Rachael Ray and Roller Coasters

Tomorrow morning, I head out on the 8-day Scandinavia trip. I've decided that I'll be leaving Beatrix (my Macbook) behind. The cons outweigh the pros, I'm afraid. And that means that the blog will suffer a bit. I may be able to find an internet cafe while I'm out and about, but it will mostly be used for e-mail.

So the next time you'll see a post will probably be next Friday, the 18th. But I'll be honing my sketching skills while I'm away, so expect oodles of drawings and pictures when I return.

During our visual journal talk, the lecturer told us to use what medium terrifies us––that it will get us out of our usual drawing conventions and force us to think about what we are drawing. I usually sketch using pencil. It's forgiving and allows me the ability to add shadow easily. What I hate using is Prismacolor marker. Absolutely hate it. The wash never seems to be constant, it bleeds, and if you make a wrong mark, you've ruined the drawing. I also dislike pen. I like it for certain things, but sketching is not one of them. Seeing a little into the future, I guess, I brought both of them with me. I figured Prismacolor would give me the option of putting in color or shadow if necessary. And pen I brought mostly for notes and postcards.

So I'm combining them. I want to start using them and developing my ability with each. I want to be able to look at an object or a landscape and draw its proportions correctly in one go. I'm still bringing pencil just in case, but I aim to use pen and marker almost exclusively.

I decided also to practice a little bit beforehand, today. Here's my attempt at a thank you card to the couple who awarded me a scholarship this year.



The card, by the way, is from Paper Source in Chicago.

I still need some practice with hatching and shadow work, but it's a start. And it still bled, even though it's very heavyweight watercolor paper, and that bothers me to no end. But I'll have to deal with it, I suppose. And bring a backer board.

It's going to be weird not posting for a full week, and I'm sure my two readers will miss it (Hi Mom and Dad!), but I'm sure I'll be so busy that posting will be the last thing on my mind.

In other, non-connected news, I had some crazy dreams last night. Let me preface this by saying that I'm getting over some sort of fever-y, sore throat and cough-like sickness somewhere in the plague classification, and I always tend to have weird dreams when I'm sick.

In one dream, I was riding roller coasters. I have never had so many roller coaster dreams in my life as I've had while working at PGAV. One a week is about the average, but I was hoping it would sort of let up after leaving. They actually kind of freak me out, as most of the time, they're non-conventional coasters. This one used one-person cars, no restraint system, and went underwater. Not cool.

The other dream involved me getting called repeatedly by Rachael Ray on my cell phone. I have never seen her show in my life, so this one's a bit left field. And when I went to the stage where they tape the show to tell her to stop calling, I was invited to stay for a taping. But they wouldn't let me stay wearing what I was wearing, which was jeans and a 3/4-sleeve baseball tee. So I changed into some Gap clothes that the show stylist had. So weird. Thank god I woke up before the show started.