Embroidery in the Age of Computers...Sue Wills' Richland Embroidery Shop

Tom and I took a short trip to northwestern Ohio last week.  Our first stop was to visit with our niece, Sue.

Sue has an embroidery services business in Ontario, Ohio.

Embroidery is a lot different from what it was when I was taking sewing in high school in the 1950s.

This is one of the computer programmed embroidery machines she uses.

Imagine what a person has to know to operate one of these.

She embroiders a wide variety of items.  Tee shirts are popular.

Here are a few of the logos and pictures she has in her files.

She has embroidered ball caps for Tom to advertise his small business.  He puts together videos and copies them to DVDs and flash drives and also does statistical analysis, mostly for the local park district.  He also occasionally provides these services for other individuals and groups.

Since she has an employee to mind the store, she was able to leave her business and have lunch with us at a local pizza parlor.  It was good to talk with her.  We caught up on what she and her family have been doing and told her what has been keeping us and our family busy.

Black-throated Green Warbler...A Painting from Tom's Photo

I have been doing a lot of pencil drawings lately...our grandson, John...

from this photo...

and our granddaughter, Samantha...

from this photo...

The sketch of John turned out looking the age he was when the photo was taken but the sketch of Samantha came out looking older than she is in the photo.  The proportions of faces change as we age.  In this case, her eyes should have been drawn lower on her face. Changing the position of her eyes would then affect the positioning of all her other facial features. I decided it would be best to leave this drawing as it is. It will remind me to measure more carefully next time. 

The trick is to think in terms of comparative relationships.

I painted the Black-throated Green Warbler from a photo Tom took at Magee Marsh on May 15.

I did not draw the bird before I painted it.  Instead, I measured with my eyes as I painted it, noting the proportion of the width of the green back to the width of the wing to the width of the breast.  Length proportions are measured against one another in the same way. The following progression from the second session to the final are below.

At this point I sent a copy of the painting to an artist friend who often critiques my work for me.  She reminded me that the eye needed a spot of life.  A dot of white carefully placed adds life.  She also suggested that I define the leaves a bit more.  I didn't want them to become as important as the bird but they should be more important than what I had them at this point.

Here I have made the leaves more important but I still wasn't satisfied with them.

This is the original photo again.  I didn't like the arrangement of the leaves so I am using my imagination, my "artistic license" and that takes a bit of thinking.

This is the final painting.  I played around with the faint hint of leaves in the upper left portion.  I also made some tiny touch up on the foreground leaves.

Spring Is Slow in Arriving This Year, April 8, 2018

 Jeanne and I went walking at Charleston Falls  on April 7.  Last year we saw flowers.  This year we saw snow.

Finally on the trail that is behind the falls we found a few flowers.  They were bluebells...not very tall and just beginning to show buds.

The wildflowers are here.  Just under the snow today.  I walked on Wednesday March 28 and found the flowers below.

PurpleCress...

Leaves of Trout Lilies ( also called Adder's Tongue and Dogtooth Violet)

Waterleaf...not sure which species...

Spring Beauty

The Bluebells were showing blue buds then, too.

There was more water dropping over the falls on March 28. We had had rain the previous day...all day long...sometimes just a mist, sometimes torrential downpours.

I am still working on my Self-challenge...sketches from photos I've collected over the years.  My grandson posted 104 days in a row.  I am not doing that well.  Sometimes I work on a sketch on and off for two or three days before I am satisfied with it.  I plan to continue the self-challenge until I have done a 100 sketches.  By then I hope to be doing some of them in watercolors.

Sketching Goal, a Sketch Every Day...(So far I have missed two days)

Yesterday's drawing...

As I drew, the child in the photo I worked from evolved from a mostly front photo to a side angle.  That happens sometimes.  I only have control of my pencil sometimes.  Here is the original photo.

Other times I get a pretty close likeness .

And, the ones I get the best likeness on are the ones I spend the least time on.  My eyes and my hand and brain are working together.

If I draw a sketch a day and study the how-to books on drawing faces, I  expect to have more eye-hand-brain control eventually.

I have liked to draw faces from the time I was a child.  I remember I was overjoyed to discover I could put a bump on the side of an oval and the bump looked like a nose.  That was in first or second grade.

Three things worked together to jump start me on this project.  I started sorting through our accumulation of photos.. eighty years of pictures from our lives.  Then there are some pictures of ancestors as well.

On the far end of the table are two plastic boxes which I think are sometimes called sweater boxes.  I have four more boxes that size filled with photos.. And then there are Tom's boxes of photos...another five boxes.  Fortunately, I have dates on the majority of them.  This time around I am adding names.

At the moment, I am sorting the photos into individual boxes for my three children and eleven grandchildren plus a box for ourselves and a box of photos to give to various other people.

As I sorted I came across pictures I thought would be fun to draw.

So 1. sorting...2 finding favorite photos...3...one of my grandsons decided to challenge himself to a drawing a sketch a day and has been posting at least one each day on Facebook.  He has posted almost sixty days without a miss.

I have already missed two days.  But I'm on a roll again.

Second Winter Storm On Its Way

This is the way our front porch looked on Wednesday.  Despite the snow, the day was warm.  After stocking up on groceries because another storm was predicted I decided to walk at Charleston Falls. 

I could hear the water falling under the icy cover.  

On Thursday, Marsha came to paint.  Both of us have been neglecting art because of other activities.  It is easy to do.  Marsha painted a barn along a rural road, one of her favorite topics.  She wasn't happy with it when she left but she said she would work on it at home.  "At least," she said, "I'm painting."

I decided to do a small drawing.  One of my grandsons has been posting a drawing every day for over fifty days in a row.  I decided if he could be that productive I could at least try to draw every day for the rest of January.

This is drawing one.

I enlarged the children and worked from the enlargement.

While Marsha and I were busy, the change in the weather arrived.  It was raining hard by the time she left.

This morning it was still raining.

By 2:30 today, the rain had changed to snow.

Tom made baked chicken with vegetables and cheese for lunch.  I put clothes in the washer and started on a drawing.  I worked and worked and worked.  The photo I am working from is of three of our grandsons taken when they were visiting us for a few days.  As sometimes happens I couldn't get a good drawing of all three grandsons so I posted the drawing of one of them instead.  Maybe I'll have better luck tomorrow.

Painting at the Little Mader Farm

Marsha arranged for our painting group to paint at the Little Mader Farm for the second time.  The weather was perfect, sunny, cool enough to need a light jacket but warm enough after a lunch snack to take the jacket off.  Jerri made  a delicious blueberry coffee cake for us.  There were five of us painting, half of the original plein air group from five or six years ago.  It was good to see everyone.

I painted and sketched, sketched and painted using the Micron pen and watercolor technique I have been playing with the last couple months.  When I looked at the painting after I came home, I realized I had painted a chair with only three legs.  I painted one in.  The rest of the painting is as it was when I laid down my brush for the final time at the farm.

Flower Sketching Experiments

I have all sorts of excuses for not losing myself in artwork recently.  Ignoring painting and drawing is not good for me.  I am happier even if I spend only a half hour a day creating.

I've been doing flower studies to get art back into my life.

I've already posted the bouquet I painted when I painted with Marsha in August.  These are three sketches I've done since then.

I like to work from a still-life set-up.  I found a few weigelia flowers still blooming.

The vase is one I bought years ago when my sister and I were shopping at a Mikasa store at an outlet mall.  I used a Micron pen which was a little low on ink.  There was enough ink for me to draw some guidelines but not enough to create firm edges.  Afterward, I laid in some watercolor washes.  The paper is bit thin so I had to be careful, not have much water in my brush.

After Labor Day Marsha and I painted at her house.  This time it was simpler to work from photographs than from a still-life.

I still used basically the same technique.  I chose to sketch only a few of the Purple Coneflowers in the photo.

I had time to do a second painting.  Marsha said she had seen an interesting painting on-line in which the artist had started with a wash of colors and then gone back and drawn shapes.  I decided to see what I could come up with.

The photo is of Ironweed.

Here is the result.  I decided I liked the sketchy lines so I didn't redraw them more precisely with a fresh Micron pen.  I think this technique could make an interesting background for a collage of some sort.  I also plan to try it on a paper that is more suitable for watercolor washes.

All of these pieces are small, about seven  inches square.

A Bouquet of Prairie Flowers, August, 2017

Earlier this month, Marsha came to paint with me.  I was pleased to see her.  I haven't been painting much for several years.  I needed a jumpstart.  Marsha, bless her, seems to have done that.

The flowers in the bouquet are from our yard...the smaller yellow ones with the graceful thin stems are Tall Coreopsis, the bigger yellow ones are Oxeye, and the orange are Butterflyweed.  The pitcher is one we bought in either Williamsburg or Jamestown, Virginia.  I remember Williamsburg.  Tom remembers Jamestown.  I received the tatted star doily in a Christmas gift exchange when I was co-oping at Landers Corporation in Toledo my senior year in high school.

This is how the painting looked after the painting session with Marsha.  I started with a rough sketch using a Micron pen, then laid in watercolors.  I was hoping to keep the painting as a sketch, an impression, not a photographic image.

I always need to make frequent stops to "think".  This was the result of my thinking.

Another day to "think".  I decided to lighten the fabric on the right side, also to redarken the leaves at the pitcher edge.  I had wiped out a lot of the color.  Then I went bolder with the watercolor.  The very last strokes I made were a few with a white gel pen to bring back some reflections on the pitcher.