Moon of the Circling Swallows – Cut Paper Art
11 x 14 inch paper cutting.
Swallows Progress Shot
Last progress photo before the final… almost finished… Here I am cutting colored tissue paper to size and gluing it to the back of the paper cutting so that the color shows through.
Swallows paper cutting: More ‘in progress’
In Progress: Moon of the Circling Swallows
Coloring and foreground coming up next…
Moon of the Circling Swallows – Paper Cutting in Progress
I pushed the pause button on a commission I’m working on because I felt the need to work on this.. I was inspired by the book I’m currently reading – Black Elk Speaks. The Lakota have their own names for the months based on the moon, such as Moon of the Popping Trees for December because of the sound the trees make when they’re frozen.
Wishing I had a compass to make the concentric circles (which I usually draw by hand after tracing the first circle from my lamp base…), I used doubled up dental floss and devised my own compass by tying knots where I wanted the circles to be and tacking it in the middle of the paper to hold it in place. By putting the pencil in each loop created by the knots and drawing as I pulled it away from the tack, I got perfect circles.
Owl In Flight
From my photo escapade on Dec. 29, 2012, in Atchison, KS.
Country Drivin’ Photos, Dec. 29-30, 2012
I’m testing out the gallery feature in this new blog format… Click on the image to make it larger! (Typing this after a couple hours of fidgeting and filtering through and reworking code after I couldn’t get it to work because of some other code modifications I made. It’s like one big word search in a foreign language without knowing what the words are.. snore… BUT, I’m happy with the results.)
Pillow Improv
Many thanks to Caitlin for sending me these images of a pillow she made out of one of my “Shelter Each Other” tote bags. I thought it was a great idea! And the addition of color is a nice touch. (I’ll be making my own soon to go with my pillow collection).
Coffee Bean
I’m making some more little birds this morning. This afternoon I’m starting in on one of two commissions that I’ve got in the pipeline, awaiting approval on an illustration job that I worked on yesterday (about eagles, no less!), and checking out a shipment of postcards that just arrived from Bizarr Verlag, my publisher in Germany, with five of my paper cuttings printed on them. They look great – pics to come soon. I’m also starting on a new blog design this weekend – I *think* I finally found a WordPress template that’ll work for me after a long search, so if things start to look wonky, it’s me, not you… And if you don’t see any changes, it’s because I can’t figure out how to make it work! But I’m ready for something fresh and simple that works across platforms – out with the old, in with the new (it’s a state-of-mind thing, really). And here’s a little quote to end this post with:
“In the end, just three things matter:
How well we have lived
How well we have loved
How well we have learned to let go”
-Jack Kornfield
Hawk, Dec. 29, 2012 – Atchison, KS
