Reflections on painting pottery....and kittens!! :-D

This is going to be a different sort of blog post. For on thing, it's a day late (sorry about that). For another, it's not about the art I usually do. 

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to go to a "paint your own pottery" place with a few friends. Since coming up with an idea on the spot is hard, I worked out a design ahead of time, a little rabbit sitting on a crescent moon. Which brings me to Reflection 1: don't try to paint a complicated design (like a rabbit sitting on a crescent moon) on to a piece of pottery. You will save yourself so much stress!

Anyway, I met up with my friends at the pottery place and picked out something to paint; a cute teacup and saucer. After spending way too much time picking out my colors, I sat down to paint. That's when I realized that my design folly. I spent the next two and a half hours stressing out over whether it would turn out, till we had to leave because the shop closed. Which brings me to Reflection 2: if you're going to try to paint something complicated, don't start it two hours before the store closes. It's not enough time. 

Here's how the teacup and saucer looked when I left the shop.

I have to say, I was extremely discouraged. I felt like I'd wasted time and money and hadn't even had fun doing it! Jon was a trooper and put up with me as I lamented the whole way home. He also assured me that my pieces weren't as bad as I thought they were and that they would look much better after they were fired. I knew he was probably right, but had a hard time believing it.

I spent the next few weeks purposefully not thinking about the teacup, until I finally got it back. Here's how it looks post firing.

Which brings me to Reflection 3: the firing process really does wonders. Even if you do everything wrong, like I did, you can still end up with something nice! It's a magical, ugly duckling-like transformation!

And thus concludes my pottery painting story. Lesson learned; don't make things unnecessarily  complicated and don't stress out so much! Hopefully I remember that if I ever paint pottery again!

One last thing, Jon and I got KITTENS this past Monday!!! :-D Yuna is the grey tiger and Koji is the black; they're both adorable little trouble makers and we love them so much already!! ^_^

onward and upward,

Bethany

Skill building: Poses

One of my "goals" (a term I use loosely here) for this summer was to get some figure drawing practice in. I haven't been highly successful at it, but did manage to do a few studies based on reference from some Athleta catalogs. (Which, btw, is a fantastic source for action pose reference!) Here are a few of good ones. 

onward and upward,

Bethany

Ladies of Liberty

Since the 4th of July holiday weekend was pretty hectic for me, I decided not to do a normal blog post that Tuesday. However, I wanted to do something to honor the occasion; something simple, something with a subtle, patriotic vibe. Since I'm reasonably confident in my ability to design girl characters, doing a "Lady of Liberty" seemed like a good option. 

And then I thought it might be cool to do a couple of "Ladies of Liberty" and to infuse some diversity into the idea. And thus the project went from a "simple" concept to something that took more work and thought than I'd initially planned. :-/ But I'm very happy with the results! I posted each of them on Instagram, but wanted to share all of them together here. Enjoy! ^_^ 

onward and upward,

Bethany