I’ve been working from home for the last few days, which has meant toting all my art supplies from my studio to my house. Fortunately I’m pretty portable these days. I have less space working on the dinner table, and it doesn’t take long before I’m spread out everywhere, especially now that I have 3 different brands of oil pastels I like to use.

I just bought a box of Erengi Art Aspirers having read a few reviews comparing them to my much beloved neopastels.They were on sale and in spite of having to get them shipped from the States were still a pretty good deal. An example of overconsumption though – I did not need to buy more, but now I have a lovely new range of colours to play with!

I’m working on the color images now for the picturebook for Rubicon, and this is the tough part for me. I’ve read a bunch of books on colour and it still pretty much boils down to instinct. They’ll either feel right, or they won’t. Its funny that I’ve been having troubles with skin tones – why is it in nature we never look at someone and say, your complexion completely clashes with the landscape! Wouldn’t that be funny. But my kids were far too orangey in the beginning, and making them a little darker brown sure helped.

Here’s a version I played around with a bit on the computer. Not the final piece, though!

click to view larger

I’m obsessed with hockey and music these days, where all I would like to do is go to stick and puck and then come home and play with garageband. I want to write songs, songs, songs. There was a time when I just wanted to draw all day and now when I get to draw all day (ok, I still love drawing all day) at the back of my mind I want to pick up my guitar. It probably has to do with the fact that the band is on our January break and I don’t have that outlet but that will be coming to and end soon. Seriously though, if I was in charge of everyone in my band’s life, we’d be practicing all the time, writing songs together, doing a recording only project where we would could just focus on singing, and learning to play all the songs I love. So I guess its a good thing that I’m not in charge because they would quickly become my musical slaves.

Last night I got to watch a video of two of our hockey games (one I was not at, unfortunately) and for the first time saw myself playing hockey. It was quite weird. And this is not meant as any sort of criticism of my teammates, who are awesome beyond belief, but I was struck with how boring we looked. That most definitely means me. It was like going back to watching a Canucks game after the World Juniors, like, come on, show a little spirit! I lack hustle, that’s the only way to say it. Is it stamina, or desire, or both? Probably both, because its hard to hustle for an hour. But I think back on all the women I’ve met who’s hockey skills I’ve admired and the common thread was that wanting to get to the puck first. Then the encouraging thought was that sure, my backhandwristshotslapshotsnapshotmohawksstopscrossovers suck but I can always improve my hustle!

Seriously though, I could see why it might be less than interesting to watch us play, and certainly will think twice about it before I invite anyone to come watch. The good thing though is that we have a game today, where I will have the opportunity to work on it.

I’ve just sat down in a cafe with my coffee and realized that I haven’t brought the pen for my tablet with me, and while I do have a pencil here to do my drawing I don’t have any paper, all because of my silly rush to get out of the house.

Part of the reason for trying to get out of the house quickly is because I should have been working all day, but instead I went to stick and puck (and here I am still not working). Its seriously been about a year since I’ve done any practicing on my own, and I have come to the conclusion that I am as good as I’m ever going to get. I simply cannot seem to get better. Ok, one could infer from that, that maybe I should go to stick and puck more than once every year and maybe I would get better, but there are things that I was doing better a year ago that I can’t seem to do anymore. Like handling the puck while skating backwards, or my backhand. And because stick and puck is so much more exhausting than a regular game, every now and then while I’m resting I like to check out the skills of all the men on the ice (men everywhere! I was the only woman, and I had to change in the bathroom because they took up all 4 dressing rooms!), and I realized that here is where I need work: backwards crossovers. mohawks. stopping left foot first. A proper hockey stop. Speed. A quicker start. stickhandling. my backhand, forehand, slapshot, and wrist shot – I’ll probably never manage a snap shot. Actually, probably the same for the slapshot, and part of me thinks, who even cares about a slapshot? Although, being a defenceperson, the likelihood of my hitting top corner from the point with a wrist shot seems very, very, unlikely. At this point the only thing that I seem to do well is wear my helmet properly, although by the end of it I was getting this pain in the side of my head so maybe I can’t even do that well.

Seriously, I’m not discouraged though. I’ve come to terms with the fact that some of those beautiful goals that I see on the tv I will never, ever be able to do. But that’s ok, cause the main thing is I’m still having a hell of a time playing.

Its kind of funny to use a teapot to illustrate my lady day, since there was no tea involved (except for the cup I made myself just a few minutes ago), rather some espresso, some singing, a game of hockey, and getting quite messy drawing with my daughter.

We had our first game today back in our old division, having been unceremoniously relegated in November and then getting moved back up in January. I was rather disgruntled at the move down, having about the strongest team we’ve ever had it seemed unthinkable that with our new, stronger players we were not able to compete with teams that we’ve been playing against for the past few years. I suppose that it was taking a bit of time to get used to each other, coupled with a high number of absences by the 5 or so players who really can make a difference on the ice in the early part of the year. Although it was kind of fun to have a hair less stress on the ice, I’m pretty glad to be back where we were. It was nice that we won today against the team that broke my finger last year. It was nice that our goalie got another shutout (her third one in a row).

Most musicians dream about having their band mentioned in Rolling Stone, for me, its on the Vancouver Canucks website (It’s down at the bottom). I think they should have mentioned how great he is at picking up your doped up husband from the dentist – I might have to complain.

learn to fly

I’ve been working on some sketches for a stock illustration company, and because I like to be difficult and do things backwards, I got it into my mind that I wanted to sketch on the computer before coloring the picture traditionally. Its much easier in terms of composition if I can just move objects around rather than erase or trace, but as anyone with a tablet knows, nothing comes close to the feel of an actual pencil and paper.

I’ve been trying out some shareware versions of two programs by one company, FlySketch and Acorn. I came across FlySketch when I started using Journler a lot and wanted to be able to sketch into my entries. The above picture is done using FlySketch, which I have to say is pretty much the closest thing I’ve come to a good sketching program on the computer. Its not intended to be a high end drawing application and so there’s a lot of things that might otherwise be annoying, like the paper size will only go so large and you can’t rotate the page. But, mostly I want something that I can print out and then trace onto paper with my lightbox so I’m not too concerned about high res options.

Acorn Sketch

Acorn makes up for what FlySketch may be lacking, including some pretty cool filters (like the image above, using the bloom filter which for reasons not entirely clear to me, I like) and its pretty fun to sketch in, but for some reason I like FlySketch better, I’m not really sure why! But really, I should just get into carrying my pad of tracing paper everywhere with me, because I think in the end it would be a hell of a lot simpler.

snowprincess

Whenever we went outside my daughter insisted on wearing the princess dress and crown that she received as presents, but would become horribly embarrassed by the attention she got. (She was quite a bit pinker in the original photo, before I got to it with iphoto ). Its pretty amusing for someone who grew up with 5 older brothers (and swore if she had a daughter she would not be dressed in pink) to see how girly my girl is. Which leads me to believe that given a rather normal upbringing (meaning having your basic needs met), it’s all nature!

I really wanted to draw a picture of her in her snow gear, and started with this, but abandoned it because she was looking to much like a Family Circus kid. Ugh. It won’t be my last attempt, though.

snow princess sketch

More snow, I can’t believe it! After years of wanting it I finally got my white christmas. The unfortunate part is I’ve been quite keen to get back on my bike after all the lazing about and eating of chocolate that I’ve been doing over the holidays.