Tools of the Trade

I was working out a new design and I was reminded of how helpful colored pencils are. One grid can begin endless designs so until you're very familiar with the based pattern, it's to mark out your design so you don't forget. You can work with the colors you intend to use and see how they work or you can just use random colors.

Lisa DeLong TEDxBYU

I wasn't able to be here for this but happily they filmed it. It's a great talk, a great introduction to Sacred Geometry!

Something new?

It's the first official day of winter break, I'm free from my day job and excited for the time to focus on my art! I'm also excited by a new dream or goal I've just dared to have. It's too early to share just yet but I hope to share bits and pieces of it along the way and if/when this happens, believe me, I'll be sharing it. Here's to tantalizing new possibilities!

"New" Designs

I've been wanting to get back into geometric designs since I stopped working on the Eight Fold series. I tried some hexagonal based designs inspired by some I've seen from Lisa DeLong, Jeea Mirza, and others. I've been trying something new with the paintings I've been working on and I'm not loving it, so today I took a break from them to try something different. I tried a couple of new (to me) designs from this book.

It probably should have been obvious but pastels are not the best for precision work. We live and learn. It's my first real attempt at pastels.

Good article on Islamic Design

A friend shared this article with me and it's a good read and intro into Islamic Design. Check it out.

A visit to the Met

Fortuitous circumstances introduced me to this video today and I had to share it! So apparently the Metropolitan Museum of Art undertook to create a facsimile of a Moroccan courtyard. I really hope I get a chance to see this space in person. Back to the video, I love all this video says about craftsmanship, I feel like in many ways craftsmanship has fallen by the wayside here, but clearly there is great worth in craftsmanship.

Ancient Greece and News

So we'll start with the news: my awesome cousin has an Oscar nominated documentary! It's pretty awesome.

Also the other day I got to see some of my friends, one of whom is probably going to be a famous scholar someday in history. He's learning/studying ancient Greek right now and so we got to talking about the ancient Greeks and their amazing art. So we know ancient statues to be plain marble (beautiful marble but unadorned) but we have evidence that that's not the way they were originally, was actually painted marble. I haven't been sure how I felt about that, as all I've ever known are the unpainted marbles and bronzes and I feel they're beautiful as they are, it's hard for me to see how they could be improved by color.
My friend was telling me that a tomb or something like that was recently discovered untouched and inside were painted statues, they were able to document them and find out what the paints were comprised of - crushed gemstones, I would really love to be able to see a picture of what that would look like.
We also talked about how insanely precise the Greeks were, probably specifically in the golden or Hellenistic period, like in pottery they were so precise that they'd take shrinking into account during firing - that's a lot. Anyway my friend tells me that the Greeks didn't have much use for numbers, that's so crazy to me. For sure I'm a believer of compass and straight edge geometry rather than number geometry, but the thought of not using numbers at all for something like the Parthenon? It's way hard to wrap my head around that. Art, it's super awesome!