One project I’m planning for this upcoming fall is creating educational videos to encourage homeschool students to do place-based science drawing. I’ll be posting the videos on Vimeo and linking them to this blog.
Here’s one I created last spring for local elementary students: Comparing two tree species
And here’s the finished sketch page:
If you’re a teacher and are interested in learning more about my project… or if you have ideas or requests for a particular subject… please contact me!
This spring, when several school art residencies got cancelled, I put together some sketching videos to accompany local teachers’ distance-education lessons. I enjoyed learning about the process, and decided to make a video for an older audience. I wanted to try to put the viewer in “sketch position,” seeing the drawing develop with the subject in view, in motion, with ambient noises and no narration to clutter the process.
Here’s the sketch page I did for the first video:
And here’s a link to the film on Vimeo. It’s only about 3.5 minutes long; the whole sketch page took me about 20 minutes in real time but I sped up the drawing process.
I decided to experiment with semi-abstract painting. My idea was to meld two different natural views by taking the composition from one, and imposing the color palette from another. This one takes the pattern of wave-washed sand and imposes the color palette of Nevada sandstone canyons.
It’s springish here in coastal Alaska, which means a shifting soundscape. Varied thrushes are singing steadily now, and juncos and wrens have stepping up their song output. Our nesting raven neighbors chat with each other and holler mysterious epithets at us.
Some of the sounds I’m most looking forward to haven’t quite arrived. For example, we won’t likely hear the calls of sandhill cranes for another couple of weeks. But I did finish a painting I started last fall, in anticipation of that thrill.
In honor of the place I am visiting, here are five fruits that are “ripe” locally right now.
Happy to have participated in Inktober!
Banjo Woman rides again!
“Catch.”
Played it fairly straight with GNSI’s “invertebrate.”
“Ride” (inktober.com).
Of course this is not what one should do in the presence of manta rays, but Banjo Woman is an exception.
“Coat”
GNSI prompt was “anthropology.” I just happened to stumble into a cultural festival celebrating traditional Pacific Rim tattoo art. There was a workshop on lauhala weaving, so today’s inktober is in honor of the kind culture-bearers who taught me.
