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Monthly Archives: January 2018

A Flock Of Feathers

08 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by duckykoren in Uncategorized

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I call this watercolour painting “A Flock Of Feathers”.

It may not look like much but painting it was a lot of fun.

My daughter gave me the idea for it when she sent me an instagram tutorial showing how easy it can be to paint feathers with watercolours.

Of course, I didn’t find it that easy.

That was lesson one for the day.

When learning something new, little comes easily. It’s all about the practice.

Experts say that when working with watercolours, one must try to stick to only three colours.

I brazenly pushed the envelope to five.

Now, on to lesson two…

Having used five colours, once I had finished up I had a number of brushes to clean up.

In the past, I’ve often wondered why a painter’s palette is always so messy looking. Most that I’ve seen are laden with both colourful and muddy mixtures and wrought with strangely inky pools.

It was while I was standing at my kitchen sink cleaning up the brushes when the answer to this question suddenly came to me.

Why do palettes always look messy?

Because trying to keep it continually clean can drive a painter crazy.

That must be why artists suffer so much….

…

…Ba-dum-tss.

The Art Of Journalling And The Journalling Of Art

07 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by duckykoren in journalling, Uncategorized

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Tags

Blogging, Travel, travel writing

It was 1992 when I began journaling.

25 years later, I think it’s safe to assume that scattered around my house are no less then 100 purchased journals filled with quotes, daily activities, pictures, spiritual meanderings, meaningless musings and all other sorts of what some people may consider unending drivel.

Perhaps.

Most of these journals cost on the average about ten dollars. I always tended to go for the prettier journals with lined paper and strong spines.

Other journals came as gifts for which I was grateful.

Now, wherever did I obtain this passion for putting pen to paper in small little books you may ask?

I often asked myself this same question as I kept stacking my filled journals one by one on top of the other. It is my belief that the answer to my obsession is my grandfather, best known in our family as Opa Scherer.

Currently, I am the keeper of what I call The Scherer Archives which contain journals and photo albums which can be found my living room, bedrooms, at least four book cases and one suitcase.

Yes, there are that many.

My Grandfather spoke and wrote in languages that I never learned and so they are mostly unreadable.

This breaks the heart as I can only imagine what they contain.

Now, what I’d like to tell you about are my experiments into making small travel size journals.

My daughter introduced the idea to me when she gifted me with a Tardis blue leather midori journal.

I’ll start with the smaller art journals which I’ve been making over the past week.

My personal preference for the art journal is the cold pressed paint paper which is best suited for watercolour painting.

First, I made the cover. This was done by taking one sheet of the chosen paper and cutting it lengthwise in half, then covering it with either artwork or gluing some decorative paper to it.

Next, I took a sheet of my cold pressed art paper and used washi tape to help divide it into sections. The reason I used washi tape instead of regular scotch tape is that it doesn’t damage the paper when it’s removed.

Then, with my scissors I cut along both lengths of the washi tape as follows…. Which left me with this

So, you may be asking yourself this by now:

How do we put this all together?

There are several options, you can bind it with stitching if you’re sure that you are comfortable with not being able to add or subtract pages later on.

This is my preference for my writing journals.

But since, I’m focusing on an art journal, I’ve come up with an idea that’s much more flexible and easy. You can remove and add paper at will.

Now, here’s the trick:

I got a black hair tie which was purchased in bulk at the dollar store.

I gave the thick paper which would be used for painting a good heavy fold along with the cover.

Then I inserted the prepared paper strips inside the cover.

Next, I fed the paper and the cover through the hair tie until it was halfway up.

In this way, the hair tie is holding everything together like a rubber band would.

Another beautiful thing about this is that should I want to remove a piece of paper and replace it, no problem because it’s not sewn together. It’s only a rubber band that’s holding everything together.

And there you have it, a quick and easy journal easily made for less than a dollar depending on the quality of your supplies.

Of course, the past few days did not come without some mistakes along the way…

I’ve learned that when using a paintbrush to glue cardboard to paper, it is no longer a paintbrush. It then becomes a glue brush because it’s nearly impossible to remove the glue bits trapped between the bristles. The last thing I want are glue particles finding their way into my painting.

Another thing I learned is I must be very careful when using soap to clean the brushes.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out where all the bubbles in my paintings were coming from.

I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial.

It’s time for me to start thinking up another one.

Cheers!

In Memory Of Don McPhee: My Portrait Of Stanley The Seagull

06 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by duckykoren in mourning, Uncategorized, water colour

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Tags

Art, Blogging, relationships, work

I am dedicating this post to my dear late friend, Don McPhee.

I got to know him early on in my career at the post office around 1991.

All too sad, he died suddenly of a heart attack in October 2002. He was literally here one minute and gone the next.

It seemed that I cried for days, and I resolved to myself that I would try and think of him once a day.

Yes, he was that special.

He suffered his first heart attack in 1992. It had not been a kind year for him, and eventually all of his stressors took their toll.

Upon hearing of Don’s first heart attack I took a page from my Grandmother’s life’s lessons. I tried to write to him at least once a week, to ensure that he knew that his friends from work were thinking of him.

I had an assortment of stationary that I had hand penned a year earlier when I was studying calligraphy. It felt good to finally put all my cards and letters to good use.

These notes contained inspirational verses and quotes that I had collected through the years.

Among my favourites of these collected quotes were:

“We are each of us Angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.”

and…

“Mailman, mailman don’t delay, do the rhumba all they way.”

When he finally returned to work, his large community of friends at the post office were very happy to have him and his zany jokes back again. I was always fond of the way he told his jokes. While telling them, he himself laughed so hard that he’d have to wipe the tears from his eyes. And that was before he even got to the punch line.

Don enjoyed taking his breaks and lunches sitting on the curb just outside the plant doors of where we worked. He always sat in the middle of his company of friends.

Over time, he befriended a seagull, one of many who kept sentry watch on the dozens of lamp posts/security cameras scattered around our vast post office parking lot.

Don named him Stanley and swore that he could tell him apart from all the other seagulls.

He and the seagull would always share Don’s lunch.

Now, I ask you…

Who befriends a seagull?

Well, to answer that will say again…

Yes… he really was that special.

Much to my surprise, the day after Don’s passing I received a telephone call from his sister.

She had called to tell me that Don had died.

I was a little confused as to why she had gone through the trouble of contacting me, as we had never met or had any other contact before.

She explained that as she and other family members were going through his things, they had found a large box containing all the cards and letters that I had sent him.

Had I really sent him that many?

After going through the letters, Don’s family decided that it would be the right thing to do to contact me and thus inform me of his passing just in case I didn’t know.

I was grateful of course.

His memorial service was the next day.

Upon entering the funeral home, I was directed to the family receiving line where I met his brothers, sister and mother. They welcomed me warmly and told me that Don had often spoke of me. I was moved to tears when they related that Don never referred to me by my name “Doris”, instead he always referred to me as “my friend Doris”.

The family then invited me towards several rooms that had been set up to celebrate his life. There were photo albums, personal cherished items and all sorts of memorabalia.

Imagine my surprise when I realized that among the items displayed were all the various cards and letters that I had sent him.

It seems that there were dozens and dozens.

Yes, I finally realized that I really did send him a lot of cards and letters.

And so, all these years later, I have taken it upon myself to paint a lovely rendering of Stanley the seagull. I had found many good ideas on Pinterest and found one in particular that I liked very much. It seemed to capture Stanley quite well.

First I sketched what I thought to be a decent rendering of a seagull. You would think that after having seen so many in the course of my lifetime, that this would have been an easy task.

Not so.

A seagull has a particular look, menacing is the best way I can describe it. There is a look in the eye that tells you he’s just here for the food and nothing more.

You’ll never get any warm fuzzies from a seagull, that’s for sure.

After I had painted what I thought would suffice being a seagull, I prepared to do a wet on wet paint application. That’s when I wet the paper I am about to paint with clear water before applying wet paint to it.

I chose to do the background colour in a bluish grey.

I needed the paper to dry before I could proceed any further, so I went to shower in an effort to acknowledge that there were tasks other than watercolour painting that needed to be done on this day.

When I returned to my project, I was glad to see that everything had dried according to plan.

Now it was time to start painting the seagull.

This, in the end proved to be more difficult than I had imagined.

I spent a good part of the rest of the morning adjusting this and repainting that.

In fact, it was all I could to to recognize when enough was enough and it was time to call it quits and put my toys away. After all, you never know that you’ve overdone something until it’s too late.

And so, allow me to introduce to you Stanley the seagull.

I hope you like it…

I’m pretty sure that Don would have liked it too.

Miracle On Seventeenth Street…

05 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by duckykoren in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

When thinking about where to find beautiful art, my thoughts often turn to to the eternal city of Rome, Italy.

Next to Rome’s City Government offices located at the address of #17 Via Venti Settembre is the church of Santa Maria Della Vittoria.

This unassuming and very plain looking church is filled with glorious works of art that include statues by the artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. It was these same statures that came to my attention when I read Dan Brown’s book ANGELS AND DEMONS back in 2008. For those of you who saw the movie starring Tom Hanks, you may remember this church as it was featured in a fiery murder scene.

Dan Brown wrote at length about one particular statue called The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. It depicts an angel holding a large arrow pointing towards the collapsed Saint.

My first two visits to the steps of this church failed to grant me inside access because of the rather staggered visiting hours.

Finally, at long last came the day when we were able to enter the church and I was very excited that I was about to come face to face with one of Bernini’s masterpieces.

Once inside the church I began to approached The Ecstasy Of Saint Teresa. When I was directly in front of the statue I noticed something was wrong with my surroundings. Both me and the statue were in darkness. This was very unlike the pictures I had seen where everything gleamed with white and gold. I quickly realized that the statue was unfortunately unlit.

Looking around I noticed there were a few other people in my area, none of which were my family. There was no clergy or anyone else to voice my concern over the lack of light.

Had someone forgotten to turn them on?

Was the church trying to save money?

There was little I could do, so I decided I would accept the lowlight conditions for what they were and I would not allow it to diminish the joy of finally being able to admire this work of art.

Standing quietly I began to take in the details of what sculpted marble and gold I could see.

It was then that I noticed a very soft golden glow beginning to emanate out of nowhere from somewhere inside the statue. Right in front of my eyes the glow became even brighter as it began to light up the face of Saint Teresa. The angel’s arrow began beaming radiant shards.

I looked left and right to see if anyone else was noticing this phenomena. Instead, I found myself totally alone. The rest of my family was some distance away near the front of the church.

Turning my attention back to the statue I saw that it was glowing brighter still.

How could this be happening?

Was I witnessing some sort of miracle?

Again, I turned my thoughts back to the present, and resolved that I must take advantage of whatever this was, and be grateful for the mysterious light. I knew that I would never forget the beauty of these moments when I was able to observe The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in full glory and bright brilliance.

After spending a few minutes in silent wonder, I noticed that the lights around the statue were slowly dimming.

Shortly after that me and the Bernini statue had fallen into darkness once again.

Taking that as my cue to leave, I turned around to find my daughter Jennifer standing behind me.

“Did you see that?” I asked her. “Did you see how the statue began to glow out of nowhere right in front of my eyes?”

She nodded yes with a smile…

“Yeah, there was an offering box on a table next to the door,”

I wondered how an offering box next to the door had any relevance to my miracle.

It was then that she went on to explain…

“I decided to donate a few coins, and as I dropped them in I saw the statue lights beginning to come up.”

She continued…

“The more money I put in the offering box, the brighter the lights, so I used up all my change to give you lots of light.

At this point my daughter and I had walked to the front of the church and sure enough, sitting on a table was an plain wooden offering box just as Jennifer had described it.

As we left the church, I noticed a sense of happiness about myself. It was the same sense of giddiness that I felt when I found myself in the presence of that strange and mysterious light.

This sense of joy has never left me and I carry it with me still.

I learned that one really must recognize and appreciate any and all miracles…

…whether they emanate from from otherworldly source…

…or just a plain old church offering box.

Living In A Box Of Paints

04 Thursday Jan 2018

Posted by duckykoren in Uncategorized, water colour

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Tags

Art, Blogging, Travel

Before I begin, I feel a need to explain the title of today’s post.

It is one of the lines in a Joni Mitchell song that has over the years etched itself deep into my music playlists.

The first time I heard this song was during a movie called TRULY MADLY DEEPLY. A trusted coworker had endorsed this movie as a must see.

At one point during the movie, this song was sung by Alan Rickman, and I was immediately charmed by it’s lovely melody.

The title of the song was A CASE OF YOU.

If you’re unfamiliar with this song, I welcome you to look it up sometime.

Now, on with my story…

If you’ll remember, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to try and learn something new every day.

Well, I can say with confidence that during this very short time I have learned more I had originally bargained for.

Let me begin…

About a month ago, while scrolling through Pinterest I had come across pictures of an extremely small box of paints made from an altoids tin and clear plastic gum pack, you know, like the plastic you find in your average package of gum.

I was immediately smitten.

Within a week I had gathered the materials, sat myself down and began constructing this little treasure of a paint box.

In front of my was a tin so small you could fit two inside an altoids tin. I had purchased this tin in a little Roman shop selling pasta, liquors, cookies and candies. This tin was filled with tiny liquorice candies. I had some bubble tea staws about the size of a liquorice wand. I was going to cut them about an inch thick, and they would hold the paint. Imagine my surprise when I learned the tin would fit sixteen pieces. This meant that my little paint box would hold sixteen different colours.

Yay!

Now, looking back, I can see that my efforts in making this small liquorice tin into a mini paint box proved to have several faux pas.

To begin with, I had thought that lining the tin with aluminum foil would help protect it from rust.

Well, what it did do was prevent the paint from thickening and hardening.

Putting gel glue on the bottom of the bubble tea straws to help contain the paint wasn’t a good idea either.

I constructed that tin weeks ago and the paint is still as wet as on the day I had poured it.

Another travel paint box that I constructed yesterday featuring varying blues and greens is already dry.

Further, yesterday I lined the tin with washi tape hoping it would add some colour and flair.

That was another bad idea because the washi tape is peeling off the sides.

There’s no flair in that.

It would seem that I’m going to have to rethink my paint box making skills and try to build a better paintbox.

Oddly enough, just now, I can hear my own father’s voice telling me time and again that in order to succeed, one has to build a better mousetrap.

I always knew that I never had the smarts nor the will to build his proverbial better mouse trap.

Instead, I’m going to build me a better box of paints.

Resolutions

03 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by duckykoren in Uncategorized, wander, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Advice, Art, blog, Blogging, Books, Learning, life, work

January 1, 2018

It must now be twenty years since I read Stephen King’s book; the craft of writing.

In that book he advocated that any serious writer must be committed to writing at least one thousand words a day.

It was a promise that I made to myself time and again, but never kept.

Today is January 1st, 2018, the first day of the new year and I have made two New Year’s resolutions.

The first is to commit myself to writing one thousand words a day. I feel I have a better than average chance at doing this because on December 28th of last year, less than one week ago, I retired after working 29 years at the post office. This retirement did not come one minute too soon. After suffering a serious shoulder injury last fall which rendered my tow motor driving days at work over and done with, the horrible night shift of 3:00 am to 11:00 am has left me exhausted.

My husband who retired last summer make it very clear to me that my retirement would be filed with everyday walks and plenty of activity.

Well, that hasn’t really happened yet because of the extreme temperatures outside. Indeed, every day seems to set new low temperature records. Even some of last night’s new year festivities were cancelled due to public health and safety.

As for my second New Year’s resolution, it is about 44 years since my school band instructor Mr. Inglis told his music student’s that if you undertake a hobby and commit yourself to it, you must strive to learn at least one new thing a day. It doesn’t have to be anything overwhelming, but something you noticed, that you have never noticed before.

About a year ago, I began to notice that I was beginning to take on an interest in watercolour art. My daughter had purchased a travel sized watercolour palette that really began to peak my interest.

What made me take notice? You ask…

Well, it was probably when she, my husband and myself were making our way through security at England’s Heathrow airport. She failed the carry on luggage test when the screening noticed something odd in her suitcase. It was pulled over for inspection much to our chagrin. Anytime you are pulled over to have your suitcase inspected the world seems to grow dark with shame and fear.

In the end it was her travel size set of watercolour paints that caught security’s attention.

They opened it up and asked her what it was.

She told them.

They allowed her to pass through their sacred portals along with her box of paints. However, they made it clear to her that had they been in liquid form, they would have been confiscated.

During my summer holidays in June of last year, I bought myself a box of paints and some paper and began to paint.

Badly, of course…

However, I found joy in my awkward paintings. Underwater scenes seemed to be the nicest ones that I produced.

I began to dabble my way around the internet and you tube looking for direction.

From “The Watercolour Misfit” I eventually learned how to properly push water and paint around the paper. Mind you, I still need a lot of practise of this and many other things.

Anyway, my second New Year’s resolution for this New Year is to learn something new each day.

This, of course does not strike me an overly time consuming commitment, yet I recognize it will require some sort of dedication.

And so, on this first day of the year, I discovered not only one, but two epiphanies in regards to the fine art form of watercolour…

The first discovery came when I was doing a pink flat wash background for a bird that I had sketched onto my cold pressed watercolour paper.

Noticing that in my paint mixture, there were small specks of debris, it didn’t take me long to figure out that they flecks had come from the rubber eraser of the pencils that I used to sketch my drawing. I had erased several pencil lines and did not think to ensure the remover of the eraser leavings. That’s a mistake I will not be making again.

The second lesson came as I was putting away the tubes of paint after I had finished painting.

I noticed that the white tube of paint that I had used to highlight my bird’s eyes with was missing it’s small little cap. It was in that moment that I realized that after removing the cap on a tube of paint, you must immediately replace the cap.

Why?

Because those little caps are so small, once misplaced, you will be hard pressed to try and find it.

Good thing that I had made a new palette of cooler hues of blues and greens and had emptied several tubes. I retrieve an empty tube from the garbage, removed the cap and rinsed off the dried paint from inside.

And voila, I had a replacement cap.

While, I was at it, I retrieved two more caps from other discarded tubes. I know myself well enough that I can be quite absent minded when I am preoccupied with my tasks at hand.

And so, there you have it. I know two things that I did not learn yesterday.

Yay me.

Tomorrow, I will write of the painting books that I made.

To be honest with you, I actually had three epiphanies today, however I’ll leave it to next time.

I was just informed by my husband that I don’t have to worry about running out of paint anytime soon.

It seems that along with the three reams of paper that I asked him to order for me, he also mistakingly ordered another three boxes of 18 count paint tubes.

Three boxes.

Fifty-four tubes of paint.

I am going to be doing a lot of watercolour painting this year.

There’s going to be a lot to be learned.

There’s even more to be done.

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