...and a New Car!

Quickly through the class stuff...

The visiting Artist yesterday was Gregory Benton. I admit that I wasn't too excited... I had looked at his B+F book in the library. I thought the dog was really cute... but as I read, the lady gets kind of hacked up and a little dog runs off with her foot. It's the kind of drawing where there is a bone sticking out of the meat. Ick. I stopped reading and the librarian handed me a Tintin saying, "this might help you feel better." Yes, thank you.

So - not too excited, and rather desperate to get to my picture book sketching! But, as always, there is something to be learned from every artist! Greg showed a whole bunch of these teeny, tiny comics he had made, talked about the risograph process (like silkscreening mated to photocopying), and then let us examine his art up close during the break.

I was really taken with this piece, below. I could see some subtle blue pencil guidelines on the edges of the drawing but this isn't "inked" in black as we have been doing with our art. So I asked him to explain how he did it. He used watercolor and colored inks and just painted in the lines as he went. (!?) If you look really closely, you'll see that the background lines are blue, and pink, and the ones on the left are green. This was a really big piece. Kind of - wow.

And today, I got my new car!!!!! This was my birthday present (September) but I had to wait a month while they tracked it down for me.

It's a new model, a Honda, HR-V, and I wanted it in purple. It's a very dark purple and looks almost black or indigo and has sparkles in the sunlight. It gets 35mpg - my Toyota Siena mini-van was doing between 17 and 22mpg. And I felt silly driving a mini-van... alone. But I got a very good trade in for it so I told it how grateful I was for its years of service and I wished it well. I think it will take me a while to get used to driving a "small" car, but it's not as small as it's little brother, the Fit. And the seats fold up in so many cool ways - car origami!

And the back door... the handle is on the side of the window - so it looks like a two-door, not a four-door car.

Alex was horrified when I told him it would be purple. He was picturing the color of the shutters on our house. What? I LIKE that color! But, no, I wanted a more subtle car. He looked relieved when Lilah and I brought it home. And this is so much cooler than driving a minivan.