Passing Time: Pen Sketches

Here are a few of the sketches I have done in my spare time while teaching/subbing. Every now and then I get a free period or I have time to kill waiting for a class to come in, so I spend the time drawing. It is very relaxing. It is also fun to share sketches with students sometimes, they are a good conversation starter! Once I was setting up and practicing with a document projector while students where working. It caught the attention of a few kids and they started asking for requests and I drew a few of their portraits. They really loved it and liked getting to see the drawing process on the screen. I wound up giving them the portrait drawings, too.

Anyway back to the sketches, using pen is challenging and fun. Working with a pen forces you to make decisions and work with unintended marks and lines, instead of erasing them. You have to commit to working through any problems or just let it go. I really enjoyed using pen for shading because of the contrast it provides. I worked on these on and off for a several weeks, whenever I had a few minutes with nothing much to do.

Enjoy!

Bison

Draped Man

Puppy

Sink Knob

Ceramic Vase

Blue Bird

Yin-Yang Creature

Banner Wordle

I tried out making a Wordle for my Blog banner! Wordles are word art designs generated by a website. They are pretty cool, you just type in the words you want to make a design out of, tweak the settings and colors, and you have personalized word art! It is fun to play and see what different results you can get. To make a word appear bigger in the design you have to repeat it more than once. The only catch is that you can't download the design directly when you make it, instead you have to take a screen shot and save that to your computer. Other than that the website was really easy to use.



My wordle has all words related to art and art education.


Try it out at www.wordle.net

Art Portfolio Website Updated

I have gone through and updated my art portfolio site at http://www.kellynixonart.com . I added a slightly bigger and smoother slideshow to display the images. New artwork has been added to each section. Information in Resume and Contacts has been updated. Last but not least, I added links to my new Art Ed blog.

Light an Color Study: Added to Website

It took about a week (on and off) to get the slideshows and coding updated. The only major problem I came across happened right after I had uploaded the new version of the website to the server, to make it live. I had tried all my files locally on my computer and everything looked perfect. I added the files to my server on GoDaddy.com and then when I viewed my page, the main image for the slideshow wouldn't appear. I spent a day and a half trying to go through the html and javascript coding to see what was wrong. Finally, I checked to see if there were any suggestions online. One of the entries I found, talked about everything being case sensitive. I double checked my file names and sure enough, the website server had converted all the titles to lowercase and that was why the slideshow wouldn't work. Once I made the image titles lowercase to match the html file, the slideshow began functioning properly again.That is the funny thing about coding, one little mistake somewhere can throw everything off.

Now everything is ready to roll! Enjoy!

Bison Sketch: Added to Website