Moving on.

Another reason to not throw away old, torn-up jeans. They have many uses. ;)
Body of doll #2.

DeskCat

A random Deskcat photo. In the spirit of having one for every weekday.

Month of April

Might use iron binding wire to construct the body for #2.

Faces of Spring- Grape Hyacinth

Some company spent the last two days clearing a patch of trees right outside my studio window. It wasn't our landlord's property, but I couldn't help but think that they were doing more harm than good. More than 20 bird species visited that patch, in the past two years alone.

The first Face of Spring, in progress.

Tweet?

The past few nights, 've been having a string of long, sometimes outright depressing dreams. Perhaps they mean something. Or, perhaps, I need to get off one lazy bum and stop using this blog like a twitter-feed. Who knows.

Elrin Quote

N: *While bemoaning the fact that she ordered reception postcards for the wrong date of the show* "I'm a failure as an artist..."
El: *From his adjacent work-desk, absent-mindedly* "No, you're a failure as a person."
N: "..."
El: "... Proofreader!! I meant, proofreader!!"

Thursday morning

Sunlight filters through the shut blinds, through the leaves of the Monster Plant. The latter's reached ten feet horizontally, and is in the process of taking over the second window. It no longer has competition from the jasmine, which has been exiled to the outside.

It's a nice feeling, waking up to birds singing, and El snoring, and sunlight of early spring that feels like summer. Happiness is quite precarious, as it never hurts to remind yourself. But while it's here (Russian song that comments on hunters for the bluebird of happiness comes to mind), one might as well make the best of it.

Today, I will studio-sit for a sweetheart of an artist, take a walk with another one, pour beers at the local brewery, and play board game with beer people afterwards. Somewhere in the middle of that 'll have to pick up a quasi-surprise cake for hubby's birthday. (Yesterday's conversation while driving: El: "So you've got to pick me up a cake tomorrow... Me: *Absent-mindedly* "It's not a cake, it's a key lime pie." El: :D! Me: "Oh.. crap.") And amidst all that, 'll be working on those doll-hands.

It's such a fragile state that can crumble at any second... that's what makes it so special.

Doll's hands

 Some progress's been made.. polymer clay hands will be painted after they're finished The final doll might get done by the end of next week. And then 'll stick it into some tiny gallery and forget ti existed for the next 5 years. ;)

Doll-making

The owl-face needed a body, and 've had the pretty fabric around for the past 6 years or so. Might as well do something interesting with it! (The body itself still needs arms and detailing.)

Hiking.

This weekend, myself and two friends went hiking down the Creeper Trail. The wild flowers were beginning to come up (spring beauties, hepatica, and we even saw a single trout lily), the weather was gorgeous and much fun was otherwise had. Here's a picture taken by Liz from that trip... If I could only take credit for it. :)

Owl face.

Mother of pearl does fire well with polymer clay. Here's the little bugger prior to being painted... I think he'll end up as a part of a three-dimensional piece, maybe as a face-mask for a ghost.

Elrin Quote

N: "Don't hit the ceiling!"
El: *While holding a long piece of a 1x2 wood* "I was trying to hit you, but the ceiling got in the way."

Procrastination goes on.

In theory, I should be working on the "Thief of a 100 flowers". In reality, it's mostly polymer clay.

Amaryllis

It was a slow, quiet night, and all throughout the house,
Gigantic, strange bulbs began putting out flowers!

And then there were seeds, too. Will see if I can grow one of these buggers.

Numbers

A guy says, "You should illustrate my children's poem about numbers!"
I say, "Yay! :D"
A couple of concept sketches later, he's regretting it already!

Wood-embroidery

The finished box, after a day of poking and prodding. (The base-lines are tucked into the wood by means of tiny, tiny holes and wood-glue.) Not sure how I feel about it. May be too frilly.

In other news cowbirds are back, and hogging the feeder!

Irises galore

Last fall, after putting a few iris seeds into the fridge for a month, I planted them with the vague idea that about an eighth would come up. This batch would then be transported to Indiana. Sadly, the germination rate was close to a 100% and now we're inundated with baby irises.

On that note, the 5-gallon plastic buckets one gets at Lowe's make excellent and very cheap planters for such run-away projects!

Wood Embroidery

While playing around with some of Nick's boxes, Nadya discovers that you can too embroider on wood.

Chuggin' along.

Really need to practice my peonies/roses. These look a bit too much like cabbages. ;)

In the spirit of daily artsing updates...

I give you... Baldwin, the bald midget knight. Eating dragons, one egg at a time.

A plate.. no, a bowl? Or maybe a wall-hanging.

A rather fun wood-turning fellow shared a new of his scrap projects with me a while back, and I'm seeing if I can turn them into something interesting.. Here's a half-finished wood plate/bowl/hanging thingie. Inspiration for this one comes from an art teacher in high school. Dana, after seeing a dead pheasant and hearing me ask if we can somehow remove its (gorgeous) feathers, grinned and said "What the heck, sure!". We skinned the bird, and I still have bits of its preserved pelt. It was an interesting experience.

Thief of a 100 Flowers

I've started a series when I first moved to this little town, namely "Thieves of things". There were Thieves of keys, dandelions, strawberries and bait.. Along these same lines, here's an under-painting for Thief of a 100 flowers.The garland of flowers serves as a frame for a series of current location-related images, since autobiographical stuff is quite fun to paint. (And, as one tapestry-weaver once told me, "The moment I stop having fun is the moment I stop doing what I am doing".) Not sure if it's realistic to expect to have fun all the time, but it seems to me that the majority of the time, it -is- fun. 

2'8"x2', acrylic on board. Maybe the next big piece will finally be over 3 feet across..

Back... but not to normal!

Let's start this batch of postings slowly- two weeks of almost total isolation and one week of recovery do not a talkative blogger make.
 The most exciting thing since last week had been the abundance of Pileated Woodpeckers in our back 'yard'. They're big, they're mean, and when they peck at wood, you can actually see wood chips fly. The bottom picture has 2- one per each batch of logs.