Dandelyon's Worlds

My sister, Dragon, and I made a plan to go march with the women in DC, because the voices of women and minorities matter, and if our new President understands anything, it's ratings, and I am hoping he will see all the women and QUILTBAG people and other minorities and allies who care enough to travel to his city to send him a message, and that he will want to earn our vote. If not, well, our other elected representatives will see us, and will remember we care. The house and cats and fish are well-tended, just not at the moment by me.

As I often do when I get together with this sister, we sat and painted together, each on our own projects, but with conversation and critique, sharing of supplies, and cheering each other on.

So, here is the revised (and still very much unfinished) painting:



As always, your comments & suggestions are welcome too (meaning, not just my sister's)!

So, a while back I did a painting inspired by going to Milwaukee's Indian Summer Festival and watching the dancers. I was very proud of it, but it lacked contrast. Still, where I was in skill, I hesitated to mess with it. I liked the composition and a lot of other things about it, and didn't want to risk ruining what I'd achieved.

But my skill and my confidence have both improved, in part thanks to @EllenMillion's sketchfest, and so finally, this week, I risked it.

I made almost no actual changes, but I added layers of paint to give it contrast and I added a lot of detail. Before it was very orange. Now it's still very orange, but it's more than that. (I should have thought to take a "before" picture. There might be one on my computer, but I'm tired, and I'm not taking the time to look.)

So, here is my Spirit of the Desert (with a watermark). It's acrylic on a 9 x 12 inch canvass.



Comments welcome! I'm at the *stare at it for a few days to see if it's done* stage.

A couple of days ago it was Mother’s Day, and—as is usual on my Facebook these days, because I have friends who care deeply and passionately about our world and the people in it—there was a lot of politics on my wall. One of the things on my wall was a friend (admittedly not a Clinton fan) who expressed horror that Hillary was willing to accept support from Republicans. In her mind, that was proof that Hillary doesn’t share any values with liberals.

And I cringed. This was, after all, Mother’s Day, a day when we all—liberals, conservatives, the apolitical, and people whose politics are best described on some other axis—celebrate our marvelous mothers or console our friends who had the misfortune to be born to mothers who aren’t so marvelous. We all value family, just as we all value warmth when it’s cold. Like today—cold and rainy, prompting me to reach for something warm. I tried a sweater, and it was too scratchy. With all the political uproar, I wanted more comfort than that.

There’s this old silk jacket I have. I bought it at the thrift store years ago even though it was a bit threadbare because the colors—purples and blues and greens—are marvelous and it fits gently around me and it’s so soft and sensual. It feels good, like a warm hug made of rose petals. It was old when I bought it, and now the outer silk is pulling apart in strips and shreds. Periodically, I pick this jacket up and give in to the illogical urge (why not just replace it?) to take satin scraps or shapes cut from old silk shirts and patch the areas that are the most tattered.

I pick it up today and put it on long enough to warm up a little, and rip it some more trying to put my phone into a place that, as it turns out, is not the pocket after all. I look again at my Facebook and see more vitriol against that other mother who hopes to help the world from the big white house in DC, and I take the jacket off again. I cut a bit of purple from a ripped silk sleeve I’ve been using to clean my glasses and start stitching it to the coat, and I feel comforted.

Our social fabric is tattered right now, pulled apart by low income and bigotry and fear. But we can’t just throw it away and buy a new one. Someone has shared a quote showing that Trump thinks he can get the nation through hard times by not paying our debt. I sigh. I so very much don't want to see more things like that, so I switch over to Live Journal on the computer and read a poem where a policeman tries to help a person with superpowers who has PTSD. Then I listen to an interview of Hillary, so I can close that tab on the web browser. I enjoy listening to Hillary when she can actually talk about her hopes for what she can accomplish if she’s President, and it’s easier to sew when I’m listening instead of reading. I reflect that our world is kind of like the poor super-kid in the poem, broken and traumatized and scared.

The bit of purple silk stitched firmly to the sleeve, I go looking to see what I can find that’s suitable to put next to it. Our youngest cat, Nebula, is sleeping in a box of material, and is quite bemused when I pull the box out and dig through things around and under her. She blinks at me, strange human, and I rub her under her chin. I find a scrap of white brocade not much more than an inch wide, and some blue satin and green brocade, and part of a tie whose off-white lining could work. And a hairball. Ugh. I brush the old dried mess into the trash and consign that bit of cloth to the laundry, along with some clothes that will probably be donated.

Then back to my old jacket with safety pins and material. I cut and lay down several more pieces and pin them in place. Some of them will doubtless get moved around as I stitch, but it’s a plan. I thread the needle again and continue. The lovely smooth texture of the silks and brocades calms me. It feels as if each stitch is sending healing energy out into the world, a gentle prayer or bit of kind sympathetic magic to help us all in our quest to make the world a little healthier, a little less ragged, and a little more beautiful.

I use up the thread on my needle and tie it off. Next is a spot where the original fabric is just gone, the rough lining showing through. It reminds me of the places where lies and hatred have hurt me and people I care about, but I smile, because here on this jacket I can fix things. More green, I think, to cover this spot. Green would look good. We could use more green in our politics too, and fewer lies. More kindness and less fear. I pin and I stitch, and I send my good wishes out into the world, and in my head is a line from science fiction that has, contrary to all expectations, become popular culture: “Make it so.”

So, I picked a more-or-less random stranger over on Flight Rising and did a portrait of one of their dragons as a surprise holiday gift. Since FR posts don't make it easy to share art that's not posted somewhere, I'm posting it somewhere!



To PinkiePastel: Rynzin struck me as more of a lover than a fighter, and maybe a bit of a dancer. I hope you like the portrait!

And, of course, other stuff. I try to clear out other errands to leave open time for sketchfest and muse fusion, but it rarely works out the way I want. This weekend, not only do we have both Sketchfest and Muse Fusion, but tomorrow is the only Sunday this month that the others in our writers' group could get together, so I have to review the stuff we're critiquing and head out do do that instead of staying in my own little creative cocoon.

Part of me is yelling, Make room! Make room! Clearly, I need to get better at making room time-wise as well as space-wise. Ah, well, I'll get better at it. I am determined.

But in the meantime, I have a couple of things to share:



Both of these are on 12x12 canvasses, though I like the closeup picture of the Gryphon Nebula better than the other pictures I took--I took a bunch, but the others look less in focus. Maybe I can get a better pic in daylight? Mostly, the cell phone camera is great, but every once in a while, it's ornery. But life is like that in general, isn't it?



You're welcome, still, to stop by Sketchfest or the Muse Fusion, check out what other people are doing, and if you want, leave some prompts.

A long time ago, I was more active in the SCA than in fandom. No one hassles you about glasses in the SCA, but they're Not Period. So, when I got out my sketchbook (which I did a lot, since autoharps are also not period), I drew people without their glasses.

Through some strange mental alchemy, I stopped noticing people's glasses. It was as if they became invisible to me, unless something called attention to them. That persisted during the years when I rarely picked up a pencil to draw, and why not? It's the person that matters, not their clothes--or their glasses!

Then My Angel fell, nearly bleeding to death, and afterward joked to the nurses that her balance was better if she couldn't see. Sure enough, her eyes had, with age, degenerated to the point where she needed different prescriptions for each eye, and the lack of glasses was a bad idea. Suddenly I needed to retrain my brain to notice if she was wearing her glasses. Or at least try to. It's not as easy as you'd think to undo years of habit.

But I've made some progress.

At Worldcon, I joined my sister, Dragon, and her daughter at one of the Sketching From Life panels. At one point, while we were sketching, Dragon talked about the sketching she'd done while studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. She mentioned doing 30-second poses, and the teachers pressing them to draw at least something for each pose. In that zen-drawing state I was in, I responded that that sounded like fun. Several people nearby stared at me as if I was nuts, and Dragon answered, "What it is is really hard." "Well, yeah." I said. But hard doesn't mean not-fun. If you push enough past your limits and dive into the flow of the process, hard can be a great deal of fun.

Later, I went to the Hugo ceremonies, again with my sketchbook, and I thought, "Well, I said it would be fun, so why don't I just do it--sketch the people presenting and accepting Hugos. So I did--with varying levels of success, of course. Pushing your limits is always like that. And it was, indeed, fun.

I drew a lot of people--and I drew a LOT of glasses. The exercise made me very aware of an unsurprising fact. Most of my people, like me, wear glasses.

When we moved in, we realized that the plumbing in the downstairs bathroom had a bad leak -- the sink and bathtub drains leaked right onto one of the beams that holds up the house. When we got into the basement and reached up, I found I could put all four fingers into that pipe. A couple years back, after opening up the wall on the other side, we fixed that. I still have a six-inch segment of pipe we removed, that basically lacks an inch-wide segment completely along its whole length.

Not long after that, the allergies informed me that there was some mold behind the plastic tile. Now, mind you, this is inevitable, that's why they don't let you use plastic tile on bathroom walls any more. But that meant tearing it out, which (since it had been glued to the plaster) left me with four walls that needed extensive plastering. I am very excited that the walls are now almost done. I've even put some paint on parts; I'll buy a waterproofing paint for the top layer, so we can use the shower down there if we want to.

So we've been discussing bathroom decor.

A long time ago, I picked up one of those sun-moon-and-stars shower curtains at rummage. More recently, friends gifted us with a whole set of bathroom things on that theme, including an identical shower curtain (read here "window drape" since the window is above the tub).

So I went online to find some suitable towel racks. Instead, I found shower curtain hooks. Bonus! But the towel rods were all unsuitable or boring.

Then I found two of these:



Now, the color isn't great, but I figured I could fix that. So, last night we watched Babylon 5 while I painted. This one is probably almost done:



And here she is with her sister, who still has some resin showing through:



Slowly, we're getting to the point where the first floor bathroom will finally not be an ongoing project!

A couple of days ago, I was going to post one of my monster sketches from last weekend, but Live Journal wouldn't let me post. Hopefully that won't be a problem tonight, be cause Elizabeth wrote a poem about the creature in one of my sketches!

So, here is the current sketch of the Unicorn Jelly:


And here is the link to the poem:  http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/2836864.html

Finally, we would welcome some new prompts, whether related to Sea Monsters or not.  Of course, you're welcome to come peek in on us as we create or even join us.  http://torn-world.livejournal.com/151363.html

Life is still overbooked and frustrating, but there are words.

Just not very many on Live Journal right now. But I have a new poem up over at Torn World: http://www.tornworld.net/storypageview.php?id=512

It goes with this painting:



So far, May is starting better than April did, creatively speaking.  Here's keeping my fingers...well, crossed isn't the right metaphor, is it?

I was hoping F would fall on Friday, since, well, Friday.

But instead I'll celebrate having so many artists in my life.




Icons by djinni (who will probably launch a new Free Icon day shortly)




Eggs by family!

And of course there's all the artists who've contributed to Torn World or joined in at Sketchfest or who post their works  in progress on LiveJournal or DreamWidth.

Nimble minds and hands
Every artist brings me joy
Each of them unique

Thanks, all of you, for bringing beauty and whimsy to my days.