“Still Life with Oranges” by Helen E. H. Madden, colored pencil on paper
This one is another colored pencil exercise I did, from the same time period as last Friday’s image. The oranges have long since shriveled up or been eaten, but…
That table they’re sitting on is currently doing duty as a printer station in my home office, AND…
That piece of blue and white gingham fabric eventually went on to become part of my Xena Warrior Milkmaid costume. Which is still sitting in my closet somewhere.
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There is no hate greater than the hate you can feel for someone who manages to finish their exams by the second day of exam week. Trust me on this.
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Oh, this week’s webcomic is no joke. Princess went off to Girl Scout camp last week, leaving me with only one child to deal with, so I took advantage of the lightened workload to tackle something that’s been bugging the crud out of me for a while now. Namely, the disaster known as my garage.
You see, for the last few months, we’ve been traveling to my mother-in-law’s house to help clean the place up. We’ve spent entire weekends getting rid of junk, clearing out the basement and attic, and tackling the overgrown yard. It’s been for a good cause, but it’s been exhausting. And every time we do this, we come home with a bunch of stuff from Mom’s house that ends up shoved into whatever free space we can find in our house. Well, after we came home from the last trip, yours truly had a total melt-down over the fact that we were putting so much time and effort into cleaning someone else’s house while our own house was rapidly turning into a dump.
Well, I finally decided to do something about it. Hubster wanted to do it himself, I know, but his long work hours have pretty much left the man with only enough free time on the weekends to tackle the lawn and buy the groceries. Thankfully, after seeing how badly I was frothing at the mouth over this issue, he decided to stay out of my way and let me do whatever the hell I wanted to do. And what I wanted to do was start with the worst disaster area in our house, the garage.
On Monday last week, Pixie and I ventured into the garage and began our work by dismantling an old stationary bike that had been sitting in there for years. I had to hunt for the manual online to figure out how to take the bike apart, and in the end had to ask folks on Twitter for help. But once I had instructions, Pixie and I were able to take that sucker apart and get it loaded into the car and take it away to the local thrift store. Then came the hauling out of stuff – boxes, trash, tools, more boxes, more trash, more tools. We lined the front yard with the entire contents of the garage, just so I could see exactly what we had in there, what could be thrown out, what could be recycled, and what we actually needed to keep. It took me five hours to haul everything out. Then a thunderstorm started and it took me 15 minutes to toss everything back in, leaving the garage looking worse than before. But at least I knew what I was dealing with now.
The next day, I hit the hardware stores and bought pegboard, screws, and paint. I spray-painted the pegboard bright colors and then hauled everything out of the garage again and started sorting. Stuff that was never, not ever supposed to go back in the garage went onto our wrap-around porch, where it stayed until I could haul it away to the dump/thrift store/recycling center. Stuff that needed to stay got cleaned up and organized into its appropriate category – toys, tools, bikes, etc. When the garage was empty, I swept it out. When it was swept clean, I put up the first section of pegboard. By the time that was done, it was dark and I had to haul everything back in again, except for the stuff I left on the porch.
And this process of hauling out, sorting, cleaning, sweeping, and putting up pegboard went on for the rest of the week. At least once every day while Pixie and I cleaned the garage, someone stopped to ask me what time the garage sale started. One person even tried to buy my bike, and nearly had his head ripped off for that (I love my bike; don’t even THINK of buying my bike). In the process of doing this, I learned a lot. I learned that…
And I think that last item was the biggest thing I’ve taken away from this little home improvement project. I can fix something if it’s broken. I can tackle any project I set my mind to. And that’s a major thing for me. I’ve depended on the Hubster for years to do things around the house. I don’t have to do that anymore. If I want something fixed, I can learn how to do it myself.
Hubster may come to regret me learning this. Or he may not. Either way, now that I’ve started fixing up the garage, I intend to do the same to the rest of the house. So look out world! I’ve got a drill and a hammer and I’m not afraid to use them!
“Colorful Cat” by Helen E. H. Madden, colored pencil on paper
I almost didn’t get this post done. I try to do all my posts by Sunday before the week starts; otherwise they likely won’t get done. I’m writing this at 11:20PM on Sunday evening, you’re reading it sometime on Friday. I’m dead tired after a lousy week. I can only hope by the time you read this, things have turned around a bit.
Anyway, enough whining. This page of doodles was a drawing exercise I attempted many years ago. The exercise was listed in a colored pencil drawing book I have, and the point was to draw freehand, with as many colors as I liked, to see how the colors might work together in creating a sense of depth, warmth or coolness, texture, etc.
I love working in colored pencil. I haven’t done it in years, but maybe I’ll be able to change that this year. I have a complete collection of Prismacolor pencils, and I’d love to drag them out, sit down and start coloring. It’s very soothing to just lay down layer after layer of color, and slowly produce a richly colored work of art.
By the way, the cat in that picture is one of my old kitties that passed away a couple years ago. From the pose and the length of fur, I think it may be Lydia. Or it could be Fritti. The color was supposed to give the image life, but I failed to use it to accurately record which cat I was drawing at the time.
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Honestly, this is how I feel right now, with the start of the kids’ school year just around the corner. I am nowhere near ready to deal with all that stuff. Trying hard not to have a panic attack about it.
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Sorry guys, no color webcomic this week, but hey, you do get to see me in my undies!
Last week was just a lousy week, with everything that could go wrong, go wrong. Everything from a sunburn that I should have had the common sense to prevent to the website going down while migrating it to a new host to the kids seeming to actively destroy the house… You name it, it went wrong last week. And I hit the point around Friday evening when I finally just started singing the “Blow-Off Day” song non-stop because that’s how bad things were.
Then I dropped a whole carton of left-over hibachi shrimp on the kitchen floor the next day, and that’s when I started swearing non-stop.
Anyway, here’s hoping this week is better. We’ll see.
PS – let me know if you encounter any problems with the website. I think I fixed all the glitches, but I can’t be certain. Thanks!
“Backyard” by Helen E. H, Madden, date unknown, probably late 70s or early 80s
I don’t know why I drew this picture. This is my backyard, or rather, why was behind my backyard, when I was growing up. We lived very near the Chesapeake Bay and we had a canal that ran behind all the houses on our side of the street. Every house on the canal had a small boat dock, and we actually had a sailboat for many years. I think we may have gotten rid of it when it capsized on my dad one time. I can’t recall. I do recall Dad let my sister and I name the boat and we called it “Butterfly.”
I remember when my mom saw this drawing, she said it was our backyard at low tide. The water did get pretty low then, but that’s not what I was trying to draw. The lines in the water that run under the cock in the mid-ground were actually meant to depict the area of water that reflected the sun late in the afternoon.
My sister and I used to swim in this canal. It was salt water, very muddy on the bottom, and could fill up with huge jellyfish at a moment’s notice. We always had to wear shoes when we swam in the canal, because the bottom was littered with mollusk shells that could cut our feet open. But the mud was very sticky and I lost a lot of shoes in that canal.
Some nights, when I dream, I dream about going out on our dock and getting into the little dinghy we used to own. Then I row out into the bay and I can’t figure out how to get back. I don’t dream this often, but it’s both scary and kind of cool when I do. I miss being able to just row away in a little boat.
Anyway, this is a drawing of my old backyard.
Yes, the website was all screwed up for about 24 hours, and I just about ripped out all my hair, but now it’s back up. At least I hope it is. If you’re reading this blog post, chances are good that we’re finally back to what loosely resembles normal around here.
Why the down time? Well, I needed to switch webhost providers this month. For years, I’ve been hosting this site on GoDaddy.com, but I’ve been getting more and more turned off by their advertising campaign, and I made the decision back in January, after seeing their Super Bowl ads, to move the website to a new web host as soon as I could afford it. Being the poor artist that I am, it took me a while to gather up the funds. It also took me a while to decide on a new host, and to gear myself up for what I knew would be a painful experience.
And it was painful. Boy howdy was it no fun the last 24 hours trying to get this site moved. I have only myself to blame in the end. I’ve not kept up with my website administrator skills, and I am going to fix that over the course of the next year or so. Ignorance is not bliss, and I prefer to be able to do my own tech support so I don’t have to drive other people crazy or go crazy waiting for them to email me back while we try to solve technical difficulties over a long distance.
I do have to say that the tech support for my new web host provider, Dreamhost, was very patient with me and they spent a lot of time helping me get the site back up and running. Hopefully, they won’t mind helping me move the VeryScaryArt.com site as well.
Anyhoo, we are back. Or I think we are. I’ll know for certain as soon as I publish this post. Which should be right… about… now!
And we are having conniptions and tantrums to go along with the aforementioned technical difficulties. My apologies folks, but I am in the process of migrating the website from one host to another, and the WordPress blog and its database have proved tricky to deal with. Tech support and I are working on it. I’ll keep you posted.
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It can take a lot of hairspray to keep my hair in place when it’s long, especially if I’ve got to take on and pull off a wheel cover or BDU cap all day long. Some days, I had so much hairspray in my hair, you could just reach up and snap off a lock of my hair! Of course, then I’d hit you for it.
