Trees, Trees and More Trees

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Tree-mania continues, and this week is the Foliage 1 seminar.  While I feel like I'm slowly getting more comfortable with drawing trees, I'm also realizing more and more how very difficult it is to get them just right.  Here's a few samples of my own work.  Most are very quick sketches (5 minutes or less), the last two I spent an hour or more on.

My eyes are getting blurry from looking at so many trees :)  So I sketched a couple of other things just to clear my head a bit.  The first is a quick thumbnail sketch of the dock at Smallwood Lake, which is just a few minutes South of here; the second is of our fireplace in the main living room/ dining room of the Cobalt house.

Today we started painting trees instead of drawing them (hooray!).  Today's exercise focused on distant trees and one mid-range tree using lay-in brushes and sponge rollers. Rachel makes it look easy, but we all quickly found out how difficult it really is.  My first-day painting is the following (about 4x98 foot), which I'm really not crazy about, but I learned a lot:

The second project took two days, and I was a bit more pleased with this one.  We learned how to make and use stamps and cut-foam rollers for the leaf pattern, making it a cinch to paint all of the leaves (Mom - don't you wish we knew this trick for painting Secret Garden!!).  The first was taken at the end of day one, just to show my workspace:

Also attending this weeks seminar are three guest students, one of whom is a vegetarian.  So we're all expanding our culinary horizons, so to speak, and cooking some new foods.  Monday was my night, so I cooked chicken satay with peanut sauce (for the meatitarians) and Buddha's Jewels, which is a baked tofu dumpling.  Both were quite tasty, if I do say so myself, and it seemed to be a hit with everyone else, so that was fun.

Last week I attempted something new as well: ratatouille.  Jackie's boyfriend, Chad, had a copy of Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," so I figured what the heck.  It sucked.  It was definitely edible and not a total disaster, but I won't be making that one again...probably ever.  Probably bad timing on my part that I decided (afterwards) that I didn't really care for the dish.  Oh well!  I suppose it keeps life interesting around here!  Next time it's Mexican food: something that I definitely know how to cook and that I already know I'll like.