Julie's Journal

I drew this in drawing class last night while my students were doing contour drawings of their shoes. These are my favorite pair of shoes. I love the stripes in the fabric and they have never hurt my feet. They have been my summer shoes (meaning in the summer I wore them about 97% of the time that I was wearing shoes) for two summers, but I think I will need to find a new pair for next summer. These are really starting to show some wear, and I didn’t realize how bad they looked until I started to draw them! They did however make a terrific subject with all the worn out spots and freyed threads. I also drew this pinecone. (These were both colored in photoshop, btw). The pinecone is being held between my thumb and finger of my left hand and the other fingers in the drawing crept in from a blind contour of my hand that I had done earlier on the same page.
My third drawing that I want to share with you is actually a 2page spread in my journal. Meal times around our house are sometimes quite a challenge. Sam has encouraged me to be having dinner ready to eat at 5:30. That is really pushing it some days, but I have been trying. But last night, I had drawing class, and as soon as dinner was over, I loaded the kids up to go to my friends house and we left everything on the table. When we all got home we had to get the kids in bed and cleaning up from dinner was the last thing on my mind, so when I came downstairs…finally glad to have some time to relax, I thought I should clean up and get that taken care of. As I looked at all the dishes, I started thinking about how I could tell which plate belonged to who by what was left and decided to do a journal entry about it. I painted these in watercolor, my travel set & waterbrush, in my moleskine…which as you may already know does not handle the watercolor so well. And so it really doesn’t look too terrific, but I honestly was not trying to do a great painting, it was more about recording how my children eat their food. Karson is going through a picky stage right now. I have found that anything that remotely resembles a casserole is “yucky” and he would love if every meal could consist of goldfish crackers, chips, ice cream cones and gum. And so he is usually disappointed in what he finds on his plate. Last night he didn’t touch the Hamburger Helper or his apple slices. He thoroughly enjoyed his corn on the cob…I picked it up from Ruehl’s farm market on Tuesday and it was awesome corn!