Tag Archives: colored pencils

Artist Date – Indianapolis Museum of Art

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My friend Jem and I went on a bit of an Artist Date, as prescribed by The Artist’s Way. I was feeling the need for some inspiration, something to cause my brain to make different waves. I took a day off work, and in the morning we went to a coffee shop and worked on our drawings:

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Then in the afternoon we went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art:

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Unfortunately, while they did have some cool kinetic sculpture (including work by Alexander Calder, the inventor of the mobile!!!!), those were in areas where I was not allowed to take pictures. I was able to shoot this wall, which is kind of cool, if not a seminal work by the originator of the mobile:

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Fair enough, the other stuff is in my head anyway, where it will do the most good!

The whole idea behind an Artist Date is to take the art half of yourself (or maybe it’s the art 7/8 or the art 3/4, whatever – you decide the exact equation) out and treat it well, show it a good time. In return, the art portion of you will grow and flourish and start helping you do really awesome stuff. It’s also part of a practice called “refilling the well,” where you replenish some of the energy needed to run the creative engine inside of you.

There were honestly some kind of scary moments in the museum, like when I realized I was writing down tons of names of sculptors, but almost nothing about photographers. What does that mean? Does it mean I’m not going to be doing photography? Does it mean I’m supposed to be a sculptor? Does it mean…well, what DOES it mean? I mean, that lamp, the one with all the brass on it – how do you do that? And those clocks! The clocks with the copper, brass, and steel faces! Those were gorgeous! How…can someone make a living like that? How do you make something so precise and so gorgeous? Many questions, no immediate answers. I guess that’s part of the price of admission with this stuff. (Actually, the IMA is free, which means my confusion and fear cost me nothing. Huzzah!)

Overall, I really enjoyed myself. I got some new ideas for sculpture work, and found out some fun stuff about the Art Nouveau movement. Things could get more interesting. I think we’re entering dangerous inspirational territory here. At any rate, Jem and I have refilled the well, so look for some fantasticness to occur here in the near future!

More art with Jem

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The one on the right is looking pretty sweet by now. This evening we finished up the separate pieces of that project, so there wasn’t a way to switch on and off on it. To give both of us something to do, we decided to start another project and swap between the two. I pulled out a scrap that was sitting around and seemed to be of a size that we could finish the two projects at about the same time. I started the design while Jem colored on the larger piece, then she added her own design work to the smaller one while I traded off and did color on the larger piece. I think Jem did some amazing color work on the smaller one. We’re tossing around different ideas on how we want to use color in the future, and I’ve purchased a few different supplies to help us out on some things later. This just keeps getting more and more interesting.

Of lines and more lines

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Jem and I got another chance to work on the new drawing, and it’s coming along very well. Check out all we’ve added to it since just a few days ago on the 3rd of the month. Jem is doing this new stuff I haven’t seen, and I’m really digging it. My work seems to be almost completely devoid of the squiggle patterns which had dominated some of my previous work. I don’t know what that means, if anything, but it’s kind of scary and cool. Color comes next!

The art returns!

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Like a welcome breath of fresh air, the collaborative drawings with Jem return! Our projects were on hiatus for all of November while I banged out my novel in various coffee shops and restaurants in and around the Circle City, but now that NaNo has passed, it is time to return to these fantastic explosions of color and design. This one was started brand new this evening, and I have to say that I’m really, really friggin’ pleased with how it’s looking already! If you compare this with some of our others, you’ll notice that there are some real interesting changes taking place in the line art. Stuff is showing up that wasn’t present on our earlier stuff. It’s kind of weird, but kind of cool. More will be revealed as we continue, I’m sure.

Mathematical Beauty

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This project was gifted to me by a teenage girl whom I don’t even know. I was hanging out with my friends, and she was at a table nearby coloring. She had some colored pencils, so it shouldn’t surprise you that I went over to look. She showed me what she was doing and said, “Here, there’s a web site you can print them out from. You can have this one,” and she gave me one that she had printed out already. I’ve been working on it little by little, just kind of more practice for arranging colors. If you need something for yourself or your kids to goof around with, the web site on the paper says www.geometrip.com, and you can go there and print out stuff like this for fun. It’s kind of a cool blending of math and visual art. There are tons of designs and some of the examples are really gorgeous!

Edit: A friend of mine saw me working on this and said, “That looks like something my wife does. She calls them ‘mandalas,’ and coloring them can be a sort of meditation process.” I thought that was interesting as all get-out, so I looked them up, and, damn, if those things aren’t ever cool! There’s some really great information on mandalas here, if you’re interested.

Triangle, Triangle(s)…5

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Number five in the series of installments, and look how close we are to being finished! I have just a few minutes left to put in on one of them, and then we’ll be done! Per Melissa, I’m thinking on ideas involving circles for the next one. I didn’t own the color black until we were halfway through these, and tonight Jem decided that she was going to add tons of black around the squiggly things. Personally, I think that was brilliant, really made the colors jump off the page!

Triangle 1,2,3…4

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Fourth installment by my count on this particular project. Jem came over tonight, and we worked on adding more color to our drawings. They’re coming along a lot faster than we’d thought they would. She wasn’t mad that I’d worked on the one a little bit. I still feel I’m a little behind, but I asked, and she said it was okay if I worked on it just a little more before we get together again. They’re looking pretty good now, but it’s still hard to tell what they’ll look like when they’re completely finished. We’re already starting to try and think of new ideas for the next project, though!

Triangle 1,2,3

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Today’s blog post is brought to you by the numbers 1, 2, and 3, and the letter “M.”

Here’s another look at the triangle stuff my friend Jem and I are working on. I actually cheated. This is the half that I worked on all by my self for several hours on Sunday. Jem was way ahead of me on her half, and I was feeling like I was holding things up, so I took some time to play catch up. It still sort of looks like I didn’t do much, but there’s more color on the page, so I’ll call it good for now. I kind of like that little purpley squiggle thing, yes I do. Go me and my attempts at color blending.