National Bobblehead Day

I love bobbleheads. My dad had the hula girl bobblehead but it was not stuck to the dash of his car. It would totally be a distraction for me as I could stare at it for hours.

It seems that bobbleheads are popular among sports fans as my son has several of his favorite ball players. They are fun.

And in honor of National Bobblehead Day, I drew myself as a bobblehead on my table as I get ready to journal. My bobblehead would be carrying a journal and a sketchbook and of course, coffee. And lately, my hair is in a side braid because I'm too lazy to blow dry it or style it. And I'm always in yoga pants with an oversized shirt. Ha! I used Daniel Smith Watercolors and my Platinum Carbon pen.

What would your bobblehead look like?

Hump Day Cure

Hope you're having a great Wednesday! I'm a bit late getting my daily prompt done because I had quite a todo list this morning including getting my dog, Vince groomed.

He is such a cutie. After all my errands, I stopped at my local Starbucks for a Skinny Vanilla Latte. I don't go there often as it is a very expensive habit to maintain.  But what is nice about this particular one is that the barista knows my name. I don't have to spell it for him nor do I have to make up a name like "Ann" so that I don't have to hold up the line while they figure out how to write it. 

It was extra nice this morning because it's still raining here in Phoenix and it has been since Monday. Like the theme song says, sometimes you want to go where everyone knows your name.. I used Kuretake Tambi Gansai Watercolors today.  

Peacock

Happy Tuesday! Today's art challenge prompt is a bird. And because it's also Tangle Tuesday, I wanted to use a zentangle pattern in my drawing. So I decided to draw a peacock using the zentangle pattern "pea-fea". 

I had drawn something similar previously using pastels.

This was my inspiration. And keeping my promise to myself that I would try to use art supplies I have, I used my Sakura Koi Watercolor Sketch Box set. The colors are vibrant but the paint is a bit more opaque than my other watercolors so I painted first before I inked it. And yes, I should have kept the pea-fea pattern in mind when I painted the peacock, but I didn't. So the colors don't really match the ink work. Lesson learned.

If you would like to try the pea-fea pattern, visit here. 

Spaghetti

I'm not sure what I was thinking when I chose "spaghetti" as my prompt for today. There are certain foods like rice and pasta that are so hard for me to draw and paint. It felt like doing a zentangle pattern, trying to draw pasta weaving in and out of each other. I'm trying to use some of the supplies I haven't used in awhile so I used the Windsor and Newton field box of half pans.

One of the things my husband and I committed to last year was to adopt a low carb lifestyle. So one of first things we got rid of from our pantry was pasta. Instead of pasta, we've added various squashes. 

I bought this gadget that allows create strings out of zucchini, yellow squash, daikon, etc. If you don't over cook them, these faux pasta can be quite good. But my favorite is the spaghetti squash. 

I usually roast this in the oven for about 50 minutes after slicing it half and removing the seeds. You can also microwave it but I just like the roasted flavor. 

(Image from steamykitchen.com)

Once cooked, you can take a fork to get strands of "spaghetti". We've added meatballs and red sauce and pesto and even Alfredo. But I just like it with a bit of olive oil, bacon bits, Parmesan cheese and parsley. And even though today is National Spaghetti Day (who comes up with these?), I'm sticking with my spaghetti squash!

Chocolate Covered Cherries

Happy National Chocolate Covered Cherries Day! Chocolate covered anything is usually good but I love the tartness of the cherries and the sweetness of the chocolate. And since today's prompt is "chocolate", it was perfect!

I usually start with a loose pencil sketch of what I want to draw. And I usually ink my drawing with the Platinum Carbon Pen but I decided to go directly to watercolors today. And I decided to use the Holbein palette.

For the chocolate, I used burnt umber and burnt sienna. I also added ultramarine blue for shadow areas.

I love the "black" you get from burnt umber and ultramarine. And since I was using ultramarine for the plate shadows, it made for a more harmonizing palette.

The cherries were done with vermillion and Crimson lake, with a bit of ultramarine added in the shadow areas. For the most part, I remembered to leave white areas for highlights. But I still had to use my Posca paint pen for white in some areas. 

I'm very happy with the results. It's a little more intimidating for me to not to ink before adding watercolors and I had to leave a bit of white space between some edges. I enjoyed the process, though it was not the loose style of painting that I'm used to these days.

Changing topics, my youngest is involved in a program called Better Together sponsored by NFTY (National Federation of Temple Youth). It teams 7th and 8th grade students with seniors living in a retirement community once a month for fun interactions. They meet once a month. The kids are organizing a bingo night for the seniors and we were asked to bring some goodies for prizes. So I made these bookmarks using homemade ink sprays. I used acrylic letter stamps for the words and tied a ribbon. I'm really happy with the way these turned out because I'm usually stamp-challenged. I'm just not very patient and usually smear the ink or misalign the stamp. But these turned out okay.

Now, my daughter and I are off to bake some cookies for the seniors. Hope you're having a wonderful Sunday!

Favorite Sci-Fi Character

Stanley Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of my favorite science fiction movies. With minimal dialog, ambiguous themes and lack of special effects, this movie differs so much from the current record-setting Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But I love both.

It's been awhile since I've seen the movie so I won't talk about the film, but every time I've seen it, it was with a group of friends and I loved the discussions the movie generated about the relationship between humans and machines, artificial intelligence and the origins of the universe. Pretty nerdy stuff. But what can I say, I'm a nerdy gal and proud of it too. And that quote! Lol...

But I'm here to talk about the art.

The background was done with Inktense block and applied with a baby wipe. I find that the baby wipe is the most effective way to get color to go on smoothly. The lens part was done using Daniel Smith watercolors and I used Pyrrol Scarlet and Phthalo Blue. You're thinking "what?" 

Since the center is orangish red, I wanted  the whole gradation to black to contain that same red. You see the color mixing chart I created comes in handy for something like this. I used varying amounts of Pyrrole Scarlet and Phthalo Blue to achieve the gradation.

If you ever have extra time, I'd encourage you to create your own mixing chart because you may be surprised by the range of colors you can make with just two colors.

Something New

Happy New Year! I hope you all had a wonderful celebration! We spent the evening at home. T had a friend over and we spent the evening making sukiyaki (a Japanese hot pot meal with thinly sliced beef, vegetables, tofu, and rice noodles). We also continued the hot pot theme for dessert and had chocolate fondu. Yum!

Today's Januart Art Challenge prompt is "something new." So I drew my new journal which is a Paper For Fountain Pen journal that uses Tomoe River paper. It is a smaller journal than my previous journal and has a hard cover. And I think I like it so far. 

It's always difficult to represent something in a drawing or painting when the subject is white. I'm always tempted to use gray (water downed black). But in fact, white can take on a lot of shadow colors depending on what other color is around the white.

My usual choice for shadow is bluish violet created with ultramarine blue and a bit of Quinacridone rose or bluish red. And this is what I used for the shadows in the notebook.

So don't be afraid of painting white things! And here is the completed page.