House No. 120: Alsatian Bourg

 

House No. 120: Alsatian Bourg

encaustic on paper

18 in. x 12 in.
120/365; 04/30/11

No matter how old I get, I will never lose my excitement over metallic crayons. They are awesome. And just look how great they look when they melt:

Check out the sparkles floating in the wax. Love, love, love that!

Check out the lint and dog fur also floating in the wax. Well, it adds texture, at least.

Colors with white in them make really lovely, subtle layering. (See the pink areas above.) That is my favorite part of this process, the layering and translucent obfuscation.

House No. 119: Traditional Japanese Gassho-Zukuri House

 

House No. 119: Traditional Japanese Gassho-Zukuri House

encaustic on paper

18 in. x 12 in.
119/365; 04/29/11

Day two of encaustics. I started with the cookie sheet, but I moved up to a foil-covered pizza stone because it holds the heat longer and it is so hot that I can get the wax to really pool. Check it out in these close-up detail shots:

The trees were my favorite part to create, and I love the waxy surface they created. I worked into those parts of the image for a long time, wiping and reapplying and scraping.

I think those two details work as little abstract compositions in their own right, don't you? Here are some more details so you can see the wax application:

I also used carry-out chopsticks to scrape and spread the wax, which seems sort of appropritate, considering the Asian architecture.

I really like the earthy tones in this one. And I love the way the traditional architecture works with its environment, so I tried to capture that in the image. 

House No. 118: Dutch Row Houses

 

House No. 118: Dutch Row Houses

encaustic on paper

18 in. x 12 in.
118/365; 04/28/11

This semester I made my 2D design students try their hand at (cheap and easy) encaustics using crayons and irons and candles and blow driers and cookie sheets pulled from the oven. I got some great work from them, and I really dug how much it freed up their style. I thought that I should revisit encaustics myself, cheap and easy style.

It did free up my hand, and the colors are so lovely and bright, which is why I went with the Amsterdam row houses again. I love their fun colors and shapes.

I used a cookie sheet covered with foil and heated in a moderate oven and a tub of Crayola crayons. As I stress to my students, crayons are one thing you cannot cheap-out on. The pigment and texture of generic crayons just suck.

Try this at home: put your paper on a hot cookie sheet and draw with unwrapped crayons. I use a few pencil lines to guide my pigments.

House No. 117: Green House II

House No. 117: Green House II
found objects on cardboard
5 in. x 5 in. x 11 in.
117/365; 04/27/11


I  am slowly working on  a series of monochromatic houses (the first was blue) using collections of mostly single-colored objects. (I collect these kinds of things. Writing about it, it even sounds odd to me.) Anyway, most of these green objects were harvested from one of my bulletin boards at work.

You see, I like to collect objects and arrange them by color, and I have bulletin boards in my office at work where I arrange these odds and ends.

Those shamrock beads were handed to me by a (man dressed like a) leprechaun on the street on St. Patrick's Day a couple years ago. And the busted computer chip was lying on the ground in my parking deck. The field day ribbon was a park find. It's like litter scrapbooking. Or something.

 

This is my third green house. Here are the other two:

Green House 

Greenhouse

House No. 116: Beach House

House No. 116: Beach House
pencil, ink, white out tape, and acrylic paint on repurposed matboard
10.75 in. x 6.5 in.
116/365; 04/26/11


I found this piece of mat board on its way to the trash* in my classroom. It was almost a finished piece without my adding to it. When I looked at it, I saw a beach landscape. I just added the details to create a house from the indications of one that I already saw there.

As I tell my students, we have to see before we can create. This is a perfect example of that.

I added the graphite, the white acrylic paint, and that one white stripe on the sand.


*Honestly, some of our students don't seem to have clue as to what they are throwing away.

Monday Meet the Neighbors, Amy O. Rizzo of Creative Space

In addition to the world that I live in, I mentally occupy a fantasy world where I garden and grow much of our own food, bake, can vegetables and sauce, pickle, make my own cheese, sew all my clothing, have chickens and a miniature donkey, and live at least partially off the grid (with internet, of course, and plumbing).  Oh, if only.

Now, believe it or not, I have a friend who is well on her way to this fantabulous existence. And she documents a great deal of it on her blog, Creative Space. Meet Amy:

Amy up until quite recently was an actual, real-life neighbor. (Meaning not just on the innerwebs.) I used to be able to just stroll across our park, oftentimes in pajama pants and slippers, to have tea and play with Little Bear who is now two.

 

So, now that Amy is further away, I really appreciate having her blog to keep me up to date on all the amazing creative things she does every day. 

Amy's blog features everything from baking to sewing to childrearing to her fiction and being an author. She's a talented lady. And she shares.

 

Why, right here is a cookie recipe that I now have waiting on my kitchen counter.

House No. 115: City Apartment

House No. 115: City Apartment
ink, watercolor pencil, and metallic ink on repurposed card stock
2 in. x 4.25 in.
115/365; 04/25/11


Another city house today. I loved drawing the fire escapes on this one. Fire escapes and cisterns atop apartment buildings are two of my favorite things about city architecture.

House No. 114: City at Sunset

House No. 114: City at Sunset
ink and watercolor pencil on repurposed card stock
2 in. x 4.25 in.
114/365; 04/24/11

Colorful skyscrapers.

House No. 113: Pink House with Cherry Tree

House No. 113: Pink House with Cherry Tree
ink and watercolor pencil on repurposed card stock
2.25 in. x 2.33 in.
113/365; 04/23/11

Happy spring weekend!

House No. 112: Farnsworth House

House No. 112: Farnsworth House
ink and watercolor pencil on repurposed card stock
4.25 in. x 2 in.
112/365; 04/22/11

And now for something entirely different ...

It took 112 houses for me to reproduce an actual house. I never had the desire previously to do it, but I wanted to experiment with some Modern Architecture and kept thinking about the Farnsworth House and Mies van der Rohe.

The Farnsworth House is an example of the International Style. Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Farnsworth House was built to be a weekend retreat/country house for Dr. Edith Farnsworth, so it wasn't a place someone would live all the time.

It’s a bit impractical. It’s not a place to have “stuff.” It is not terribly private, either. (Remember, those who live in Mies van der Rohe houses shouldn’t throw stones.)

My head loves this design, but my heart doesn’t. What do you think?

House No. 111: Igloo

House No. 111: Igloo

ink and watercolor pencil on repurposed card stock
4.25 in. x 2 in.
111/365; 04/21/11

Igloos have been made to be sort of silly. We see them in media with fur-hooded Eskimos and penguins (wrong continent), and advertising ice cream or bagged ice. Igloos are simplified and misunderstood, quite like the tipi. Igloos are, in reality, amazing snow structures of the Inuit people of the arctic, themselves a very complicated culture that is diverse and spans portions of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Russia.

Igloos are an example of ingenuity and make-do. I love how homes reflect culture and available resources. For me, igloos are proof that people make comfortable, homey retreats out of whatever is available wherever people find themselves.

What is home exactly? I think that beyond shelter, containment, and safety, there is an element of comfort required to make someplace home. We make homes for those we love, and we think of home as someplace comforting. I think food is inseparable from home, as are smells. What are your requirements for home?

House No. 110: Yurts

House No. 110: Yurts
ink and watercolor pencil on repurposed card stock
4.25 in. x 2 in.
110/365; 04/20/11

You know I love some tents. I really do.

I'm still working out some troubadour-style nomadic homes in 3D materials, but I have some ideas that are cooking. I love the patterns on some Mongolian gers, and so I wanted to play with that for today's houses. I like the white is set off against the background. I imagine the interiors are lush.

Update! New, natural light photo of House No. 4: The Dresden Walls

The Dresden Walls

Follow the above link to see the photo on its original post page.

House No. 109: Petit Château

House No. 109: Petit Château 
ink and watercolor pencil on repurposed card stock
2.75 in. x 2.75 in.
109/365; 04/19/11

This little illustration is drawn on the back of another sheet from my matchbook calendar that I have mentioned before. The paper is just yummy. Very thick with just the right amount of tooth to it.

It’s funny because the photos of the drawing are so much larger than they are in life, and the details are so much easier to see. I like making these tiny drawings and am thinking about what I should do with them all. Perhaps mount them all together? What do you think?