not going to be doing that workshop next week ~ darn ~ I will do it later on, as soon as we can set a date.

In the meantime, I've totally re-vamped my 3-day Nature Sketching workshop into two 2-day workshops: "Nature Sketching Basics/Natural Landscape Basics," and "Nature Sketching Details/Nature Sketching With Color." I'll be teaching the first run of this new Basic class this weekend (starting tomorrow), and the first run of the more advanced Detail class on October 25-26.

Last weekend I taught a Journaling Workshop at the Siskiyou Field Institute, utilizing their amazing Darlingtonia(carnivorous pitcher plants!) fen. That's a fen at left.
SFI is a great organization which supports and presents all kinds of art, nature and science oriented classes and workshops, mostly centered on the Siskiyou Bioregion (this is the area between Grants Pass, Oregon, and the Pacific Coast. If you'd like to learn a bit about it, you can read up on it at the Siskiyou Field Institute website.

We had the class in the main classroom, and shared conversation, laughs and space in the kitchen while we prepared our own meals; and slept in tents, bedrooms in the main building, or bunks in the yurt (I stayed in the yurt, and it was a delight).

While this workshop was similar to my other journaling workshops, instead of learning how to paint an apple or gourd with watercolor pencils, we drew and colored pitcher plants, Darlingtonia californica, also called Cobra Lilies. Some of the drawings/paintings turned out really excellent ~ and we all had a great time.

It is at the very end of the season for the plants. They've gathered up all their nutrients for the year and many have already dried, crumpled and faded to cinnamon red or brown, so the institute had no qualms about bringing a few about-to-fold specimens inside for us to draw.

I went out with the students to visit the fen the first afternoon (I've been there before, to take pictures for the students to use in class) and when they sat right down and started sketching, I gave advice here and there, but mostly left them to experience the wonderful ambience and journal about it.

I generally don't take the students out in the field during workshops. Students tend to spread out to find a good scene to sketch, so if I help one student, the others don't get the benefit of the teaching. So I taught in the classroom from 9:30 to 2:30, then they sketched in the afternoons, between 2:30 and 7:30 ~ plenty of time. And were they ever intense! One evening when I went through the classroom at 9:30pm, several were still hard at work working on their journals! Wow!

Here are some classroom scenes, with most of my ten students (one had to leave early). Lynn, below right, is experimenting with some "fun fonts" which I designed expressly to jazz up workshop pages. Kristi, below left, is preparing to add a yellow wash to her cobra lily drawing. The first steps are the most daunting, then it's just fun.

As usual, there wasn't enough time to really finish the watercolor pencil paintings (that could take DAYS), but being able to take home the color photo printouts (from photos I'd taken on the earlier visit) was a big bonus, allowing the students the possibility of improving and finishing the painting after the workshop was over.

But even with the time limitations, there were a number of beautiful paintings created, and other works that showcased beginning students' remarkable progress over a three day period.

While I've mostly shown artwork here, we actually spent about a third of the time working with writing, poetry, haiku, and lettering, plus experiments with "ephemera," things one glues or tapes onto a page. You can see Karin's example, below, of a journalist's trick to rescue a good painting on a "bad" page by simply cutting it out and gluing it on another page where you can do what you want with it.

Andrew, at right, discovered how effective bright, vibrant colors can be in a composition. As usual, I'm putting up a "rogue's gallery" of the students' work ~ they chose what they wanted to display. My students ran the gamut from a beginner's "I don't know if I can draw anyting" to a more advanced student who said "I draw pretty well but I want to improve and to learn about the watercolor pencils."














I'm just barely getting this page up in time since I have another class starting tomorrow! Whoosh! Time flashes through like a bolt of lightning!

If you click on an image, you can see it larger, and if you right-click on the image, you will see the students' first names, with their permission, of course.

Tomorrow morning I begin a new workshop, with, if I remember correctly, eight students. I can hardly wait!