A Little Spark of Madness

This is what recently evolved on the pages of my journal.  At first glance you may assume I had a crazy week getting used to being back in the classroom again.  That would be correct.  But the little creature on this page is actually the result of a project done with my drawing students.  It was inspired by an exercise from the book Drawing Lab by Carla Sonheim.  Using a series of self generated prompts, we each made original 'creatures'.  (I like to work along with my students whenever possible.)
Pictures of giraffes were used to make a series of overlapping blind contour drawings.  From those, we picked out groupings of lines that suggested a figure, creature, or animal.   Using tracing paper, we 'tweaked' the drawings, developed something we liked and made a graphite transfer into our sketchbooks.  The drawings could be finished using any medium.  I choose to play with some new gel pens.  Too bad the 'sparkle' one doesn't show up very well here.... lots of sparkle.

Speaking of Carla Sonheim, she has a wonderfully creative blog called Snowball Journals.  Check it out and be sure to go back into some of the older posts as there is so much playful inspiration there.

Steampunk Man

Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction set in the 19th century Victorian era when steam power was still widely used.  It features futuristic technology as people of this historical period would have envisioned it.  

It contains fictional machines like those found in the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.

Below is the original cabinet card I found in a local antique shop.   It had $5 printed in pencil on the back and, not having my reading glasses on, I though it read $8.   I nicely asked the owner of the shop if he would take $6 for it and he said "Sure!"   Later as my friend Katie and I were having lunch I took it out and with reading glasses on, realized my mistake and we had a good laugh about it.    For the rest of the afternoon as we explored local shops, it became our joke that whatever the price tag said, maybe I could offer a bit more.   As we get older we really need to keep our sense of humor and just roll with it.

The man in the photo seemed the perfect candidate to become "Steampunk Man" for this month's ATC exchange.    I had fun transforming him and really think it was worth the extra dollar paid.
If you are not familiar with Steampunk, do a little Google image search..... there is some amazing creative stuff going on in this genre!