For Illustration Friday: Heroes

Read about My Summer Vacation Below

About my Summer Vacation

This is a picture of my vacation trip well it doesn’t look anything like my vacation but it is a fun colorful picture and I like it and my vacation was fun and colorful and I liked it so the picture can represent what it does not look like. We went to the black river. My sister said she knew that I would not go a whole summer without getting in a river and she was right. The black river is my favorite place in the world. The river as it flows through granite rock is crystal clear and the river is very shallow and can be walked across seeing the bottom the whole way. We played on the river for two days and I loved it. The weather was hot enough to really enjoy being in the water. When we weren’t in the water we ate lunch at a little family owned restaurant in a huge 100 year-old brick building that use to be Ursland Academy for girls before it moved to St. Louis. The restaurant doesn’t look really like my picture either but we had very good home cooked roast beef sandwiches on home made wheat buns and for dessert we had caramel pecan cinnamon rolls that were so huge we didn’t even mind sharing them. After we ate we wandered around the antique store that was also in the old building and found lots of things to point out to each other and to make us remember something from growing up or something that our grandparents use to have or that we had seen somewhere before. Don found a very old dusty picture of St. Frances Cabrini, and since St. Frances Cabrini is the name of the grade school from which Julie just graduated we bought the picture to give to the school. Another day we went to Caledonia and stopped at an antique and candy store that was in a 100 year-old general store building. The store had a tin ceiling and a promenade for the second story, just a second story walkway really so that you could look down into the first floor. I thought most of the antiques were over priced and was just browsing while Julie took pictures but Don found a bowler hat, a derby made by Stetson and he looked very good in it actually, although I had absolutely no idea where he could ever wear it. It wasn’t cheap and I was about to ask him where he would ever wear it but I could tell he wanted it very much, so I just ask him if he was going to get it, and he said yes. While on vacation I brought Everybody’s Autobiography by Gertrude Stein to read. This happened because I went to the used bookstore to get a paperback, since I didn’t want to take a library book and possibly damage it. In the bookstore this book looked interesting. I had never read anything that Gertrude Stein had written and this is not even her famous book, “the Autobiography of Alice B Toklas”. But the book I bought was the first book of hers I read. At first I did not know how to read Gertrude Stein. I am a very slow reader and I always have to understand the meaning of a sentence before I go on. It took me several pages to realize that there were many sentences that I wasn’t going to understand and to just keep reading and every once in a while something would make sense. Gertrude Stein wrote that she only writes about 30 minutes a day. I wonder if I could write 30 minutes a day, not trying to make any story or even any sense just write. I wonder if I would do it, or if I would only do it for a few days and then quit. I also noticed that Gertrude Stein doesn’t seem to like commas very much at first I thought that she did not use them at all but later I found one so I think that occasionally she does use them. I always over use commas so I am thinking about being influenced by Gertrude Stein and doing away with my commas, or not. I am certainly not ready to do away with capitalization like my cousin does when she emails. I do not like when people do not capitalize I. It seems to me like I is extraordinarily important, I’d capitalize me, if I could get away with it, I do not like when people type I and do not capitalize it.

The last night of the vacation I could not sleep. I had a sore throat. At about 2:30 in the morning I went into the front room of the cabin and made a cup of tea and was lying on the couch reading the Gertrude Stein book when Don woke up. He asked me what was the matter and I told him. He went back into the other room of the cabin and came back wearing the Derby Hat. He was wearing just the Derby Hat and his gym shorts that he sleeps in. He then started doing Curly Howard, “drop the vernacular, it’s not a vernacular, it’s a Derby.” It is quite something to see Don, in nothing but shorts and a Derby doing Curly Howard. And my vacation was just that, quite something.

Second drawing for IF theme Black and White

This is the illustration I use for my buisness card since is prints so well in black and white.

Illustration Friday Theme: Summer

Ancient Digital Map

Created for Illustration Friday's theme: DIGITAL

Title: Ancient Digital Map

Medium: Painter 8 using a Graphire tablet

Last week for Illustration Friday’s theme, Envy, I was influenced by the amazing work of artist Wassily Kandinsky. This week thanks to Ian, another IF participant, I have learned about the artist John Wolseley and his worked influenced my piece for Illustration Friday’s theme: Digital.

Gallery of John Wolseley’s work at: http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/1/John_Wolseley/

When I first read the “Digital” theme, I thought, WOW this is great, everything I draw, I do digitally, but instead of portraying “Digital” I wanted to create digitally and I wanted to use a lot of the brushes and pens from Corel Painter 8 that I don’t always use. Again I thank IF for the nudge to try something out of my usual routine. And participating in IF is how I learned about the artist John Wolseley. I find that I really enjoy Illustration Friday, seeing other artists work is a great energizer, and it has certainly encouraged me to stretch out of my usual.

<> Below is some additional information on how I drew this piece.

Drawing in Painter 8 I started with an 850 by 1100 pixel canvas resolution 300. I used both the digital watercolor brushes and the “regular” watercolor brushes for the color, diffusion and wet fringe were set high and the opacity was set very low. The marks are made with the digital calligraphy pens and the regular pen tools, including barbed wire pen, nervous pen, leaky pen and calligraphy pen 25. Digital Pastels were also used to add some color and S-F shattered was used to break some of that color up. I ended with 18 layers most of the layers are gel layers. I enjoy using Painter 8 very much and if you have any questions please email me, jlddavis@charter.net. Best Regards, Jacque.