The Not So Secret Garden

Not long ago our niece, Rosemary, was awarded tenure at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  Yah! You go girl! For those of you outside the academic world that is a lot like getting your driver's license. You get to drive wherever you want and you have to do something terrible before they can take your license away.  In the giddy aftermath of that liberation, Rosemary signed up to teach classes at the local hoosegow, jail, lock-up, whatever you want to call it.  It would be nice, she opined, to have students who really wanted to come to class. Ah, yes!  Anyhow, she also asked for suggestions for purely creative outlets. Which I took to mean the freedom to create things that would not have to be submitted to an editorial board.  It was in response to that query that I shared with her the following process:

Spoiler alert: You need a digital graphics tablet hooked to your computer to do the first few steps, altho' I bet there are those of you out there who could figure out an analog work around.

Step one: Take a picture. A close-up of some nature subject is perhaps the best way to start. You don't want a landscape like that "perfect day" picture I sent you the other day. Backgrounds just get in the way. Let's start with an iris:

Step two: Now, you load that picture into your computer and open it in Photoshop or Gimp or whatever painting program you use. Add a "layer" which is like putting a transparent surface over the picture - glass, plastic wrap, whatever analogy works best for you. Then click on the new layer, so you are sure you are about to draw on the new layer.  This is where I use my Wacom graphics tablets, though those of you with steadier hands and awesome mouse skills might be able to do this on your computer. If any of you are good enough to do it on your phone - don't tell me!

What you are going to do now is trace the outline of the flower. I just use the photoshop brush tool in black.  Again in Photoshop you can click the color version off and on so you can see how you are doing. 

Step three: When you are done tracing click the color layer off, or just throw it away.  Now print the tracing layer.  You should get something that looks sort of like this:

If you get shading around your tracing you can add another layer and fill it with white.  If it makes your tracing go away you have put the white layer on top of the tracing. Drag the white layer below the tracing and print it again - that should clear it up.  I use drawing paper to print the tracing. You will use your favorite coloring medium on the tracing so try to match your paper choice with what you will use to draw.

Step four: Turn off your computer - Yay! - and take your tracing over to your drawing table. 

Step five: I can't really show you this because it disappears with the last step. But essentially you are going to fill in the tracing however you want. No surprise, I take a black fine tip .01 marker and create little designs within the spaces within the tracing until I have a pretty detailed [in the examples below the entire image is about 4x6 inches and the smallest spaces are filled with a single dot from those .01 markers] coloringbook-like and then I color it in with other fine tip markers until you get  something like this:

I'm not sure why I am choosing to go tiny on these images. Maybe a reaction to the images I had printed on the sides of busses several years ago. I listen to music and novels while I'm drawing. Gets nice and zen-like after awhile .  .  .  I dunno.

Anyhow, I'll try to leave you with a couple of other examples. I'm not sure how the Blogger software will react.

Peace to you.

Cabbage

Photo:

Tracing:

Colored:

Paper Mulberry

Photo (I flipped this one for drawing)

Tracing

Colored:

To a Perfect Day

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I remember sitting, many years ago now, outside on the deck of the Columbia Yacht Club in Chicago. A friend had invited my wife, my daughter, Andrea, and I for lunch.  It was a perfect day.  A mild breeze was blowing off Lake Michigan that glittered gold and impossibly blue below us.  Sailboats sporting flags of many colors played tag across the water.

“Wow,” Andrea opined. “If every day was like today everyone would want to live in Chicago!”  No one mentioned Michigan Avenue in February.

Today was such a perfect day here in Raleigh.  The sky was paintbox blue, if there were clouds they had drifted over to Chapel Hill, or maybe Durham. Here, everything was in bloom, but nary a breeze stirred the pollen that biology declares must accompany such flowerings. Greenery of varying heights and hues competed to carpet the glades shaded by the petaled trees. Variations on “What a glorious day!” echoed out of windows and down the dappled paths.

I can also recall perfect days in Albuquerque, NM, when a thunderstorm, backlit with lightening, swept down the Sandias. Perfect days in Freeman, SD, perched upon the ridge of my cousin’s barn, trying to call the fickle storm clouds, far out on the horizon, closer to our fields which could surely use a drink. Springfield, Ohio when nighttime summer showers blew breezes through the porch screens carrying strange aromas from beyond our city streets. Kalamazoo, MI, where heaping banks of lilacs perfumed huge swaths of the town. Everywhere, if we play careful heed, nature bestows her gifts of perfect days.

And it is those perfect days in varied perfect places that become the canvases upon which memory paints the scenes of our perfect moments. On days such as these memory moves her slight-of-hand with such grace that we may be deceived, for just the shadow of an instant, into believing that we have been transported back to one such moment. We stand transfixed, every sense alert, waiting for the missing players to take their places, so the fairy tale can unfold again - again perfect. Then a bird sings, a car drives by, or the voices of strangers intrude, and the scene dissolves; remembered perfection replaced with the merely exquisite present. With a shake, we move on about life, our memories trailing along, into the glory of yet another exceptional day.

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