Finished Thorne Scratch!

Since I started this monster back in February...It's officially been a year and six months, whoot!

My first serious acrylic painting, and my first of a human. One day, cover art dream job. One day.

Lessons learned:

• I hate canvas texture. With a fiery burning hate. Next painting will be on illustration board.
• Nervous about making rock texture? Just jump in! Oh the adrenalin...
• When it been a year and there is NO way that you're going to be able to replicate that skin tone, break out the water color pencils. They smudge under a damp fingertip and are quasi erasable.
• Also go for drawing red vines! And tattoos!
• Fineliner inking the vines really made them pop and helped define the thorns, which were disappearing into the background.
• Mixed media for the win!

The book, Elf Home, is now out both on Amazon and Baen. Go read it, it's EXCELLENT. Also, this painting is a giant pun, since the character's name is Thorne Scratch on Stone. *ducks flying rocks*

The beautiful stock is provided by the following:

Woman by Jagged-eye, who can also be found at DMAC Studios
Stone texture by ShinimegamiStock



Disclaimer: Thorne is owned by and copyright Wen Spencer. As is anything Tinker-Windwolf-Elfhome related. I just visit, a lot. More than I should. Maybe I should rent an apartment...

Elemental Eggs

Confession: I'm a total nerd. One of my favorite shows is Avatar: the Last Airbender. I'm also into resist dyeing. So egg dyeing this year got a bit...creative ;)

Recently, I've seen several tutorials on making masking tape stencils. that artist woman has a good tutorial, though I tend to sketch directly onto the wax paper and then put my tape on top of it. However, with my method, you have to be very careful about mirroring (you'll see why in a second). I never thought about using masking tape on eggs because I usually dye by soaking or boiling them. Then I saw Melissa's post on No. 2 Pencil about making super bright (though not water-fast) eggs by rolling them in vinegar, then pouring on food coloring. It sounded like a great technique to try with the masking tape, and if they didn't turn out perfect, then I could still eat them!

Wet eggs with tape on

Unfortunately, I accidentally put the tape on the wrong side of the wax paper, so the designs are reversed. Impossible to tell with the Earth Kingdom coin, and it's not very noticeable with the Air Nomad swirls or Fire Nation flame, but the poor Water Tribe wave and moon...

The wrinkles in the tape made for a cool batik look, in my opinion. Though if you want crisp lines, I recommend a resist that can be painted on or using very small pieces of tape.

I also recommend wearing gloves!

The dye took a few days to scrub off completely...

All in all, a delicious, nerdy, artistic project using local, free-range, cage-free eggs!

WIP Art Nouveau Bast

Long time, no post! Let's just say that I got a full time job and found Tumblr. Baaaaaaad combination for my attention span. (I'm also Flame Point over there if you want to brave the crazy world of Tumblr).

I was in an art slump for a while and decided to force myself out of it by coming up with a way to grade myself on effort and work on faces and backgrounds (I'm highly grade motivated, just to let you know how huge a nerd I am). I managed to get fifteen faces done and three backgrounds before my little Murphy-inspired personality quirk set in: If I force myself to do an art project, I will suddenly be flooded with art inspiration...for things that are not that project. If I make myself stay on course, I will loose all drive and make cruddy art, but if I jump on that rogue art idea, I will be driven and motivated and get it done. Thankfully, though I have a hard time self motivating, I can work through the lack of drive and still make good art for other people, otherwise I never would have made it through college.

Now that I don't have a GPA steering my every move and I have to be my own motivation, I'm trying to make this flaw into a feature. When I get a crazy art idea, I do it. Of course now instead of no drive, I have a webcomic storyboarded but stalled in the character design, eight posts written for an environmental blog idea, a sample sketch and a half for a great history blog's Indiegogo, and two finished art pieces. Creativity overload!

I thought I would share some WIP shots I took of the piece that took me out of my slump and cat-apulted me back into drive (I couldn't resist):

 Materials: toned card stock, mechanical pencil, Faber-Castile pens, watercolor, white gel pen, white conte pencil, black and white Prismacolors.

Stock art: a vintage postcard

The jewelry is based on Victorian/Edwardian Egyptian Revival jewelry, so not ancient but it is period for Art Nouveau.

Passive Solar Fabric Dyeing

Passive Solar Dyeing

The weather this week has been very unusual for the Midwest. It's barely gone below 90° F at night, and, with humidity, the highs have been greater than 101° F (32° C and 38° C, respectively). I decided to capture some of this free energy by dyeing linen thread using passive solar heat. Like a slightly toxic, colorful version of sun tea, if you will.

The dark blue enamel makes it hard to tell that the dye is wine red.

The setup is very simple. You just need direct sunlight, a dye container, and a clear or dark colored cover. Anything you will never use for food in the future and don't mind being stained will work as a dye pot, and a piece of glass, clear plastic, or even trash bags will work as the cover. I used my trusty enameled dye pot and a clear bin I had lying around.

Capture the summer heat to dye yarn or fabric.

I wound my linen thread into a skein and loosely tied it with some blue warp scraps. Then I plopped the skein in the premixed Rit dye and put the cover on top to concentrate the sunlight and to keep mosquitoes and thirsty critters out. I left the skein in the dye bath all day and overnight, moving it to keep it in direct sunlight, and stirring every few hours.

Here's what it looked like after rinsing.

Not a perfect coverage, but good enough for the project I have in mind. Dyeing it outside definitely helped me keep the inside of my house cool! Next time I'll pre-soak the skein, tie it looser, and stir it more often and see if that helps get the color more even.

Quite a successful experiment in saving energy and making the killer heat useful!

The Basil that Refused to Die

Last year I bought a cute little basil plant at my local farmers market. A winkled old gypsy lady sold it to me. I heard that she had pulled up in a brightly painted wagon as a cloud covered the sun, and though she made much money selling both homey and mysterious herbs, she left and was never seen again.

Or maybe I've been reading too much cliched fantasy lately.

Okay, I bought it at a perfectly ordinary tent from a perfectly ordinary woman, but the dang basil plant is quite magical all on its own. Last summer, I did nothing right for the poor plant. I picked leaves from its base, not from its tips. I watered it haphazardly and not at all often. Then, insults of insults, I dug it up after the first frost, put it in a pot, and brought it inside. In my ignorance, I put it in an east-facing window. It lasted until November then kicked the bucket. However, by that time I had cloned it—by accident.

When I brought the plant inside, I had trimmed off a few stalks. I didn't feel like hanging them up to dry right then, so I put them in a vase, set it on the dining room table, and forgot about them. A week later, I noticed that the leaves hadn't drooped or withered. A week after that, I saw that it had grown roots. A month or two after that (around the time the parent plant died), I decided that I had better pot the poor thing. After two months with no soil, nutrition, or strong daylight, you would think that I'd have a sickly, slow-growing or even dying plant.

Third generation cloned basil sprouting roots.

\

Nope, I put it in the south window in the kitchen, and it thrived. Oh did it thrive. It blossomed, it grew through the blinds, and, finally, it took over the window. I kept trimming the stalks, and they just came back, twice as strong. I'd forget to water it for two weeks (this happened repeatedly), then I would frantically poor water on it, certain it would never recover. In a few hours it was back to being it's perky, happy self.

So this summer, I take it outside and bury back out in the garden. I don't waste time on letting it adjust slowly to the violent rainstorms and lack of climate control; I just plant it. After all, it doesn't care, why should I?

A week later, and its even greener and healthier than before. Magic, I tell you Magic.

Confessions of a Gardening Addict

I do not have a green thumb. Through a combination of ignorance, bad timing, and both over- and under-watering, I have never had anything I would call a real harvest from my garden, other than the Basil Plant that Will Not Die, Why Won't the Sunflowers Go Away? and Where Did All This Catnip Come From?

One year I decided to grow zucchini the summer that everyone's zucchini failed (mine was no exception), and the next year featured sweet peppers that never got larger than my very small fists (though my peppers were slightly larger than my friends'). I have catnip and sunflowers growing as gorgeous weeds, but I killed my supposedly hardy mint plant. My father could grow tomatoes on a west facing balcony in the most polluted part of Tokyo, yet I can't get a tomato to bear a single fruit in a sunny backyard. Don't even ask about my dismal strawberry harvest. Or the potatoes, or the green beans...well, you get the picture.

Plants seem to thrive despite my care—not because of it. I can't grow clover, but my “rescued” rosebushes are thriving on neglect. The year I deliberately planted sunflowers, none got taller than two feet. The next year I had a rogue sunflower in my catnip bed that towered over me by a good foot or so. This year I have “volunteer” sunflowers growing everywhere, even in the cracks of the concrete patio.

With this less than stellar background, you might not be surprised by my poor, pitiful pea harvest.

Between an unseasonably warm spring and only planting ten or so seeds from a “expired” seed packet, the fact that I got any peas was a blessing.

What surprised me was how delicious they were! Juicy, sweet as sugar, melt in your mouth when raw. I gobbled those suckers right up. And in a few months, I'll be digging up the green beans and hoping I can sneak in another harvest in the fall. South Dakota winters can start...mmm...anytime between mid-September to late November, so we'll see.

Extreme Spinning: Alien Seed Pod Thread

A while back, I received a mysterious package from my good friend Katie the Ninja (visit her blog Okra of Doom for daring adventures of the gardening kind). The phrase, “Hana, you will never guess what's in this,” adorned the outside.

The mysterious package and contents, along with my trusty Navajo spindle.

 

She was right! Inside was a letter, a comic, and a large ball of fluffy softness. It was like the essence of smooth silk and fluffy kittens. You can almost imagine it purring. Which is why I was slightly alarmed when I read her letter and discovered that the fluff had been extricated from a alien seed pod found growing on a tree in California. The tree has gray bark with green veins and thick, bendy limbs. Any information on it, oh internet wanderer, would be appreciated.

The discovery of the alien seed pod fluff, by Katie.

The fibers of this fluff are quite short. I don't know if I can spin this....

 

However, despite my reservations (what if aliens show up demanding their seed pod padding back?) she had sent it to me to see if the fluff could be spun, and I rose to the challenge.

My trusty spindle ready for action.

Quick hand twisted roving. I may need to borrow the neighbor's wool combs...

It attaches easily to the leader thread, a good sign.

And we have thread! Alien thread...

And it could! It can be spun!

Happy Birthday, Katie!