Drawing while breastfeeding :-)

Well, about those simple paintings I was talking about doing; I did one last night!
I knew, basically, that I wanted to attempt a really simple style -- a kind of "naive" childlike style of drawing with no worrying about perspective or realism. Just color and fun. The way I used to work was rewarding after the fact, but I'd spend days working on a drawing with reference photos and overlays, trying to get everything just right. It wasn't fun. Then I'd spend weeks oil painting it. That was kind of fun, but it took too long trying to achieve a degree of realism.

So yesterday I sat down to do some sketches, hoping to find some "naive" style that I would like -- but I couldn't really make my brain do it! It's harder than it looks! I wasn't getting anything I liked. Then Clementine woke up and wanted to be fed, so I had her in my lap, and I continued drawing, only this time I had a boppy and a baby on my lap, so I had the paper way out to the side of me on the sofa and I could barely see it. Still, I sketched, and . . . I liked those drawings! Something about the process encouraged looseness that is not my usual style! It was fun! So last night, after Clementine was put down to bed (though she woke up repeatedly and Jim and I took turns coaxing her back to sleep), I painted this. Here's a detail:
It's not a work of staggering genius or anything, but it was just what I wanted to do: a simple, colorful painting, quickly executed.

And since I spend a lot of time nursing, that's a lot of drawing time :-) I got to thinking about whether writing in that way might loosen me up the way it did with drawing. Maybe. I have some picture book ideas I might play with while nursing: notebook on the sofa beside me, messy writing. When you want to try a new style, it can help to change your set-up. If you write on a computer, try hand-writing, maybe with a purple pen. You know?

Oh, and I still had to fight my natural tendencies with the painting. When I got to my studio desk with the drawing and faced the decisions of turning it into a painting, I began in my usual old way, which was to painstakingly transfer the drawing onto a prepared canvas. Ugh. As soon as I started doing that, it wasn't fun anymore. So I stopped, and redrew the drawing on the canvas instead, knowing it wouldn't come out exactly the same, but encouraging any new wonkiness, because that's what I want, after all. And it was way more fun that way! So, as the painting expresses, I'm pretty HAPPY :-) It was nice to be putting color on a canvas again!

Oh yeah. One more thing . . .

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Awww . . .

Photography & Paintings -- creative urges

Earlier this year I'd made it a goal to learn how to use my camera -- to be able to take it off the fully auto settings and get more interesting, sophisticated pictures. So far, I haven't followed up on that. Well. I did order a DVD instructional manual for my camera, but what I found, watching it twice, was that I need to understand the basic principles of photography first, before I can understand how to manipulate them on my camera. You know: aperture, shutter speed, white balance, etc. I got a little confused :-(

Last week I was emailing with a woman who was in our birthing class; she's had her baby too, and she sent a link to the local photographer they'd hired to take newborn pictures of him. Well, I don't come from a family that has ever had studio portraits done. Ever. It didn't even occur to me to do this, even though our birthing class teacher had given us all vouchers for the photographer, for a very nice discount. I guess I thought I could take pictures that were "good enough." Well. As soon as I saw the photographer's blog, I realized the drastic difference between professional portraits and my snapshots. My oh my. I immediately contacted the photographer to hire her to take some pictures before Clementine gets much bigger, but beyond that, it made me want more than ever to follow through on my goal of becoming a better photographer!

So I signed up for a night class for this semester. Yay! My dad is going to take it with me, and I'm really excited! It's a basics of digital photography class, for SLR, covering all those things I need to learn: f-stop and depth of field, shutter speed, ISO, etc. Perfect. I'm sure I will be posting *assignments* here over the next few months.

I'm also feeling a real urgency to do a little painting. It's been so long! I used to paint daily, but I can't recall the last time I uncapped a tube of oil paint. Cheap craft paint, yes, and that's not nothing. Anyway, my old "style" and techniques were way too painstaking for my current life style . . .

. . . and it's been long enough now since I've worked that way that I think it's feasible I could begin anew, with an all-new style, something much simpler and more suited to the minutes in the day I have available. First step: get a work station set up in the [newly decluttered] studio, with some small canvasses prepped, some ink, some acrylics and collage materials.

Really. I'm going to do it. Like, one-hour paintings instead of one-month paintings like I used to do. I'll show you :-)

(And by the way, I'm writing with a sleeping baby in my lap again, just like in the photo from the last post. It's becoming a thing. Not ergonomic, but very cute!)