Jonah at Four

I know everyone's just so excited to see some more portraits on the plains! Right? RIGHT?!

 

 Elora has had several years where her birthday portraits have featured the vast grasslands, but I was realizing that for Jonah we've always taken photos with props: a tractor, a cowboy hat in a barn, etc. and he doesn't have any birthday pictures of just the prairie yet. Plus..where else would I take his pictures?

Actually, I saw a place owned by some of our friends in town with a bunch of colored barrels and I considered going there, but that's been done by everyone already, especially in Utah. And it's too far to go just to take pictures. I'm lazy like that.

So, Jonah. One day, we had fifteen minutes to take some pictures before dinner was ready. I thought he was wearing a cute outfit that made his eyes show up, and the lighting was really nice so we went outside and walked around for a minute. Most of them aren't even good enough to post- but we did find a pretty place where we took a handful that I like:

A.

In the bottom one I told him to open his eyes so I could
see them better!

I admit, we picked this spot because I wanted to capture the flowers too. Sometimes I like these, and sometimes it feels too much like "pose-my-kid-in-front-of-my-house" pictures. Even though it's not my house, its one nobody lives in.

The next day I dressed Jonah in blue again, hoping for an opportunity to go out. The day was cloudy, and I decided to go out midday, as the cloud cover should make it not too bright and it might be too dark in the evening. It worked for even lighting, but the white sky was a little bright so Jonah squinted a lot. Josh wanted to come too!

See all those brown stems? Those were the sunflowers from June.

 

 

 

I really liked the ones we took of Josh in the flowers where the hill went up behind him, so we took some pictures of Jonah near there first. The flowers are gone and the grass is long, so it's like a completely different place! These all turned out pretty cute. I think I like the two in "C" the best, especially the bottom one. I'm almost tempted to add in a cloudy sky behind him, because it looks so white it's like I took the sky out! But I hate changing photos that much.

B.



I know they're almost the same picture, but to a mother,
there are many nuanced differences in his expressions.

C.

 

Since these seemed to work out well, I again followed the same path as with Josh's photos, headed over to the cool fence with the big boards. This time, we did a different angle than Joshua's, so it's not the same. I was playing with different stuff in photoshop, so here are two versions of the same three pictures. I can't decide if I like the bright dreamy colors, or the faded ones the best:

 

D.

I like the bottom two the best; not sure which though.

 

We tried some sitting down, but Jonah was done with this spot and he wouldn't really look at me more than once:

 

E.

 

 

We walked until we found a nice spot with a hill to add some depth. Really, my vision for the day was more something like these rolling hills:
 

F.

But somehow a good photo with this background never materialized. Here's the small hill as the consolation prize:
G.

I like the bottom one.

H. The middle one here kind of has the landscape, though his face is iffy.



























 

 

Before we were done, we tried a few more in thick grass. These are pretty meh, and very similar to the first group except for the angle, but I wanted to post them because his face is so funny! Especially the bottom right..he looks like a little imp!

I.

 

Finally, here are some behind the scenes "moments". You know, when Jonah was done and wanted to leave?

 



 

 

Eli's sandals

These are Eli's cute summer sandals. At the beginning of the summer, they mirrored one another in every way: shape, color, snazziness. But recent events have caused one of these shoes to look a bit...different. Can you tell? The sandal to the left is somewhat deformed: wider, flatter, scrumblier.

 

 

 

If you look even closer, you might notice that the shoe on the right has a pleasant repeating pattern stamped into the rubber sole.

 

 

 

However, no such pattern exists in the shoe to the left, almost as if it never existed. What could have caused such a transformation? Well, let me tell you a little story.

 

 

 

Last month we took an impromptu quick car trip to Riverton, WY. Joseph has been called to several job interviews this summer, and this time we thought we might join him! Somewhere on the drive there, we lost Eli's sandal out of the car! We searched thoroughly, but it was gone, and the next day we had to go buy him some new shoes. They are pretty cool- blue with lights- but now he didn't have snappy summer sandals anymore. Poor Eli.

While Joseph went to his interview-there were three candidates, he felt he did well, he still didn't the job- we waited at a local park. It was one of those fancy ones where the whole community contributes. You know the ones, where they have a maze of rooms and structures planned by the kids who live there, then they put the names of all the businesses that contribute money. There seems to be one in most bigger towns these days, and they all look very similar.

While I waited for Joseph's return-after I had played for a while with Eli and decided it was way too hot-, I drew these girls that were sitting outside of the structure. Yes, I thought the grass and the parkinglot were more worthy of a drawing than the elaborate playground. Or something.

So hours later, we were on our way home. (Yes, I'm getting to the shoe part.) It was a beautiful day, and we were headed north on the highway between Casper, WY and Gillette, WY. As we came around a bend in the road, the setting sun filtered warmly through our car windows and I was enjoying the slow transition of the sagebrushy part of Wyoming to the grassy northeastern part that was similar to the landscape of our home.

All the sudden my lazy reverie was interrupted by Joseph shouting, "There's Eli's shoe!!" I gaped at him incredulously as we pulled over, turned the car around, and returned to the side of the road where a dirt road split off to the right. There at the entrance to the dirt road, was Eli's cute little sandal! It was a little flat, and smooshed, but it was wearable!

24 hours later, we had found the shoe. I did a drawing in the car as we continued on our journey, to commemorate the reunion of Eli's footwear (I colored it later at home):

 

 It turns out, on our way south the night before, we had stopped at that road to let the little boys go potty. Usually we wouldn't even have opened Eli's car door, but at the time his arm had been twisted in the harness of his carseat, so we had opened his side to make adjustments, at which point the shoe had fallen out.

We're so happy we found it!
Too bad he likes his new blue shoes better.

 

 

paper

Earlier this summer, we made a little trip to the craft store, and I was able to get some new art supplies! I was excited to get three new art pads of different kinds of paper: one tan, one gray, and one the traditional white.

I don't know why, but I've always had some kind of mental block when it comes to art sketch books. It's like my mind goes blank and I can think if nothing to draw. If I do have something to draw, say for an assignment in school or something, my art skills seem to go right out the window, and I can't remember how to draw anything except the cartoon people I've drawn since middle school.

Even today, I often feel an aversion to nice sketchbooks, because I know it will make me avoid working on art.  Up until this summer, I think it's been at least 12-13 years since I've bought one-basically not since I graduated from college.

In school, I waxed the most artistic when I had lined paper in front of me, but then I'd feel sad when I drew a nice picture but it wasn't on good paper. So, I figure if I want to work on my art portfolio (which is definitely a goal of mine) I need to ease into the real sketchbook thing.

So over the last few years, I've been buying an oversized 11x14 sketchbook to use as my personal  journal, rather than a regular 8.5 x11 book. Then, when inspiration strikes, I can use one of the nice pages therein, but not feel bad if it turns out poorly, because it's just my journal, right?

All of the marker drawings from the last three years, the pencil drawing of Eli and Jonah, Elora in the sunflowers...basically, everything that wasn't a commissioned drawing has been in my journal.

Anyway, this summer I finally felt like I could handle a real sketchbook. Mostly because when I want to show people the originals I'm not too keen on leafing through my personal journal to find them.

So here are some things I've done recently. First, I wanted to try the tan paper. I thought it might work well for portraits, since I haven't been able to find the light pink paper that I first started drawing them on in 2008. The color was nice, but didn't work quite as well as I hoped. It really sucked up the color from the pencils, so I found myself pushing a lot harder than I usually do, and it still didn't look very bright. I'll have to experiment some more.
I used Joshua's birthday pictures for this drawing, because there was a lot of high contrast light. First is a toned drawing of his head,

 

 



then I tried one with more color; I liked his expression in this photo. It turned out a little cartoony, but Josh really does have a cartoony face!

 

finally I did one in full color, which again wasn't as bright as I hoped, but it turned out pretty good:

 

 

Here is the full page with all three drawings on it.

 

 

Next I wanted to try out the gray toned paper. I looked through all of my black and white photos to find something that would look cool with it. I settled on an old photo of Elora by some water from around 2008. I used charcoal pencil, which I hadn't used in years. I forgot how hard it was to get precise details, plus I didn't have all the tools I used to have for this medium  from back when I was in school, so I wasn't very excited with how the drawing turned out. In the end, I added a smidge of color just to make it more interesting. It probably wasn't the best choice of photos for the medium.

 

 

I knew I had a lot of nice black and white photos saved on Pinterest, but I was hesitant to use someone else's photo for my artwork. In the end, I figured I'm not selling it and it's just for practice, so I decided it was okay. Believe me the photo I was looking at is much cooler than the drawing, but this is the one I did:

 

Not too bad. But again, it was someone else's idea to begin with, so eh.

 

Finally, I've come around to my white paper. It's the same size as my journal, but nicer paper. When we were on a little car trip a few weeks ago, we had stopped at a gas station in the evening, and I took a picture of a telephone pole with the evening sky behind it. I love paintings of everyday, almost ugly objects made beautiful, and this reminded me of a neat painting I'd seen with lots of telephone wires in it. For this drawing, I used my markers:

 

For the most part I really like it, especially  the red undertones on the pole and the ground. I'm not sure I like the clouds through the middle of the drawing. I added them last minute without thinking about it first, and they were not  in the photo. I had to put a little bit of white acrylic paint over them because the yellow was too yellow, and I didn't have a better color to use.  All in all thought, I like it. It's not nearly as cool as the painting I was remembering , but it reflects where I live pretty accurately.

This is the one I liked: "Alley at Dawn" - René Wiley Oil on Canvas 40 x 20. I love it!

 

renewileygallery.com

 

 

  Right now I am working on another drawing in my white sketchbook that's not finished yet..because you know, kids and stuff. It takes weeks to finish something that would take a day or two otherwise! I can't wait to show you.

 

green and pink and hit all over

What's green and pink and hit all over?




















Well,it starts with a balloon, and a few cups.

























Then add lots of paper, flour and water.  Probably cover the table, because it's really messy.



Finally, you add Jonah's two favorite colors (pink and green),

























with a few frills just for fun.




















What do you end up with? Why a piñata of course! One of Jonah's favorite bedtime books is a Spanish book about filling up a piñata, so we decided to make one just for his birthday. Of course we didn't have cool things like in his book- dos trompetas, tres animalitos, quatro aviones, cinco silbatos, seis chicles...well, you get the idea. We did have candy, and a few glow in the dark things, so that was pretty good, right?
 Jonah seemed to think so. Good thing too, because it took most of the week to make it!

























We don't have a good tree nearby, so we planned to hang it at the school playground on one of the toys there. But as there were people there the night of his birthday, we changed plans and took it to the pow wow grounds!
Everyone got a turn to hit, from smallest to largest:





































 








































Josh made the first mortal wound, and it wasn't too long before it looked like this:

 

Of course, mommy might have had something to do with that final blow :)

 

 The piñata was the big event of the evening, but Jonah got other cool stuff for his birthday too, like the cake that he and daddy decorated together. He got chocolate cake with strawberry frosting, and he told daddy how he wanted it decorated.

 

 

 

He got lots of cool presents too!

 

 

Everyone needs at least one light saber in their childhood.

 

 

 

Happy birthday, Jonah!