Still Playing Blog Catch-Up

My mom's birthday was last week so I made her this little painting based on an old photo of the two of us.  My mom was so 80's chic in her Diane Keaton style menswear.  I usually shy away from making gift paintings (sooo agonizingly time-consuming), but my mom did give me life and all of that good stuff.  Plus, she really likes my bird head women paintings.  My sister, Meghan, on the other hand, thinks they're creepy.  She uses gentler language to express this, like "irksome" and "unsettling."  But I know she really means creepy.  

Here's a little doodle I made last week while I was experimenting with drawing and painting on my tea-stained paper:And my bean plants are still growing:This week I've been working on cutting tree silhouettes out of pieces of watercolor-stained rice paper.  This one is almost finished now, but I have yet to capture the progress with a photo.This is how these cut-outs will be arranged when I mount them on the birch panel:
My goal is to create a kind of forest or garden-scape populated with bird head women.  So that's what I'll be working on next week.

There's a great drawing show up at the New Art Center in Newton, MA, where I teach on Mondays.  I've used it as a teaching tool for both, kids' and adult classes.  Here are some (but not all) of the highlights:

Detail from Randy Garber's drawing on a piano scroll

Aparna Agrawal

Rebecca Kinkead (I have never felt this way about a stump before).

Deb Putnoi's Drawing Lab, where kids and adults can abandon their drawing hang ups and draw with wild abandon!