Thursday, April 24, 2008

Let there be light!

Some traditional color pencil sketches on black cardstock ATC's. It's fun to just draw sometimes! =)


Candlelight


Red Lantern


Fireflies Jar

Sunday, April 20, 2008

This Spring's Orchids

Here's pictures of orchids picked from my backyard recently. It's not a wide variety of colors but I think the soft pinks and muaves are beautiful, and I wanted to capture them somehow with this series of photos... Happy Spring!





Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Something New...

So for the past few weeks, I've been playing around more with gouache. It's such a great medium! I love its coverage, blending capability, and just the way the brush moves it on paper. I went to a gouache demo some time ago, and the artist who was teaching was telling us that it was ok NOT to be exact when you paint. She said "let your brush dance on the canvas". Ok, well here's my very first gouache piece. Yeah I need more practice, but I did what she said and just let my brush "dance".


Something else I'm trying out is woodburning. Now this technique does take some getting used to, but it's fun! ooh, but watch out and don't squeeze the handle of the woodburning tool but instead lightly hold it like a pen. Otherwise, you'll get a fat heat blister on your finger like me. Yes, I burned myself quite badly doing this one.



Ok, totally unrelated but I was able to catch American Idol tonight and David Cook --Wow, you go boy! BRILLIANT!!!

Friday, April 4, 2008

The Only Moving National Historic Landmark


This week, I actually managed to do something I hadn't done before -- I rode a cable car! It's funny... I've lived in the SF Bay Area for most of my life, but that was one thing I just hadn't gotten the chance to do yet until now.

My work sent me to the city for a few days to attend a conference, and I knew I did not want to drive in, so public transportation was the alternative option. After taking our subway/metro system, I caught the California/Van Ness cable car line to the hotel.

I didn't realize that it took 2 people to operate it, with each car propelled by a continuously moving cable running at a constant speed underneath. Each car can be stopped and started by releasing and gripping the cable. One of the drivers mentioned that they had to change the cables every 100 days. You can read more about cable cars and a bit of their history here.

It was a fun commute over these last three days - but a ride on a cable car is way expensive -- $5 one way! That's a high price to pay for something that's kind of old, and goes pretty slow over a relatively short route. I mean, riding the MUNI metro is only $1.50. So the cable cars are more for the tourists than for most regular commuters. I would have tried to walk on other days, but the streets are really steep and the MUNI couldn't take me directly to the conference site the way the cable car could (yeah I know I'm SO lazy). Anyway, it was a fun experience nonetheless.