Handsawing the night away

My partially finished canvas frame!

I love art classes, and working on art generally, but one of the big issues can be cost. I have a couple strays, but for our next project in class, we're going to need 3 canvases.

I'm not exactly swimming in money and I love a good project so I was searching Craigslist (online classifieds basically) and checking materials costs for stretching my own canvases. The most of expensive of these being canvas, but I found a great deal and bought an absolutely GIANT roll of it from a really lovely woman for very cheap because she was closing her studio. This meant, hoooooray, no worrying about canvas for a while!

I also sauntered down to the hardware store and picked up quite a few strips of 1x2's and quarter round.

There are these things called miter boxes which contain slots for a bunch of different angles, so you can saw within one of these slots and get, say, a 45 degree angle cut with much more ease than, how I'm doing it now! I am marking the angle and then just handsawing with wild abandon and I've definitely found there is some skill to the saw!

My frame looks a little Frankenstein's monster so far but I don't think anyone will notice once a canvas is stretched over it and I have the pride of having made it :)

Oh, and my knitting is coming along quite nicely too!

Painting Post

Slowly knitting through my sweater, well, actually I'm almost done with one side but, once again, school strikes terror in the heart of all my crafting.

In the mean time, I've been taking a painting course and it's been very challenging, but nice to have an allotted time in my schedule dedicated to art. I took oil painting lessons for quite a while when I was younger, probably from ages 10 - 13, somewhere in there and painted landscapes. I got sick of them and that's what my teacher specialized in, so at some point there came a very long stint without painting - I mean, until now!

I thought I'd share what I've made thus far! You can click on each to see them much larger:

This was in the first week, and it's my first time painting from observed forms, versus photographs.

And then this one is currently what I am working on, so it's still WIP (work in progress.) It's based on the idea of the word 'place' and mine is focused on a dream of a place once can just disappear into. The sky is still a bit funny, it got left behind for a while.

It's nice to get some stuff in the blog again and take a breather :)

-Nancy

Art Final

So, this is my last piece for my drawing class. I got really into gesture drawings, which was the last thing we were introduced to so I made my final to do with figures. I have mixed feelings about it so I took a picture of it hoping it might give me some separation from the piece.

Almost done with school!

Art Post

Etching of a Greek Goddess (In Progress)

close-up

I've been taking drawing this term mainly because drawing was always pretty much a large avoidance for me. I am trying to get back into art like I used to be and I figured I should confront drawing at some point. (Not to say there hasn't been any dragging of feet about it...) I suppose this isn't necessarily a drawing anymore as I am etching with a knife for the values, but I don't have much experience with shading or any of this and I'm pretty pleased with it so far, so I thought I'd share my progress on it.