Easter bunny

How have rabbits become synonymous with Easter? And where is the theory behind the Easter Bunny bringing chocolate eggs to children (and adults)? I never quite understand the connection anymore than I understand the connection chocolate or chicks have with this holiday either, so I did a little research.

Marion Murdoch's version seems logical.

It is thought that the hunt for eggs came first, with no association to the rabbit. As children searched for the eggs, they flushed out rabbits and thus began the stories of the rabbits leaving the eggs. Eggs were traditionally given out at the start of Spring in Egypt and Persia.

Historically, the rabbit, hare, and eggs in folklore have their basis as pagan fertility symbols, signifying Spring and new life, and the worship of the goddess Eostre or Eastre (usually shown with the rabbit as her symbolic animal). To entertain a child, the goddess turned her favorite bird into a hare, which immediately laid colorful eggs. When the Christians moved into the pagan's territories, they decided that the custom of coloring eggs was not harmful and adapted it to their own festivities.

Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday following a full moon, so the moon was used to figure out the date of Easter every year, and the hare (not the rabbit) was the symbol of the Egyptian moon. The hare was always been portrayed with its eyes open, watching the moon. In fact, the Egyptian word for hare is "un" which means open. Hares are born with their eyes open, rabbits are born with them closed.

When German settlers arrived in America, they brought with them the legend of "Oschter Haws", the white Easter Hare. Children behaved themselves, believing that, if they were good, Oschter Haws would lay colorful eggs (symbols of rebirth) for them in a nest the children had provided (usually their hat or bonnet, placed in the barn). By the 19th Century, the Easter Hare became the Easter Rabbit. American families would later adapt the nest tradition, using baskets, chocolate, and money. Easter itself was not widely celebrated until after the Civil War. A recent poll showed that 88 percent of adults still continue the Easter Bunny tradition

And to make your arteries quiver and your dentist rub his hands in glee here are some facts about Easter candy production:

• The first chocolate eggs were made in Europe in the early 19th century and remain among the most popular treats associated with Easter.
• 90 million chocolate Easter bunnies are made for Easter each year.
• 16 billion jelly beans are made for Easter.
• Each day, five million marshmallow chicks and bunnies are produced in preparation for Easter.
• Easter is the second top-selling confectionery holiday behind only Halloween.
• 88 percent of adults carry on the Easter tradition of creating Easter baskets for their kids.
• 76 percent of people eat the ears on chocolate bunnies first.
• Red jelly beans are kids' favorite.
• According to the Guinness Book of World Records the largest Easter egg ever made was just over 25-ft high and made of chocolate and marshmallow. The egg weighed 8,968 lbs. and was supported by an internal steel frame.

Of course, I have to include a link to the infamous 'Peeps' experiments. You remember those neon coloured marshmallowy chicks?

Outside the zone

Its a holiday for me today so I spent my time catching up with some drawing. This is my effort with the baby orangutan on drafting film. Its been the first time I've seriously worked on this support and I have to say that I quite enjoyed using it.

There isn't much tooth to it of course so layers were a challenge and choosing colours became more crucial and I went outside my usual colour zone. The image changes slightly too depending on the colour of the paper you put behind it. Its currently on white. I have to look into how to frame this medium as its obviously too floppy to be framed on its own and needs a backing.

This drawing is done with coloured pencil and is about 11 x 14. The photo, as always, doesn't do justice to the colour of the drawing. In real life it has a softer glow to it and the colours are less intense in some areas, more so in others.

”The seed of your next art work lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece. Such imperfections (or mistakes, if you’re feeling particularly depressed about them today) are your guides -- valuable, reliable, objective, non-judgemental guides -- to matters you need to reconsider or develop further.” -- David Bayles and Ted Orland.

Decisions

There are so many project in my head that its difficult to prioritize them and I find myself working in small sections of time on a number of them. Interruptions from various sources distract me and just when I find a block of time to myself, the multitude of images all call individually for attention.

I started a drawing in coloured pencil on mylar tonight. Its a unique surface -very smooth application, but not open to using many layers, so it really is an experiment. There are a few Q & A's about using drafting film that are very useful.

Drafting Film Q's and A's

Portrait demo on drafting film

And to prove how easily I get distracted, here's a sketch I did of my grand daughter even when I knew I had other drawings that needed work on them. I think I need blinkers.

Eric

Meet Eric. He's a baby orangutan rescued after his mother was killed in the forest in Taiwan. I have been studying apes lately and find them constantly interesting. Poor Eric looks a little alien in this line drawing, but should become more animated as details emerge.

I will transfer this line drawing to some mylar that I finally found and see how it works with coloured pencil. As I haven't used drafting film much yet, its an experiment. I'll show you how it progresses - if it progresses.

This line drawing is 9 x 12

Observation

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.

William S. Burroughs

People ask how to draw and its never an easy thing to explain. Everyone has in them the ability to draw, but the ability to observe is difficult to explain. I was drawing a chimp's hand today and explaining to the person what I was seeing and how interesting it was. They didn't understand and I could see I lost them the further I got into the subject and the drawing.

Artists often look at things differently. I saw a television program that showed old communities in Newfoundland long abandoned or resettled. Buildings slowly decaying and nature reclaiming the land for itself again. I asked 'what do you see?[ The answer was a quiet setting near the sea. In my mind, I saw possibilities for drawing, focal points, light and shade. I listed colours that I would use as scenes flashed in front of my eyes. I saw something very different. Why do some see the details and others do not? Is it training, the level of interest, ability, habit? Perhaps a combination of all of the above.

This is a quick sketch for an oil painting that I will start soon. Yes, I know I keep putting it off, but I will do it. My sketches end up on the trashiest paper - anything from napkins to envelopes to newspaper. However, I believe getting the idea down is more important than the support at that point.

Apes

Why do apes fascinate humans so much? Do we see ourselves in them, or they in us? I remember years ago being at a zoo and watching a big male orangutan who was watching me as well. We held eye contact for a good 5 minutes with about two ape arm lengths between us in a fairly open zoo.

I continued to photograph him and watch him when he stretched his arm as far as he could out between the bars of his enclosure to pick a dandelion from the grass, then he held it out to me. I so wanted to take the flower he was offering, but couldn't. It was one of those moments in life when you feel as if you can read the animal's mind. Or so I believe. Now taking that flower may well have meant, he'd rip my arm off, but it felt safe somehow with him.


These chimpanzee sketches were the start of a WDE at WetCanvas that never quite got finished. I'd like to go back and doing a painting or coloured pencil drawing of a primate. They do have a fascination to me and perhaps I to them.

What is spring?

I came across Loretta's post in Pomegranates and Paper about what signals spring to her. It was inspiring and made me think about how I know spring is here. What about you? What makes your heart and soul know that it is spring?

Here's my list so far.

• Crocuses peeking round the last vestiges of snow in the garden
• Ducks and geese starting to lay eggs after the winter break
• Putting away winter coats and boots
• The cat being outside for hours instead of 5 minutes at a time
• The greenhouse feeling warm even without heat on
• Starting seeds for flowers and vegetables
• Rabbits in the garden
  
• Robins returning to the garden
• Cleaning the winter's grime off outside windows
• The pair of crows in the woods setting up their nest again
• Lighter mornings and longer evenings
• No frost to scrape off the car in the morning
• Open windows
• Plowing the fields
  
• Looking at brightly coloured dresses in the stores

Guardian of the eggs

I bought this rabbit for my grand daughter, along with some chocolate eggs for the older members of the family. They were all perched on the edge of the table and the rabbit looked so like a guardian of the eggs that it begged to be drawn. So here is the result. It may serve as representation for one of the alphabet letters in the little book I'm preparing for my grand daughter. Sometimes the idea is before me and I don't have to search for it. I find that if I have to search, the end result is not usually pleasing. So found treasures will make up the contents.

9 x 12 Canson sketchbook. Mechanical pencil and watercolour pencils.

Don's Macaw

This is only of my early paintings, done about 2o years ago in acrylic on canvas board, about 16 x 20. Its one of those paintings that has travelled continents with me, and keeps turning up when I sift through old drawings and boxes of half finished paintings that I discarded years ago in the hopes that 'one day' I would find time or inspiration to continue on with them.

This was pretty much finished. Looking at it now, I can see how much more work needs to be done ont he feathers, especially on the right side.

The painting reminds me of a friend who died after the painting was complete. Don had developed lymph node cancer and the painting became part of his ritual. In the week following chemotherapy, when he felt sick and depressed, he would come to my house and sit in the kitchen drinking tea and eating digestive biscuits and watch me paint this bird. Each day that he came he would sit back and say ' Man, that's a great bird.' We talked little some days and a lot on other days. I learned more about him than I ever knew in superficial conversations in a pub with others around. I knew his fears, his deepest fears about cancer, life, death, people, but the conversations were never depressing. Sometimes sad, but we always managed to laugh at some point during his visit.

The macaw remained at this point of completion and was put in the pile of drawings and paintings accumulating in a spare room or behind the sofa. Don had a brief remission after completing the first sessions of chemotherapy but a year later, the cancer returned. He came back to my house again to talk and to watch me paint, more to talk as my back would be turned to him as I painted and it made an easy sounding board. I was there, but I wasn't. I was the listener. He told me he would not have chemotherapy again, it was too hard on his body and mind. Having seen the ravages, I agreed with him. Weeks later he went into a hospice and died there.

The painting, complete or not will stay with me as a reminder of Don and of those talks.

Two months

The smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps--does anybody know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumor that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning.
Author: Sir Rabindranath Tagore

Here is my grand daughter who was two months old yesterday. I do like this photo of her with a genuine smile, not one created by gas. It has potential for an interesting portrait.

Line drawing

Without art, the crudeness of reality

would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw

This is the original line drawing for a new image that I'm starting of my old dog in his favourite habitat - the woods. There is more detail added in the transferred drawing, with a remarque on the bottom of the drawing. You'll have to wait impatiently to see that section...

The path leads into the woods and is a rough road going from the bottom of my driveway off for miles leading to trees, ponds, trees, meadows and more trees. Its full of rabbits and squirrels and moose along with other creatures that I don't even want to think of like coyotes and bears.

I want to create a detailed, realistic drawing of the dog within a background. I have been lazy about using backgrounds and they do add a lot to a drawing or painting. I like the simplicity of working on a single item so have steered clear of landscapes. By breaking the background down into smaller sections, it becomes more manageable. I'm impatient to get to the drawing of the dog, but like leaving the cherry til last, I will make myself finish the background first before I start on him.

Dog dreams

I've started the layout of a new drawing of my dog, Biscuit, who died a year or so ago at 16. The drawing will be in graphite, detailed and include some of his favourite things - the woods, rabbits and moose.

In researching references for this drawing, I looked through lots of old photos of the dog and other elements of the image. While doing so, I came across a little video that I made of him while he was asleep on the sofa one afternoon, dreaming. Unfortunately, I missed the livelier parts of his dream, so its not too exciting a clip. Its also a bit of an experiment as its the first time I've tried uploading a video onto YouTube, which seemed to be fairly straightforward. There are a lot of possibilities with this technology, especially in teaching art, so I'll be experimenting more and perhaps subjecting you all to my efforts.

Roses

I needed a reminder of summer today. Its trying to be spring here, but today didn't succeed very well, with flurries and cold temperatures most of the day. I spent some time cataloguing photographs and came across this one of a dog rose (rosa canina) that I took last summer in a cemetery in St. John's. The plants are horribly prickly but so hardy, nothing can kill them and the roses, while simple and short lived are so beautifully fragrant.

I have pink and white dog roses in the garden, an inheritance from the previous owners and every year I collect petals to make my own rosewater to use in creating herbal creams and lotions. The rosewater that I make is a combination of a distillation of rose petals, distilled water and alcohol. The scent when I open one of those bottles in the depth of winter is pure summer, quite incredible how the scent lasts.

These roses produce huge rosehips and if I can beat the birds and mice to them I dry them and make use of them too in herbal medicine. The hips have an acidic but fruity taste, due to the rich amount of ascorbic acid present. Fresh rose hips contain 60 times as much vitamin C as oranges, and rugosa roses, with their large round fruits, are considered to have one of the highest contents.

Light and shade

While we sat on the patio of a restaurant in Laguna Beach, Robin spotted the interesting architectural shape and light play in this building which was behind me. I asked her to take a photo of it as she was facing that way.

The simple lines and contrasts of light scream oil paint to me. My sister sent me a box of oil paints a few weeks ago as the book store in the university was having a sale, selling them at half price. Perhaps this weekend I'll have a chance to reacquaint myself with oils. Its been some time since I tried them, so I'm looking forward to them again. There is something so nice about the feel, look, texture and smell of oil paints.

Silk nest

I love drawing eggs. They are such beautiful shapes and colours. This reference was from Dianna Ponting, who has done a series of eggs in silk using pastels - and quite beautifully too.

I was taken with the image and will likely try it on a larger scale perhaps in pastel or maybe Derwent Drawing pencils. For now its in mechanical pencil in a 7 x 10 sketchbook.

Learning curves

I have been trying to help someone come to grips with some basic drawing skills. The individual wasn't good at following written directions and was at a distance, being online, so I tried a combination of illustrated steps to see if she could follow that way. I chose a simple circle to turn into a sphere as it would provide a number of techniques and would be satisfying.

Unfortunately, I started the demonstration at lunch, so grabbed the first thing to hand - lined paper. Kids - don't do this at home!

Here were the steps that were to be followed:

1. Lightly draw a circle freehand on your paper with a pencil of your choice.
2. Your light source is coming from the upper left of your paper.
3. Begin shading your circle lightly, just cover the surface with a layer of graphite.
4. Then start adding further layers to deepen the shading, remembering where your light source is coming from. Your sphere will be darker on the right than the left.
5. Continue to deepen shading, trying for a smooth transition from light to dark until you achieve the illusion of having a smooth, round ball on your paper.
6. Finally, you can 'ground' your ball by adding a shadow to the right, darkest closest to the ball and lighter as it gets further away.
7. Post your sphere online here at each level so we can help guide and correct you if required.
8. Have fun!






I had great fun drawing this sphere. Why don't you have a go at it and see what you produce? And see what unusual support you can draw it on? Telephone book page? Envelope? Newspaper? Be creative!

Red dot

After Tripod joined the household, I rediscovered an old laser pointer kicking around a kitchen drawer. The red dot that it creates provides hours of amusement for him as he chases it as if it were a bug or mouse all over the living room, up furniture, under the coffee table, finally flopping onto it, convinced he's trapped it. Only to find it has gotten away... The game is now known as 'red dot' and you only have to say the words or pick up the pointer and he's ready for a game.

The laser beam lights up one of his little plastic balls amazingly well, giving it an unearthly light. The cat is looking suspiciously at it. When he arrived, his left eye was partially shut. It seems fine now and I wonder if it was something to do with the injury of his leg on the same side.

Spring

Spring is trying to raise its head here for the last week or so. Its made quite a bit of progress with about half of the snow melting. I can actually see that I have a garden again, not just a broad expanse of white broken occasionally by trees.

Warmer weather means that the ducks and geese like to come out of the barn and wander in the yard. Sunday was warm enough for them to have their first proper bath of the spring. BD (short for Big Duck) and Buddy, the two Muscovy ducks were first in and came out quite sparkling clean. This is unusual for BD as he hates water. Yes, he's a duck and yes he hates water. But he was the first one in this time. After his bath, he spread his wings slightly and gently raised them up and down drying himself.

I offered him a treat of some bread and as I went to the kitchen to get it and came back out, he was clambering up the steps of the porch, waiting for me. For a big duck, climbing stairs is neither safe nor elegant but he managed. I think he stayed there for most of the afternoon because these large ducks manage to climb the stairs, but then get to the top and wonder how they're going to get down again. With a little 'encouragement' he half flew, half fell back down the steps and was reunited with his friend Buddy. I adore these two ducks, they are such characters and despite hissing and tail wagging which some see as aggression, they are as meek as lambs.

Spring is also uncovering things in the garden, some which are good, some not. These rocks emerged out of the snow with matted grass surrounded them. Flaked pieces of the slate were breaking off and the image proved to be a lot more detailed to draw than the sketch that I anticipated doing.

Artist's/Writer's block

Wikipedia defines writer's block as a phenomenon involving temporary loss of ability to continue writing, usually due to lack of inspiration or creativity

I don't consider myself a writer, even though I've written nearly every day for the last 15 months for this blog. In the last few weeks, my writing has become a struggle. Inspiration is slow to find me or me it and I start to view the blog as a chore rather than a pleasure at times.

I know all the tricks to getting through a block, whether artistic or writing, but I haven't put them to much use yet. The reason for the blog was for my art and with my life moving at breakneck speed in many areas, the art is now moving ahead as well as I want it to. All this is in my control I know. Only I can make the time and take the decision to move it ahead.

So my block is a combination of art and writing, as one fuels the other.

Inkless pen

A stainless steel pen, 8cm long. However when you unscrew the top, the 'nib' is a solid piece of metal. There is no ink, yet this pen will write on virtually any type of paper. This is what it looked like when we tried it on a piece of normal paper...

I imagine this is something similar to silverpoint drawing, which I've never tried, but I would like to access one of these pens, if for nothing but curiosity's sake.

The sketch I did a couple of weeks ago. The face was appealing, as are most older faces which have character. I find drawing a young face almost boring at times as there is little substance to draw from and hold interest. Yes youth has its appeal, but an older face is so much more interesting to draw.

CALLING ALL ARTISTS!

The 13th Sketchcrawl is on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17th!

WHAT: 14th World Wide SketchCrawl, drawing marathon/fund-raiser for Emergency
WHO: Artists of all ages and skill levels
WHEN: Saturday May 19, 2007
WHERE: Around the globe
INFO: Free registration and location information at www.sketchcrawl.com/forum
CONTACT: Enrico Casarosa, casarosa@gmail,com, phone(415)317-2731

All artists, whether they be professionals or just habitual doodlers, are invited to participate in the 14th World Wide SketchCrawl May 19, 2007. While the event is free, participants will be encouraged through their art to raise money for Emergency, a nonprofit international organization based in Italy that provides free medical care to civilian victims of war, landmines and poverty.