My lovely wife and I attended Balfar’s Challenge (04.19.08) up Connecticut way hosted by Duke Balfar and the Barony of Dragonship Haven. It was held in a large field at an YMCA camping area. Fencing was at one end of the field alongside a row of merchants and the archery range was stationed all the way at the other end. The central area being held for the armored types.

 Mistress Avelina Keys, Kenny Paul and I formed the 3- member archery team called the Grumpy Badgers and proceeded directly to first place with our efforts. It was grand day for shooting. Bright sunny and actually a bit windy as attested to by my arrows sailing all over the course. A wonderful dayboard under a large open walled structure took care of the hungry part and a nice place to rest out of the sun for awhile. Of course, there was lots of armored combat action and fast fencing types showing off their martial skills. By the end of the day I was pretty tired and rather red and roasted from the neck up.

By nature, I am a shade critter. Shade critters really don’t think about things like sun-block. Well by the next morning my bald pate was weeping serous fluid and really starting to aggravate me. Looks like I had gotten myself a good case of sun poisoning as my reward for my efforts in representing my Barony, lol.  It is now three days later and the top of my skull looks like an old medieval map. I got some dark red and pinks and some yellow and browns and what looks like a few craters. I am starting to peel bits of vellum too. Terrific. Well at least my scalp is period. 

Note to self. Sun-block and a bigggggggggggg hat.

Today we made a duct tape sewing dressform and it came out pretty good.  Three rolls of 60 foot duct tape, a cheap t-shirt and a little time got it done.  I initially heard about this from a group of SCA friends and was intrigued. I certainly would love to have a dressform of my wife that emulates her unique shape. That and that it costs a lot less than a generic fall apart model cinched the idea. A little research on the web showed that it not an unknown concept and so after some reading and planning, off we went.  A nice set of instructions with pictures lives at http://etsylabs.blogspot.com/2007/03/dress-form-tutorial-want-to-make-exact.html

It took two hours. I started from the bottom and worked my way up twice.

Being in a rush to see what it looks like I went ahead and stuffed the form, cut a quick base out of doubled cardboard and checked it out. It still needed some work so I unstuffed it. Good grief what an explosion of batting and rags. It is pretty amazing the volume of batting that it takes to fill that. We had bought two 32 oz. bags for 10 bucks at Joanne’s and that only went up to the waist.  Cost being a factor, I started scouring up old used up blankets and raided all the material out of a burlap bag that I had been saving as an archery stop. With all that material, I got pretty much up to the neckline. Not surprising, some more changes were in order.

Item 1.  When  stuffing the dummy try to maintain the body shape of the person you are emulating.  The waist basically being spherical in transection can be stuffed badly resulting in not enough distance side to side or front to back.  The volume will remain the same but using the dummy for measuring and such might make a difference. If you stuff  without concern you may well find yourself with a dummy that looks 9 months pregnant, as I did. 

Item 2.  Apparently,  my re-connecting of the back seam where I had cut was not too swift. The waist had grown 3.5 inches,  the hips 4 inches from the original model.  Inspection showed an ever widening gap from the mid-back to the bottom.

Note 3 The cardboard will need to be cut to a better fitting shape.

So, I removed the connecting tape on the back and the seam split open!  I was immediately overwhelmed by the batting. Man that stuff can really just keep compressing into a space.

I had some difficulty try to connect the seam by simply pushing the edges together for when you get to the curves, pushing together does not work.  The solution is to pinch the two edges together a couple of inches high and the simply lay a strip of tape over and rub down both sides smoothly. Once you have connected the back be sure and check inside the dressform in the area of the small of the back. It may likely need a bit more attention. I pulled the neck kerchief piece off and then reinforced the neck, bottom hem and the arm holes  making  for a stronger edging and a more finished look. I re-cut the cardboard to a better shape to fit the base.

My simple solution to the stand is an old rotating stool base. This one is just slightly wider at the seat than the base of the dressform but that is fine as everything I am planning on creating are generally loose fitting items. I suspect a bar stool would work admirably and those things can be gotten cheaply if not for zip anywhere. People are always chucking them away. This stool, which I had salvaged from the bin, was my drawing table seat for about 15 years till the seat disassembled beyond repair. So at this point, I need to scavenge some plywood and build a base for the dressform and another wood base to stool seat and connect the two.

When we were done, we went to exercise the ghost dog in the stool picture and saw these turkeys meandering through the yard searching for grub. Strange to see such big birds casually strolling about. Later!

Hazel Court, 82, has moved on. This talented lady was also a sculptress and a painter. As an actress she was well known to English and American audiences and is probably best known for her work in Roger Corman’s “The Raven” in 1963 when she shared the screen with Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre.  The Raven is a fun popcorn movie, no doubt. Also well known for her role in in Hammer Studios 1957  ”Curse of Frankenstein”  she worked along side with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Hammer’s films pursued sensationalism, sexuality and violence, and Hazel Court emerged as the studio’s principal female attraction. As a scream queen, she really had the shrieking banshee thing going not that the obvious low cut outfits hurt the movie either ; ).

She did bunches of other work in TV and the movies but these horror movies are the one that I remember seeing as a kid and still watch now and again as they are in my DVD collection.  Her daughter said that she would get over 100 pieces of fan mail a month and she would reply to every single one. Now that is a class act.

04.14.08 Study in working with red paint. Alizarin crimson, Cadmium red light and Winsor Red. Winsor Red is new to my palette. I bought a tube quite a while ago. It looked to be real close to a pure red to me. It worked well, though a bit thin in confirmation for my taste. Nothing that a paper bag soak will not take care of. I found with the addition of Winsor red, I was able to add a mid range red to the study without muddiness. I have been using cad red light in conjunction with alizarin to get a range of reds but because of the secondary color bias of these paints there was a certain amount of graying going on so that it was not possible to get a sparkling clear red. Color induction was used to boost the apparent chroma but it could not relieve the neutralization in entirety. Winsor Red is a welcome addition and I look forward to some red paintings. Perhaps, another painting of Smaug of Hobbit fame may be in order.

04.15.08 Not wanting to do another shiny transparent subject, I cast about looking for an opaque, matte object for contrast…………….ah an old plastic electric drill….perfect!

04.06.08 The world has been diminished once again with the passing of a movie legend. Charlton Heston has moved on. He was 84. I grew up watching this man working his magic on the silver screen. Well known for Ben-Hur and The Commandments, he played many many other roles. My favorites movies of his are Will Penny, The Mountain Men, Touch of Evil and of course, Planet of the Apes. He was a heroic icon from a different age of film and cultural standards than what exists today. In so many ways, a better and stronger one, I think. Happy Trails, Chuck!!!

04.06.08 I was looking for an object that I had little familiarity with. Familiar subject would be something that I have drawn or painted before. I settled on a pair of wicked witch high heels in my wife’s collection.  When painting familiar objects, you have to be careful to paint what you see and not what you know from prior experience. It is all to easy to start pulling information from the memory well.

Painting these shoes was quite a challenge. Unfamiliar angles, value gradients with rapid transitions over curves that dip and twist made these two paintings quite a challenge. I had succeeded in finding subject matter with which I had little mental frame of reference not to mention actively wondering just how do women walk in these things? 

As I was painting these, I had the strange thought that everything we see is an edge. A flat surface, that you are perpendicular to, is an edge. It is just an edge with a zero falloff. Wonder if that is really true? Not in a philosophical debate sense but whether as a rough rule for painting what you see. Instead of thinking of planes and edges, I could just be thinking of edges?   I shall keep it mind for awhile and see if it makes sense as I explore more studies.

Afterall, painting is all about edges.

04.07.08 Another successful attempt at crushing my perception of ‘what is’ based on past observations. This is a frontal view of an old dog skull upside down. It looked familiar in an overall sort of a way but it just wasn’t right. Once I tried to stop matching it up with my memory well of information, I was able to get to the study. The success lies in forcing me to paint what I see not what I know or what I think I know.

04.02.08 It is finally getting warmer, a bit unseasonably so, but who’s complaining : ), so off we go to the Pawtuxet River to capture some early morning light on water. Well, there was quite a bit fog and it was dispersing. I had forgotten how rapidly you have to paint in the early hours to keep up and capture the rapidly fading scene before you. Relatively rough attempt completed. My outdoor skills are going to need some industrial housekeeping to get the dust, rust, and cobwebs eliminated. Sounds like fun : ) Many pochades to come.

Soon, I can get to painting regularly outside for my dailies though my fingers felt like popsicles. Onward!!

04.03.08 Out in the yard! The fresh air. A cool wind on my neck and Jack Frost chewing on my fingertips. The harbingers of spring……….hmmmm, harbingers sounds too ominous. The heralds of spring, snowdrops! We have them scattered sporadically throughout the front and back yard. So bright and cheery : )

     Being a freelance illustrator necessitates a degree of being alone for long hours that leads into days and months that can get downright nearing the pathological. Probably not true for everyone, but for me it looked like the trail I was riding. What little social skills I had developed were fading along with my vocabulary. I was becoming a hermit in the middle of suburbia. I suspect that is probably more common than people think.

     I had first seen SCA types in ‘77 went I went to Texas A&M for my education. There they were, a bunch of guys in makeshift ‘hockey’ armor wailing away on each other with duct taped bamboo sticks out on the soccer field.  They were friendly and open and invited me to come and join. I debated the offer but overwhelming responsibilities came first. I never forgot them and checked up on the group periodically. Fast forward twenty years. For various reasons best left unexplained, I ended up in Rhode Island far from Texas soil.  At the place I was working at the time, I met a vibrant young lady named Beth. I ran into her now and again as my wife worked on many of the same company committees with her. One day, we spotted a SCA demo in a Johnston park. We pulled in to check things out and lo and behold, there was Beth. She was Elspeth, Baroness of the Barony of the Bridge. I was invited again however responsibilities and time made it not possible. Fast forward another ten years or so when situations as well as priorities have changed. 

     So realizing a key component was missing, I joined the the Society of Creative Anachronisms. It seemed to be a group of like minded people with interests in arcane arts and strange forms of entertainment ; ). It offered a social outlet, opportunities to learn new art-forms, skills and even how to pull a bow or swing a sword. As I was already making mead as a hobby, I already had something to talk about with others.

     What I found was a great group of generous and welcoming people happy to share their hard won knowledge with others. That seems to be just their way.  Since that initial time , I also come to realize that I had not actually joined a club or a social group but a community of individuals that help each other at each turn. Looks like, I finally fell  into something good.

     I am part of the Barony of the Bridge in the East Kingdom. More information about the Bridge can be found here: http://www.baronyofthebridge.eastkingdom.org/ .

     For more information regarding the SCA: http://www.sca.org/ . They are a worldwide organization so check it out for a barony near you!!

     Ya ya, it took thirty years to make that decision but then again I like to think things through : )

03.18.08 Today, the idea seems more about concept. I was casting about the studio looking for ideas when I lighted on the coppery ends of some 20 gauge shotgun shells. By themselves relatively boring but with the addition of a toy mammoth , it all changed. Suddenly, here was a creature moving through a strangely dark and ominous forest………

03.19.08  Well, it has now been three weeks with this years version of the flu. Malaise, weakness and a cough. But it is all slowly dissipating. I am grateful though. I still have been able to drag my carcass to the easel to do the the daily study. I think I have missed a day or two but I am planning to double up to catch up. I am beginning to find that finding something to paint is becoming part of the challenge. You begin thinking a bit more creatively of ways to combine objects. Recently, I am looking for objects with widely divergent properties to place together.