Wooden Figure #3

 in Wooden figure #3. Digital painting. Ulla Hennig March 2013

If you compare this version with the first one you will notice that I darkened the water and the background in order to put more focus on the wooden figure.

I am still exploring the potential of Artrage. There are a lot of video tutorials on YouTube, and there is the artrage forum with “tips and tricks”. But they don’t cover anything, and I feel that I should begin to make notes about my own experiences.

 

 

Here I am again!

Well, sometimes things happen. I had my Christmas vacations very carefully planned: I wanted to so some readings, do some art, relax and prepare myself for 2013.

However I had to go to the hospital on January 2 and stayed there till last Monday because of a rather nasty abscess in my appendix. On Monday I could leave the hospital but I am still on antibiotics. I am still trying to get my strenght back.

I learned two important things:

1. Never take your health for granted. Health is a present we have to be thankful for every day. 
2. Accept your weaknesses and focus on healing. That is something I am not very good in. I tend to become impatient, even angry with my body. Why is it me? Why in my vacations? Why? Why am I still weak and getting out of breath after having walked for such a short time? These questions are utterly out of place. I should rather ask myself what are the steps which are good for my body? And I should focus on the things that work.

 

Oil pastels: Learning by Doing

Another experiment with oil pastels.

This is not an art piece. I am not presenting it because I think it’s good. I am presenting this piece because I want to learn from my failures.

With this piece I learnt several things:

• You can shade by using a darker pastel over the lighter one. You can then leave the strokes as they are or blend them with a paper stump (or your fingers).
• When you use a paper stump you have to be very careful to use a clean one. Otherwise you get mud instead the lovely colour you are wanting to achieve.
• When shading you have to be sure where the light comes from and then continue to shade in the same direction.
• Imagination is fine, but doing a pencil sketch before painting with the oil pastels is not bad at all. It might be helpful for getting a decent composition.

Practice, practice, practice!

 I read somewhere that you should practice the things you find difficult to do, not those you find easy. Well, up to yesterday I did not know how to do gradients in Inkscape. I knew how to do them in Photoshop, but everytime I tried to do them with the vector program I failed. I looked at several video tutorials on Youtube, but no way!

On the other hand I read a lot of Adobe Illustrator tutorials about using gradients and looking at the amazing results I so wished I were not too daft to learn!

And then yesterday once again I looked at a Youtube tutorial (one, that was new to me) and click! I had that aha experience. i could but try it out, although it got late in the evening. It worked! I did it!

But I knew one thing: Without practice I would lose the new gained knowledge. So I opened my Inkscape today and did these two candles. I know I can only describe them as “work in progress”, but I love the colours and how the gradients go!

And I also learnt something very important: Never ever think you’re too daft to learn something! Often it is the way things are taught which makes difficult to learn something. It just needed that one well designed and organised tutorial to put things into the right place.

Living Here and Now

Sometimes, on my way home, I watch mothers with their young children. Obviously they have fetched them from kindergarten, and now both are on their way home, or on their way to the next supermarket. Mom looks on her watch. You can see that she’s got a certain schedule in her mind (“must get food for dinner. Dinner must be ready at 7pm, otherwise hungry husband gets angry”). Little boy or girl is lagging behind and stops. A little dog has caught his attention, and he squats down to pat it. Mom has discovered that her child is not with her anymore, turns around and grabs her boy.

The little boy is making noises at the dog, and the dog is obviously enjoying his attention. The boy doesn’t want to go away. Here is a sweet little dog, swishing its tail, even throwing itself on its back in order to be patted on its tummy.

His mom is not stone-hearted. She notices the way her boy is acting – carefully patting the dog, making calming noises, and is proud of him. But she’s got that schedule in her head and wants to keep to it. So she says “Come on, we’ve got to go, daddy is waiting at home and wants to have his dinner”. No reaction. Her boy doesn’t care about the future. He’s focused on the here and now.

Here my story ends. We adults have our schedules. We go from A to Z in order to reach the office, the bus, to do the shopping, to meet someone at a certain time. We don’t want to get lost in the here and now. But I think that is something we should learn from children: to get distracted  – to get distracted by the song of a bird, by the color of a flower, the tail-swishing of a dog.

This is a contribution to Robert Hruzek’s Group Writing Project “What I learned from Children” over at Middlezone Musings.

What I learned from a good friend

Most of my really good friends are women, and most of them are freelancers. Not always because they wanted it to be from the beginning, but because they are unemployed – although all of them are highly qualified persons.

I am lucky. I have a job. It is not the job I have been trained for, but I got into it because I had gone to a course on programming for the web and a person with that knowledge was needed. I work at a university, not as a lecturer, but as an internet editor in the communication and marketing department, and this department is a part of the administration of the Berlin University of the Arts. It is an interesting and sometimes challenging job, and I have a regular income.
Every time I meet Gertrud, one of my freelancing friends, I am fascinated. She’s got a one-woman business with cosmetics, and it is very hard for her to earn money though she puts in a lot of work. She never complains; she’s almost never grumpy. I told her once how I admired her for her energy to encounter all the difficulties in her life. She looked at me and said: “Well, it wouldn’t help if I would complain and whine – so what’s the use of doing it.” Wow!
So she taught me to go on, to keep on trying in spite of difficulties.

The second thing I am learning from her is self-responsibility and self-organization. At my job the general goals are defined elsewhere – for example not only to present the University with a website in German, but also with a website in English. Me and my collague then have to define the sub-goals and organize the proper activities. My friend has to define all the goals herself – general goals and sub-goals, and then to convert them into activities. Nobody controls her, nobody says “no” to her ideas – and nobody helps her. She is completely on her own. That impresses me a lot, and I try to learn from her. And not to forget: I learn is to appreciate the “luxuries” of being employed…

This is part of Robert Hruzek’s group writing project “What I learned from Friends”.

Keep on Trying

This picture is has been created accidentally. I’ve got a black ceramic cat in my flats, and I decided to try out the makro function of my camera. The results were – ahem – more than bad. You could see nothing than a black form standing before a somewhat whiteish background. Half an hour of working on it with Photoshop didn’t do anything good. So I decided to call it a day and to throw all the pics into the wastebin. But then I stopped. Maybe a last try with those beautiful layer masks and layer styles? The next ten minutes you could be see clicking wildly around – and this is the result! (Don’t ask me how I did it – I don’t remember!)

And this is, what I learned: Even when you think you have tried everything – there might be a last possibility, a last way. Try it!