Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Second Piece in Hennie's Mole: Nora's Entry


Nora is a Dermatologist whose office is at the corner of Mack and Moran and I walk by it nearly every day. I love seeing her flowers and I poked my head in and took a picture of them the other day, and made this piece from that picture. It is done with Faber-Castel PITT artist pens, pigment markers and pens, and a few other pigment pens. I was trying to capture the delicate range of hues that showed up in the flower photograph that to the eye in person were primarily white, yellow and pinkish, but unfortunately, the pens simply do not have the rage of hues needed so I had to do the best I could with the selection I had. I think watercolor paints, which can be mixed and diluted, might have worked better, but this coated yellow paper does not work well for me with water color--they tend to bead up and leave lots of little dots and look uneven and ugly. Maybe someone else can do it, but I can't seem to. So, this is my best effort to use the actual paper in the book rather than pasting something in. I probably should attempt to make pieces that don't refer to something real so that I won't be so disappointed by the results. I worked on this every day for 6 days, during and after meals and when I took a break from working on my Fellowship application. The intense concentration of studying each petal and subtle hues on it was a welcome break from studying each word in my application, and I discovered that working on it relieved my headaches that I got from the Fellowship application work, which was good.

Click the image to view it larger.

I have a suggestion: I added the tag Hennie's Mole to this, using the pseudonym she chose to sue rather than her real name. If everyone adds that tag to their pieces from her mole, Hennie can click on that link and see all the pictures people have done in her mole. The same for everyone else. We need to use the same tag for each person, though, for it to work properly.

People can also include their own names in the tags and then someone could chose to click on the artist names and see all the work they have presented on this blog. And if you include a tag for the media, someone could see all work done with pigment markers or all work done in pencil or water colors by all of us.

If we added the type of Moleskine, we could compare the work in the different types. We'd have to agree on a tag for each, eg: watercolor mole or ??? for the other kind with the greasy or waxy yellow paper.

3 comments:

ballookey said...

I've been away from my feeds because I'm so busy at work, so I just saw this. That's a lot of work with those pens! I haven't seen the photo, but I think you did an excellent job working from it.

I don't have so much trouble with the yellow paper, but on the other hand, I'm not trying watercolors on it. I personally find the watercolor paper intimidating because it's so much more costly if I make a mistake. So far, so good, I guess. But in the regular books I know that if I bungle it completely, I can make it so no one will be the wiser. The watercolor paper hides no secrets!

Mary Stebbins Taitt said...

Thanks, Balookey. I'm kind of a big bungler myself--I guess it's all in what you're used to like macs and PCs.

Mary Stebbins Taitt said...

:-D THANKS!