Purple Pony Art Blog

For some reason, I thought I had already shared that one of my short stories was published this year! It's called Trapped on Tragodia and it's an exciting tale of friendship, adventure and journey into the unknown!

Odie is just a regular space trucker until a forced landing changes everything. I don't know how much to reveal about the story without spoiling it, LOL! I spotted the submission call from < a href="https://www.perennial-press.com/">Perennial Press in fall 2021, which seems forever ago. The anthology would contain stories and poems about arthropods--kind of a unique subject, IMHO. Now, this is why you always hang onto rejected ideas, because there could be a day when they fit perfectly. The idea I had hanging around was from a horror anthology submission call. I enjoy mild horror and tried my hardest, but liking something and creating something are two different things. I cannot write a horror story to save my life. However, I have a strong belief in the power of friendship and just let my authentic voice speak.

Inspired by childhood memories of movies like Mysterious Island, I changed the setting to a wild place where giant insects rule. If you know me, you'd be seriously surprised I wrote a story that doesn't contain birds or horses, but I was up for the creative challenge. Arthropoda was edited by JW Stebner, who also edits Hexagon, a speculative fiction magazine.

It was a long wait until I had a physical copy in my hands, but it was such a great moment to open the box and see my ideas made real, especially the gorgeous cover by Stephanie Lane Gage of Martian Press. Order your copy today--you won't be disappointed.

This week was an exciting one for students—studio access resumed! Larger lecture classes are still being held online for the time being. Most studio classes are under 20 people, so it’s more intimate and there aren’t a lot of people in the building. The cafeteria was revamped over Christmas break and it’s so nice to have new tables, chairs and couches. It’s an instant upgrade and marks the school as a proper university instead of looking like a high school. I swear, the old furniture was probably brand-new when I went on my school tour back in 1995!

Soon I’ll have pictures to show of my works in progress. This week was mostly meeting and greeting classmates, gathering supplies and getting our bearings. It’s weird to be back in the school after so long and it’s going to take a bit of time to get used to the new schedule.

FIBRE 327

This was mostly a meet and great class, but we all talked about our projects and some had things to show. I disassembled one of the frames I bought from the thrift store for my project. I thought the picture inside was a mass-produced picture. It kinda is--it's someone tole picture from 1974!

These are layered pictures cut out from a kit and assembled. Kits are hard to find these days. The top layer of the images were faded. I thought it was neat because there's a frame within a frame and the illustration is backed on an old oranges box. Aw! Someone took a lot of care to frame this. You can even see the glue stains on the picture. It's easy to imagine that it hung on someone's wall for years and years until they passed or something.

FIBRE 419

We met in small groups for some show and tell and discuss an assigned reading from Sherry Turkle's book Evocative Objects. Sherry Turkle is a neat author with a long history of writing about people, psychology and how we interact with things. I read Life on the Screen years ago and as an early Internet user, I felt so seen.

FIBRE 451

We went over creating a reading journal in OneNote. We have three chapters from Art/Work to read and there are three groups presenting each chapter. I felt bad I used my studio time to read and draft the journal entries, but quiet time is such a premium to me, as spring is just around the corner, which means lots of birdie screaming.

I went shopping Thursday afternoon to buy more supplies. My challenge is finding the right armature for what I'm building. I bought 16x16" square canvas and a 12x12" shadowbox frame.

Watching movies for homework is usually fun, except when it’s not fun!

Our weekly reading selection came from The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher and focused on a book, Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, and a movie, Under the Skin, directed by Jonathan Glazer.

I downloaded Surfacing as an audiobook and haven’t finished listening to it yet, but I thought a movie would be a nice way to wrap up my weekend. Hehehe...well, not this movie! Under the Skin stars Scarlett Johannsson as an alien who roams Scotland, preying on men. There are a lot of interesting binaries in the movie such as pleasure/pain, known/unknown, civilization/wilderness, alien/human, physical/mental etc., in addition to the gender reverse of predator/prey. This would be a very different movie if it starred a male alien killer.

Visually, the film is very dark, mostly taking place at night. Audibly, there is very little dialogue and the Scottish accents are hard to decipher. There’s also a droning background track. The whole movie is designed to be unsettling and I get that. I’m usually okay with horror movies (and this one is rated R) and what not, but I didn’t like feeling unsettled and noped out of the movie after 39 minutes. It took me a few hours to feel right again afterwards!

I'm going to be a published author!

As you may have guessed from this journal, I'm not always the most visual person for an artist. My cloth journal had, to me, an alarming amount of text. Over the years, I discovered that my grades for humanities were higher than studios. Apparently the ability to write well is an advantage at an art college. Last year I had two great courses that really expanded my writing skills--ENGL200 and AHIS313. Both classes opened my eyes to the fact that maybe, just maybe, I could get some of the little stories I write for fun in print. My AHIS313 teacher, especially, was proof that one could make a career out of writing about art.

So, last year, I did try. I sent in a story that I had been working on for five years to a large publisher of science fiction stories. I followed the writer's guidelines to a T, hit submit and waited. And waited. And after four months of waiting, I got a rejection email. Awww!

Rejection, as you might guess, is everything to artists. Rejection only makes you stronger!

I found a list of submission calls and one from Zombie Pirate Publishing really appealed to me. The topic was retro style science fiction stories. Are you kidding me? That's all I read as a teenager! Out of 80+ entries, my story, SECOND ACTS, was chosen for the final 21 stories. Eeeee!

You can pre-order the eBook on Amazon for half price right now--https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0857CTPMY/?tag=a_fwd-20

I can't wait to read the other stories :-)

The first day of 2012 is a bright and sunny one here. Most people would probably not guess it, but Calgary is one of the sunniest places in Canada with an average of 333 sunny days a year.

We spent New Year's Eve with friends watching movies and playing games, and a birthday dinner for my mom. Yup, she narrowly missed out being a New Year's baby!

I imagine that many people are eagerly beginning new Painting/Drawing/Whatever A Day today. I tried to do this once and I don't think I got past February. I'm not sure how successful I'll be either as I go back to school next week. But I'm going to give it a good try with a book I bought a couple of years ago called The Crafter's Devotional by Barbara R. Call. It's a bumper book of 365 creative ideas that are coded in different ways such as Monday-Sunday, 1-365 and by category such as ideas, journalling and collaborating.

In fact day #1 is journalling. I do keep a paper journal, but I often prefer the online ones. I buy cute little notebooks and then usually they get misplaced around the house :-D Maybe I'm just an idea squirrel at heart. Sometimes I find half-filled journals from when I was younger and it makes me glad the Internet wasn't around back then. We don't really get a feel for how we grow and change. Don't rely on your memory either, because even after five years things can get fuzzy. I was only laid off a year ago and have trouble remembering the name of some co-workers.

The activities are pretty free-form and a variety of genres and techniques are represented, which must have been hard to do. Beads, wire, collage, stamping and mark making are just some of the things to be explored. Sometimes it's easier to just have an "assignment" to try instead of thinking up something on your own. The inclusion of personal and family history was interesting to me because I took several unsuccessful stabs at genealogy a long time ago. This book will definitely keep crafty types busy all year long!

This is more of a note to self, but it seems like a promising book by Kay Redfield Jamison. I haven't read through it all the way, and I can't renew it, but she has some interesting ideas about mental illness and "artistic temperaments". She mainly looks at older authors and artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Emily Dickenson who were plagued by "melancholia" and other non-DSM terms of the day. I think it would have been a better book if it looked at more modern artists and writers though. It's often hard to decode the language of the past, as romantic as it tends to be.

I rarely put on my snob hat, but one thing I can't stand is the ransom art school of design. I was reminded of how much it bugs me when I finally got to sit down and read Artful Cards edited by Katherine Duncan Aimone. I picked it up on my way out of the library and a quick flip revealed some neat ideas, but most of the examples are really unartistic.

I can understand how people can be overwhelmed by a limitless choices of textures, colours and materials and fonts, but if these elements are not chosen correctly with regard to composition, size, texture and colour, it just ends up like someone spent an afternoon ripping up paper, stitching paper and punching paper in random, chaotic ways. Ugly, distracting and unappealing sounds harsh, but that's exactly what most of the designs are. The contributor biographies show people who clearly have immense talent, but they just couldn't bring it to this book. I think they aimed too low and wanted to make card making so accessible to everyone (because everyone can rip paper and glue it down after all) that they missed out teaching some pretty basic art fundamentals rather than just assembly techniques that would have made this a more valuable book to beginner cardmakers.

My secret shame is an embarrassingly large stash of paper. There's probably someone out there with a larger stash than me, but I feel ashamed that such fine material is not being used. So what better way to use than make some homemade books? Here are five books I have recently perused for ideas -

Bookbinding Basics by Paola Rosati

The Handmade Book by Angela James

Books Unbound by Michael Jacobs

Creating Handmade Books by Alisa Gordon

The Penland Book of Handmade Books

The first one covers traditional techniques while the other four have much more creative examples to inspire. Some of the books are completely non-functional as well.

Whew! I haven't logged in forever. I'll have to catch up on my f-list tomorrow, I just wanted to post this before I have to return it to the library. I happened to spot this book while I was zooming around the stacks. It's called Creating Creatures of Fantasy and Imagination b Claudia Nice. Personally I do not like her style, although her drawings are nice and I found myself really inspired by her ideas. Her illustrations are mostly watercolours, with a few acrylic and pencil drawings thrown in. She gives some colour formulas with some of them as well.

An ordinary reference photo of a grumpy man or pretty girl becomes an ogre or a fairy under her brush. She gives a lot of suggestions for making these transformations that seem so obvious (yet not :-)) such as chipping nails, adding hair, looking to nature for patterns, etc. A horse's head makes a fine reference for a graceful dragon as does a green sea turtle for a mermaid's fins. Nice really put a lot of thought and effort in presenting so many fantasy beings - it was also nice to get a glimpse into her imagination.

With a name like Trudy Friend, it's hard to go wrong with her "problem and solution" books. I can't remember what I was looking up on Amazon when Artist's Complete Problem and Solution Handbook popped up. Naturally that led to the solution book for drawing and painting animals. I checked both out from the library and I think I will purchase them down the road.

The first book is actually two books in one - it deals with common problems in drawing and watercolours. Friend strongly advises that most problems can be solved through closer and more careful observation of the subject matter. The drawing section has help for value, perspective and lighting problems. The watercolour section deals with much the same, although she suggests colour palettes and brushstroke advice. She also shows how to save a watercolour when various problems show up. After reading this section, I now know why my watercolours have been miserable failures :-D

The animal book has more or less the same basic advice, but it runs through many different media such as paint, pastels and graphite. The range of animals is quite helpful - they include the furry, the feathered and the scaly. Definitely a good reference book to have on hand!