NaNoWriMo this Spring!

I just joined Camp NaNoWriMo!  Yah, I love art and writing and cello music and dogs - what could make a life better than all those things?  Well, how about having a few of YOU join me at Camp??  My Camp name is jaymethunt and I'm writing a fantasy fiction book.  I really enjoy magic, dragons, fairies, and all that; but I also have a strong love of battles, too.

http://pixabay.com/en/book-love-the-reading-romanticism-58942/

y favorite author is Robert Jordan, who is now deceased, but like JRR Tolkein, he wrote books that are just GREAT stories, full of characters you want to root for and help win.  You cry when they don't and you bawl your head off when one of them dies.  THOSE are great stories.

Do you have a great (or even a good or not-so-good) story inside of you?  Want to join me at Camp and write with me?  You have to be 13 or older to attend camp this year.  They don't have a camp for younger authors in the spring yet.  But if you're younger than 13, you can start preparing now for YWP NaNoWriMo!  Just because you can't actually get to writing your novel now (and still get credit for your story for NaNo), doesn't mean you can't do a few things now, like:

• Write your outline
• Write a few stories that you're not going to enter into NaNo, as warm-ups!
• Read about the snowflake method to get a story written
• Peruse Plinky to get some ideas for a story you never even considered writing

ost people try to reach the recommended fifty thousand words for the month.  I've tried that and just not been able to hit it.  I've tried for a couple of years now.  November is just too busy for me!  So, I thought I'd give it another shot in April (though you can also try in June) and set my goal at thirty thousand words.  It's *just* 1000 words per day, right?  I can do that.  I think.  Hehehe.  Maybe I can only do it if I get to count all my blogging (personal one at jaymehunt.com and this one) and ATCsJr.com posts...  I know I write that much daily right now.  The trick will be to do it all without dropping the ball on ATCsJr and my own site!  Last year, I did drop the ball on my site and this one was just beginning again, so it doesn't really count.  Hehehe.

Oh, yah.  I'm using this tool to get it done:  http://scriffon.com

Anyway, consider this a personal invitation from me to you to write a novel in April!  Hope to see you there...


ey!  We should just pick a month and call it NaATCMo.  lol.

100 Things to Draw When You Are Bored: 2012 Edition

Wonderstrange.com has a great, fun list of 100 Things to Draw When You Are Bored: 2012 Edition...  You've just got to take a look!  Here's a sneak peek:


1.   Zombies on parade

2.   A Very Bad Fairy

3.   Rejected Beanie Babies

4.   Goldilocks and The Three Penguins

5.   Thursday Addams

6.   Vampires in a mall

7.   Rapunzel’s first hair cut

8.   Spock in love

9.   Pencils have feelings, too

10.  Marie Antoinette drunk

11.  When shoes attack

12.  Goth prom

13.  Ice Princess in the summer

14.  Mr. Potato Arm

Magazine Beads & Charms

It's not ATCs, but it's still a sweet idea.  Part recycled, part upcycled stuff and all cool.  Make some beads and charms out of magazines!

Pretty cool looking bracelet that they teach you to make...

Popcorn Drawing

From a great post here: http://www.teachkidsart.net/popcorn-drawing-observation-imagination/

Popcorn Drawing — Observation & Imagination

by Cheryl Trowbridge on July 2, 2012 in Colored Pencil, Drawing, Imagination, Lessons, Process, Subject

Have you ever looked at a cloud and seen an ani­mal or some other ran­dom image?  Most every­one has used their imag­i­na­tion to “find” things in clouds, and pop­corn offers this same cre­ative expe­ri­ence!  This is a great les­son for 5th grade and up.  Make sure you cre­ate a sam­ple to illus­trate the steps… a pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words here!  After doing this les­son, your stu­dents (and you!) will never look at a piece of pop­corn (or a bear sit­ting on a rock, wear­ing a red ban­dana!) the same way again!

Mate­ri­als:

• 9x12 black con­struc­tion paper
• pop­corn (at least 2 pieces per student)
• white craft glue (Aleene’s Tacky Glue is my favorite)
• white char­coal pen­cil or Pris­ma­color draw­ing pencil
• Magic Rub eraser
• 9x12 trac­ing paper
• No.2 graphite pencil
• fine point marker, any color except black (I like to use a col­ored “F” Sharpie or a Cray­ola water base marker.)
• 9x12 white con­struc­tion paper

Direc­tions:

1. Pass out 2 (or more) pieces of pop­corn to each stu­dent.  Let them choose one to draw and one (or more) to eat!

2. Squirt a dime size blob of glue near the top of your 9x12 black paper. (I went around and did this as stu­dents were “exam­in­ing” their pop­corn for the most inter­est­ing side to draw!)  Place pop­corn on the glue.

3. Use a white pen­cil to draw the pop­corn (as large as pos­si­ble) below the pop­corn you glued to the paper.  Press harder on the light­est areas and less hard in the shad­owed areas. (It can be help­ful to make a value scale using a white pen­cil on black paper to prac­tice mak­ing a range of val­ues. Explain to stu­dents that this is the oppo­site of work­ing with a graphite pen­cil, where press­ing harder pro­duces a darker value. You may also need to review con­tour draw­ing prin­ci­ples if you haven’t done any obser­va­tion draw­ing in a while.) 

4. Then, lay trac­ing paper on top of your white on black draw­ing.  Use a col­ored marker to trace the out­side shape (con­tour) and any impor­tant lines on the inside.

5. Next, turn your trac­ing paper over to the back.  You’ll be able to see your col­ored marker lines through it.  Trace over the top of these lines with a reg­u­lar No.2 graphite pen­cil.  Press hard so your lines will be nice and dark.

6. Now, lay your trac­ing paper, pen­cil side down, on top of your white paper.  Trace over your marker lines using your No.2 pen­cil.  If you used a col­ored marker for step #4, it will be easy to see where you’ve traced and where you still need to!

7. Lift off the trac­ing paper and you’ll see a faint copy of your draw­ing on the white paper.  Turn your paper dif­fer­ent direc­tions and use your imag­i­na­tion to find an inter­est­ing image in your pop­corn, if you haven’t already!

8. Finally, use col­ored pen­cils to fin­ish your draw­ing, adding any details you need so your viewer can see what you saw in your popcorn!

Art Beat for Kids (Newspaper)

There's a new place to get news about art, creativity, project ideas, and lessons!  It's a newspaper updated once a week.  You can subscribe to it so it's just there in your inbox waiting for you every Friday!  Take a look at it at the Art Beat for Kids' site!

If you know of a cool site that specializes in Art and Creativity, please let me know so I can add it to the newspaper...  The more we work together, the better that resource will be.  :)

Inspirational Dr. Seuss

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.  
Fantasy is a 
necessary ingredient
in living,  It's a way of 
looking at life through the

wrong end

of a telescope.”

~ Dr. Seuss

Dr. Seuss is inspirational to the art community on so many levels.  All his artwork is so "out-of-bounds" in colors that are unexpected and bold.  Even his wonderful trees, from the Lorax, are spectacular in their design and color.  They don't look like our trees at all, but when anyone who's ever seen Dr. Seuss' work looks at his lovely puffy fluffy trees, you can tell exactly what they are.

His fish are the same way.  Last I knew, our fish were pretty sleek and, forgive me for saying it, but slippery and slimy looking.  They have eyeballs on either side of their heads, for the most part.  They are NOT endearing, in my opinion.  But Dr. Seuss' fish look a little like puppies.  They seem to have fur and look nice to pet.  They're friendly in his books, rather than aloof and non-committal.  Who could resist such "fish?"

Art gives the beholder and the creator a whole new world to create *ANYTHING* your minds can imagine.  I've heard of people calling their imagination their "image machine."  I really think that shows through very clear in the art of Dr. Seuss.




And here's a little interesting tidbit about how to say Seuss properly.  Found at the official Dr. Seuss site at Random House books, his publisher, and it confirmed this quiet fact:

“If you want to pronounce the name the way his family did, say Zoice, not Soose. Seuss is a Bavarian name, and was his mother’s maiden name: Henrietta Seuss’s parents emigrated from Bavaria (part of modern-day Germany) in the nineteenth century. Seuss was also his middle name.”

Son of Man: Hiding in Plain Sight

"Everything we see hides another thing; we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, that it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well."
	- Rene Magritte

Surrealist Rene Magritte's (1898-1967)  Son of Man

Rene Magritte's art seems to point a silent finger to things we'd rather not recognize.  In Son of Man (a self portrait, by the way), he stands in front of a low brick wall with a sea and clouds beyond the wall.  But there's an apple floating in front of his face.  It forces a question of what each of us is hiding, right there in plain sight, where everyone can see it.

Apples, in Christianity, symbolizes the forbidden fruit.  It generally represents knowledge.  However, knowledge isn't particular about good and bad.  So, what does the apple in his painting mean?

The Lovers

Several of his creations show people doing normal things, but their faces are obscured, such as in The Lovers.  They're hiding themselves from the world, from each other, from the eyes of the artist...

ATC Creation Process

I've been working on a 3D sort of ATC today:

It was a fun process, too!  I used recycled material throughout the whole thing.  The top piece is made from the top center of a #6 plastic clam shell that our Russian cakes came in.

I used Sharpie markers to make my design.

Then I cooked it in the toaster oven!  Yup, ~275 degrees (F) for about 6 minutes on the parchment paper seen in the picture above.  It shriveled all up and curled around itself.  I had to flatten it back out a little and put something heavy on it to sort of get it to lay down again.

Then I covered a recycled cardboard ATC card (I just cut it out from the bottom of small package) with this flashing leftovers:

Then I put a neat little design in the flashing and lined up the plastic:

I used E-6000 glue to fix them to each other and added a few final swirls to the metal bits...  I'm quite pleased with how it turned out!

I call it Emotions.  The depth and movement, darkness and light...  It's even got a well in the middle of the plastic - a well of emotions.  :)

Vincent Van Gogh, Thoughts & Contemplations

I had absolutely no idea that Van Gogh did watercolors.  As it turns out, he did a LOT of watercolor works.  I suspect that it was used because it's an easy travel companion; you just need your colors, canvas, some water, and a brush and you're ready to hit the trail.

Starry Night

This is one of my favorite pieces by Van Gogh.  I love the way he did the moon and stars, 

as well as the way he shows the wind on that cold night.  

I can almost feel the need to wrap up tight and close...  Can't you?

Most Impressionistic Artists rather liked painting in the great outdoors, so I can see where watercolors would be a nice, light, easy travelling sort of companion for them.  It gives choices for color rather than being stuck with just a sketch or dragging bottles of ink around or turpentine and oils.  I think the turpentine and oils would be the most bother, myself.

Irises

This one is my absolute favorite that Van Gogh ever did.  The bunch 

of purple blue irises surrounding the single white iris off to the left looks 

like it could have right out of my Mom's garden.  Irises are 

my favorite flower anyway, but that single white iris just reminds me 

of the feeling you'd get when you find your Soulmate, some how.

Impressionistic Art is one of my favorite styles for the simple reason that it makes me *feel* when I see it.  It makes the world breathe and feels like there's just a small moment captured when the wind is dancing between the petals of the flowers and the leaves giggle from getting tickled by the bugs just underneath them, where we can't see them in the picture.

Winner Takes All game: Dogs

This month's WTA (Winner Takes All) game features Dogs.  I love dogs and often doodle comic strips about them in my journals.  A few years ago, I was doodling Dogs into famous art works, like Michaelangelo's "Creation of Man," Leonardo DaVinci's "Vitruvian Man," and a few others.  Then we went over to the local school and used chalk to put them all over their sidewalks.  It was a lot of fun, but I'd never done one of those as an ATC until this game.  I'm really pleased with how it turned out!

I chose to do a spoof on "Girl with a Pearl Earring" by Johannes Vermeer.  This is a picture of the original:

It's striking and the way the girl is looking at you evokes some pretty strong feelings, don't you think?  The colors are pure and you can almost feel the fabric.  I think it's the contrast between the humble everyday servant clothes and the pearl, however, that made this painting as famous as it is.

Here's my  version of it, "Poodle with the Pearl Earring":

I used oil pastels, water colors, sparkly water colors, and micron pen (just for the eye details) to get it done. Where it's certainly not to the standard of the original, I am most pleased with how it turned out.  I wish you could see it in person, as the scan just doesn't do it justice.  The "pearls" on my Poodle are built up water color, so they're 3D and that makes them really stand out.  So, it's not a lifelike Poodle or anything, but it does sort of evoke the same feeling as the original.  I probably should have added more shading to her back, but it's difficult to know where to stop that with fur!

I was going to make this with a black poodle, but decided that probably wouldn't work so well with such a dark background.  It would have to be named something more like "Floating Pearl Earring," then.  Hahaha!