Lee Thomson

distracted, bemused

April 27, 2014

I'm not sure if I am having organizational issues or motivational ones, but either way it means you don't get to see what I've been working on lately, which is not good.

I signed up for a "what comes after beginning drawing" class, which is helping me get things from outside in the world down onto paper in a two diemsnional way. I like the teacher (Paula Gottlieb) a lot – she's got a firm grip both on drawing and on explaining things. And I love the things she brings in to draw; eggs, shells, tree branches and birch bark – all things that speak to me!

My fellow students are an interesting bunch too. One woman does unexpected prints using craft foam on fabric, two others draw, and to our mutual astonishment, one has two pieces of my art that she got at Grow Gallery (veils of mist, and meadow maple, greening) which I still find cheering and humbling.

I am still working on the weird little April project I invented, drawing things in the hangman game book. Photographing it is harder than I expected because the book wants to be closed. I should probably locate a clip of some sort to hold it open, because I am not liking all the pictures of my hands and fingers holding it down, plus the focusing is much more difficult with only one hand.

April is Fake journal month

April 1, 2014

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dancingcrow/13571025965/player/

I've had this book full of hangman games, and it's always felt like a book full of drawing prompts. So for April, I'll illustrate one answer across each two page spread.

Have some apple pie, to start.

April is International Fake Journal Month. Roz invented it, and runs the blog, and collects people's work into one place. You can read more about it at the IFJM blog too.

And no, although this seems random and weird, this isn't an April fool – I'll be back tomorrow.

sets for a musical, or the theater that ate my March

March 16, 2014

Another thing I do is work at the high school in the theater program. This spring I was invited to design the sets for the musical Meredith Willson's Music Man – the one with Robert Preston and Seventy-six Trombones and a great deal of chasing around the bushes in the moonlight. And the train. And the Shipoopi dance (that one is hard to get out of your head!)

Our high school has a strong arts and music program, so we had a great chorus, fantastic leads, and a full pit orchestra. Students designed the lights and sound, and worked closely with the adults doing the designing and building of costumes, sets and choreography. We had four shows, finishing last night and striking the show after.

This is what it looked like while it was up:

In daily project news, I managed to finish February, so I'll post those soon. I'm not sure what to do about two lost weeks in March. I'll probably pick up a new booklet and start….something. I get to do a lot of nothing today.

the needle eater is finally done

February 25, 2014

I'm not sure why this one took so long to finish, but it might have had to do with breaking ten needles on it. Generally the needle body count ranges from zero to three (they do run in threes) so I am not entirely sure what made this one so voracious.

I'm leading with it because I am really proud of it. I still need to finish the edges and stretch it, but the piece itself is finished.

I also started Book 5 – white pages for the next two books/four weeks.

foolishness with circle stamps, and thinking about rivers (again)

i hab a code, im my node

February 23, 2014

and you can see how increasing amounts of phlegm in my head made it difficult to do much of anything.

i had a long meditation on stepping in rivers, but i'll find it tomorrow instead, because i must now nap again

sugaring off

February 19, 2014

Half the fun with stamps is combining them with other stamps to make patterns and repeats. Although I still have the story stamp I made with some friends. Each of us got an eraser, and using all six sides, we had to carve stamps to tell a four panel story. Mine had to do with lightning, and a forest fire, and rain putting it out. I remember Lynne's better though – a princess lost her cats. It was funny, and the faces were all characteristically hers.

I also managed to break four needles tonight, and finish a small piece:

It will be 5×7" once it is cropped and the edges finished.

three days and a stamp pad

February 18, 2014

I mentioned I made my own stamp pad (and spilled green ink all over). I wanted some new colors, so I made a purple and pink pad, and did not spill any ink. One of my Flickr contacts wanted to know what I used, so I show you the tiny adorable bottles of Tsukineko inks and blank stamp pads from Dharma Trading.

Over the weekend I took Alice and Red Kate, and we took my mother too and went to the Peabody Essex Museum. A friend had acquired timed tickets for us to hang out with about 40 tiny adorable zebra finches and their musical stylings on a half dozen electric guitars and basses. They looked like this – the picture is courtesy of PEM, because my sketches of the birds were not successful.

page, and peeks

February 15, 2014

The little round stamp is from yesterday, but the hole was so appealing I wanted to use that too. I used a paper punch to cut the hole out, and centered it on the eraser becaue I was worried about edges. The texture on the piece with the hole is from the trademarks on the surface of the eraser. The nicer erasers have smooooth surfaces, and the pink Easy-carve is just one GIANT pink rubber eraser in 1/4" sheets of variable size.

Shown below are pieces of two medium sized landscapes I am building simultaneously; one in the middle of a snowstorm, the other the clear blue day after a snow storm. With the weather cycling back and forth like this, I'm getting a lot of good looks at both conditions!

ink spill, snowpocalypse and green

February 14, 2014

on the good side, a new ink pad, and also knowledge about how easy it is to make another, and I do have another five blanks ready to go, AND it works really well, so it is a huge win all around

on the less good side, a lot of ink in places it should not be, and I have to make a new work surface because this is now shedding green on various snowscapes that are in progress, serious snowscapes, all white, and more white… no green until March, when the thaw starts

magical morning

February 11, 2014

This morning the temperature was right around zero F, and the river was smoking and steaming. The moisture in the air condensed and froze on everything next to the river, producing the most astoundingly gorgeous frosting on the landscape. I took some landscape photos, and some of sumac and false bittersweet up close with frost on them, and then my camera battery stopped and I took more pictures with my phone. I am glad to have a camera in my phone, that I carry everywhere.

I even stopped and parked out of the way and walked back and forth across the Sunderland bridge, trying to capture the the fluffy beauty of the trees.

Today's stamp has tiny leaves all over it, so I tried turning it, when stamping, so they went up and down in alternating ways.