It’s the third or fourth day in a row we’ve been under a heat warning. Yesterday it was 103 and up to 80% humidity. How there be so much humidity without at least a few rain drops falling? Oh, yeah, they never make it to the ground. Still, I can dream of Cool Water with my pens and moleskine (it is not true that all Texans own swimming pools!) Meanwhile we and our dog take refuge indoors. The house has a working air conditioner, there are two oscillating fans blowing the cold air around, and I have a tall glass of Lipton iced tea, with no sugar, plenty of lemon and enough condensation on the outside of the glass to drip down my fingers when I pick it up.

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to main, to whom thou sayst,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” (John Keats)

Practicing with my pens, drawing around blobs of paint to see what they make. Kind of like cloud-watching…This is a lightning goddess about to hurl a bolt of golden electricity to earth.

I liked the color combination so well I hated to journal over it. Two light coats of Golden acrylic glaze, Sea Foam Green with Violet Earth on top, and then a bit of brown crayola. Rubber stamped borders and my favorite red Gelly Glaze pen for contrast. I do love my Gelly Glaze! I bought a couple of bottles of glaze a long time ago when I first began experimenting with paint and collage. I thought I ought to use them up. I lean more to acrylic in a tube.

The blue down the center is leakage from another page. I accidentally bought the moleskine sketch book instead of the notebook, and I’m still getting used to the way it’s stitched, as well as the color of the paper. It leaks more in the gutter than the notebooks I’ve had.

I think art is better therapy than pharmaceuticals; I hate not being able to ditch medication altogether.

Ok, it’s been 3 months or so since I updated the blog; maybe I should begin again. I’ve had brain blight; in other words recurrence of depression. When it happens I usually crawl into my protective shell and live in my own little world until I feel like poking my head out. As an analogy, I posted the above photo from our garden. Our tomato plants started out like gangbusters this spring; we had lots of blossoms and SO many tomatoes of all sizes. The plants started wilting and we thought it was the hot weather, but now we know they have “early blight”, an incurable fungus. These two cherry tomatoes are about all that’s left. You can see the blight in the lower right corner of the photo as it works its way up the plant. Apparently the only thing you can do is to pull the plants up, put in some new plants, and hope for another harvest in the fall. My mom put in two new plants today, so I thought I’d start “re-planting” my blog as well.

I added the “and graveyards” to the blog title because lately I’ve been photographing headstones in a local historic cemetery and I may end up writing about my experiences. The photos are uploaded to a searchable site, findagrave.com, so anyone can see them. The site is a wonderful tool for genealogists.

I have a hard time keeping up with art challenges, but I stopped in at just the right time for Michelle Ward’s monthly Street Team crusade focusing on the use of tissue paper as a texture/layer element.

I’ve used tissue paper before but not this way, so I really didn’t know what to expect. I used white gesso to coat some bright magenta tissue and some lighter weight brown. I then painted the tissues with yellow and gold acrylic and used rubber stamps with paint to imprint some designs and words. I also used some markers and pens on some “untreated” brown tissue. I tore the paper and layered it onto paper, canvas, and board using thinned white glue. This canvas was the result I liked the best. The glue added some sheen to the tissue, and while the markers bled, the pen lines did not (see upper left corner).

I didn’t have a plan for a composition. I was just experimenting. I decided this made a good playground for some of these little “helmet fish” I’ve been drawing lately. I drew the fish on some scrap paper and glued them down. After I finished, I decided the composition looked better upside down, so that’s how you’re seeing it.

I like old comic strips; they’re a favorite source of models for drawing practice. This was a truly obnoxious character from 1900 called Mischievous Willie. He makes Dennis the Menace look well-behaved. At least most of the mischief caused by Dennis seem inadvertent rather that premeditated.

Wanna be normal? Take a pill. More collage thoughts in the sketchbook. I like how the pages take the glue stick, but if I come back later to do a wash on the back side of the page the glue starts dissolving.

I’m trying some ideas for future collages in my new sketchbook. I’ve lately been enamored of some 1950s cigarette cards found in the New York Public Library Digital Collection depicting rockets of the era. I use the images for drawing practice, as the forms are fairly simple and good for a beginner, I think. I’m hoping to emulate these old color combinations, too. In the meantime collage will have to do.

Putting the new sketchbook through its paces has stimulated some experimenting. Yay!