Beautiful Baby Exhibition

Back in 2006, I was invited to create an illustration for a traveling exhibit sponsored by the Society of Illustrators. The theme is You must have been a Beautiful Baby. Fifty illustrators were asked to create a piece of artwork that depicted them at some point before their 12th birthday.
I chose a version of my nine-year-old self and painted a picture of me looking through the Bionic eye of my Col. Steve Austin doll.
The show is still on the move. It is about to make an appearance in Plainview Texas this fall.
I dug out the artist's statement. It is below.

The Bionic Illustrator?

You may remember an action show from the seventies called The Six Million Dollar Man. It starred Lee Majors as Colonel Steve Austin, an astronaut who was badly injured in an airplane crash. They rebuilt his battered body with bionic parts, which gave him super-human strength. Each episode would feature him getting caught up in some crime-solving melee’, culminating in him moving on to another town, so his identity wouldn’t be discovered.
As a kid, I dreamed of being Mrs. Colonel Austin. But Steve was the same as every good super hero. He could never be in a committed relationship.
The show spawned an action figure of Steve that had a futuristic bionic arm. That arm, of course, was the first thing to get broken off. The Steve doll also had a hole in the back of its head. This allowed you to look in and see what the Bionic Man might be viewing through his incredible Bionic eye. This feature required the doll to have an empty eye socket on his face. As a child, I thought this was really cool. As an adult, I find this disturbing.
When I fast-forward to present day, I realize that things turned out pretty well for me. Ok, I don’t have a Bionic husband who can leap 16-foot chain-link fences or witness a crime in progress half a mile away. But all in all, he’s a pretty good guy. Heck, he let me keep all of my old toys.


Media: Watercolor on Paper

The miracle of loaves and sharks...

I am doing the cookbook cover for our church. It should be out before Christmas and will be a lovely holiday gift. Mary Oxenrider is going to share all of her secret recipes that we've come to love over the years.
Anyway, I am doing the cover. The black and white picture is the sketch we've decided upon. I sketched it from my imagination which is what I typically do.
The challenging part is recreating my sketch into real life. I do that, photograph it, and paint from the photograph.
Sometimes real life looks nothing like I imagined. This was one of those times when I got it pretty close.
On Monday, I drove all over town looking for goblets, the right bread, a table cloth, and wheat. The theme is loaves and fishes. I really didn't want to use real fish- they're expensive, smell bad, and I'd probably have to throw them out after an hour under the hot lights.
Then it hit me. Juliet's Beanie Baby sharks. "Crunch" was her very very favoritist toy ever. One time, she lost it. She cried for days. That was at the height of the Beanie Baby fad, and unfortunately, Crunch was a rare, discontinued toy. Ralph's mother had some connections in PA. She was able to obtain two Crunches which she sent out very quickly. We tucked one away in case of another loss, and we told Juliet that we found Crunch and that somehow he was clean again and had a new tag.
Soon after that, she found the original Crunch. She had put him in a dresser that I was refinishing at the time.
We then gave her the other Crunch and that's how she got three little shark bean bags that are remarkably the same size as Mackerels.
Any port in a storm, right?
BTW, Juliet is a really cool teen these days. She'd probably hate me for revealing this, but she still keeps her three little sharks on a shelf in her room. AWWWWWW!

Painting away a Sunday.

I got another chance to paint with real paint today. It is going well, but I am starting to lose my light. This little picture is on canvas paper. I like it and wish I painted it on a surface that is better quality.
I still have to work on the ears and lighten up the contrast a bit on the fence on the left side. He has issues, but they will have to wait for some other time. I promised the girls I would take them to the pool this afternoon.

goofing around.

Where is my work ethic today?
I thought I would try out a new watercolor pencil I found at Pat Catans. Actually, this product is not watercolor, it's water soluble graphite and it's probably been around for years. But this is all new to me, so I thought I'd experiment with it. My watercolors were nearby so my experiment turned into a watercolor sketch. I will try to have more discipline and put the colors away and try the graphite thing again.
Well it's time to do some paying stuff now.