Don't Mind the Arrow

Sunday Image - Minimalism

Sunday Image - Swans

Garden of the Gods

Early last week, Morgan and the kids and I went down near Colorado Springs to visit Garden of the Gods Park. We had a great time, in spite of it being very, very hot. Giant rocks tend to reflect sunlight and heat, which added to the problem. But we were all troopers and toughed it out (three large bottles of water helped considerably).

We found a good spot for Jacob to climb and the rest of us to sit for a while, and I got out my sketchbook. Drawing rock formations is interesting - there's not much to grab onto visually. Crags and shadows can look like just so many squiggly lines. I did my best, though, and then came home and added colored pencil to it.

From Sketchbook

 

Sunday Image - Lion

Going Old School

I know I've gotten into the habit of mostly posting drawing on this blog, but I keep myself busy with other hobbies as well. At the moment, a lot of my time is split between drawing and taking photographs. I'm currently having a love affair with film.

I've posted some photos from my Holga here before (I also have a Diana +, but for the time being my husband has appropriated that one). Now I've acquired a new toy - recently, on a whim, I was checking out Craigslist for cameras and ran across an ad for Minolta SRT-101. This is a great, basic manual focus camera from the late '60s.

The person was selling it for a song, which made me wonder if there was something wrong with it. But Morgan and I talked it over and decided to go ahead and check it out. It turns out, the camera had belonged to the guy's dad and he just thought it was time to get rid of it. Everything was in working order as far as he knew. And he threw in several rolls of film, including a couple of black and white.  I cleaned the lens and filter, read a copy of the manual online to figure out what everything was, and popped a roll of film into it. 

I had a minor problem where the mirror wasn't returning after taking a photo. Looked up online what to do about it, and ordered a new set of foam pads for everything in the camera. Put on a brave face, opened it up, and started removing the old ones and replacing them with the new ones. I am not usually terribly mechanically inclined, but I figured I'd rather do it myself than make Morgan nervous about trying to do it! As it turns out, it didn't fix the problem. I have one more thing I can do myself, which is opening up the bottom and oiling a little gear in there. If that doesn't work, I'll have to live with it until I can afford to take it in to a shop.

I'm really enjoying the process of taking photos and not being sure what you got until you get the film developed. I know I started off taking pictures this way, but it seems so far in the distant past that I'd completely forgotten what it's like. I have a feeling I'm going to have a lot of fun with this camera.

Sunday Image - Mountains

Sunday Image - Luxor

Sunday Image - California Poppies

Sunday Image - Poppy

Days 4 and 5

I'm a little behind in posting my 30 Days of Creativity projects here, although I'm not behind in actually making them. Day 4 I took a photo while Morgan and I were out at the Denver Chalk Art Festival.

For Day 5, I colored in a drawing I'd started on the same day. 

I also used it as another test of the color selection I'd put into my travel case. I decided to go ahead and fill it out to capacity - 48 pencils. I don't think I'll really feel like I'm missing anything now. After completing this drawing, I also decided to add some of the brown paper into my Germany journal. Yesterday I cut and folded the signatures for that, and hopefully I'll sew them together tonight.

However, that's not my day 6 project. I'll be posting about that in a separate post, up in a little while.