Vocabulary Words (& random doodles)

Another wonderful way to WASTE time! Actually, no, this is something I've been thinking about doing for many years....making pictures for sophomore vocabulary words. So one of them I made on a big index card at school with a ball point pen (while my sophomores were writing in their response journals) and the other, much less satisfactorily, digitally. The third image here is a doodle I made during Writer's Club (of which I am a sponsor) during a very animated discussion about the newest plot developments of the collaborative story the kids are working on (you can check it out at http://writinglikemad.blogspot.com/).

Dance weekend buttons

One nice thing about making things digitally, on the computer, is that the dog can't chew them up. He doesn't chew shoes, or socks, or gloves, or books, or musical instruments, but for some reason he likes watercolor paper, and no matter how well I feel I've put things away, he pulls out those pieces of paper and shreds them. Or at least partially shreds them. I have a lot of things now with corners missing. And I'm completely missing two pieces. I don't know where he's taken them, unless he's completely eaten them, leaving not even a scrap of paper.

But he can't do that with these.

I've made buttons for our local dance weekend for the past several years. Usually I do drawings, and then scan them and add the type. This time I did it all on the computer. It was actually really fun.

As I was looking for images of leaves on Google Images, I thought "This is really stupid--it's fall and there are a gazillion beautiful leaves out there." So I got some and scanned them. MUCH more satisfying.

The different colors are for different folks--all weekend people, part-time people, and then the band and board members.

Illustration Friday: Spooky

Aha! I got this one "done" (or sortof done anyway) this week too. I should have just waited to post this week's Illustration Friday picture.

This was from a sketch I did maybe six or seven years ago. I always meant to do something with it, but never have before.

I'm not exactly satisfied with this, and may try to again with a traditional medium.

Illustration Friday: Transportation

I know, I know, I'm a week late here, but that's just the way it's going. I actually started this last week, but then kept ditzing with it, and now, when I should be finishing up a picture for "spooky", have decided this is done, at least for now.

I see this topic more as "transported" than "transportation." People are transported by their music.

Sketches

Here are some sketches from the past week or so. I'm not meeting my goal of a drawing every day, but it's sure better than nothing. I especially like the cedar tree. I normally don't have the patience for that kind of sitting and looking at details, but I'd taken my American Literature class out into the woods to write about nature (we'd been reading Walden), and they had all disappeared, and I was sitting on a rock for a good half hour, and so I actually took the time. I'm never disappointed when I do drawings like that, and really should do them more often.

Illustration Friday: Beneath

This topic makes me think of Edgar Allan Poe, who thought that beneath the face of the everyday lay the dark world of the human psyche, with all its fears and insanities. Not everything he wrote was twisted, with narrators on the verge of madness, but it was always close enough.

Just for the record, this is NOT the way I feel in my everyday life.

But here it is, for this week's topic.