This year I submitted “Hopes and Dreams”, which is the drawing I did of Kiersten when she was 7 months pregnant (our daughter, Emma, is now 11 weeks old!).  I received a call from Gary at the Fine Arts Fiesta to inform me that my entry had won 1st place in it’s category, Graphics.  The first place winners of all the categories are then judged, and a best of show is selected.  ”Hopes and Dreams” won Best of Show!  The local newspaper, The Times Leader, called me, and did a short interview.  They’re writing a piece on the Fine Arts Fiesta that will appear a week before the show, and a picture of my artwork with a quote will probably appear in the article.  This is my third Best of Show award from the Fine Arts Fiesta. The other two were for “Opaline Dreams” and “Bend”, and I received 1st place awards for “Daydreams” and “Cascade” in previous years.

The show dates are:

The 57th Annual Fine Arts Fiesta on May 17, 18, 19, 20 2012, Public Square, Wilkes-Barre, PA. Fiesta Hours: May 17, 18, 19: 10 a.m.-8 p.m., May 20: 10 a.m.-6 p.m.  The awards ceremony is Thursday, May 17th @ 6:30 pm.

For those who are Facebook friends, you’ve seen a steady stream of Emma pictures; I’ll include one of my favorite recent ones for those who aren’t on Facebook:

“Hopes and Dreams”, 26.75″ H x 14″ W Prismacolor and Luminance pencils on Aubergine Colourfix Paper

1. Fisher Price Rock N Play Sleeper - Lightweight and portable, Emma naps in it downstairs with us as we go about our day.
2. Swaddle Me - There’s a bit of an origami like art to folding a blanket into a good swaddle, which is even harder with a squirming baby.  The velcro closures and custom shape of the swaddle me blanket makes life much easier.
3. Itzbeen Timer - After the first few nights of trying to constantly reset the alarm clock in the middle of the night and do math to calculate the next feeding time, we got this timer.  There’s a simple baby bottle button you press when you feed her, plus a diaper button for changing, etc.  You configure an interval for each, and it will alarm you when it’s elapsed.  If you glance at it’s backlit display, it will show time since the last event.
4. Diaper Genie – Anything that makes managing the sea of poopy diapers easier is worth the money!
5. Boppy - the boppy has many uses, but my favorite is as extra support to rest the baby when feeding
6. Motion Activated Nite Lite - Not baby gear exactly, but I bought a couple and set them up in the hallways I travel to get from the kitchen to the nursery to the bedroom.  They’re very bright and turn on automatically as I  walk down the hall.  Great when you’re carrying a baby!

And, of course, I can’t have a baby post without posting a baby picture, so here’s a cute one from this week:

After a couple of proofs and revisions, I printed and framed it yesterday, and hung it in the nursery.  By doing it myself, I was able to incorporate an actual scan of Emma’s footprints inked at the hospital. Here’s the final announcement:

Last weekend we felt restless and decided to focus on some of the final details.  On Saturday we installed the car seat in the CR-V, set up the plush rocker we bought from Babies R Us in the nursery, and I downloaded “Kiersten’s Baby Mix” onto her iPod.  On Sunday night before going to bed we finished stocking the hospital overnight bag.  Since we were both off for President’s Day, we stayed up late and went to bed around midnight.

At four am I was gently shaken awake by Kiersten.  Childbirth classes had coached us on the average times for the different stages of labor, as well as what week of pregnancy first time deliveries usually occur.  In reality, things zipped along much differently for us.  At 9:59 a.m. we had a baby girl, and we named her Emma.

The past 7 days have been a single, long, wonderful day.  Day and night have blurred together; quiet times and crying times, sleepy times and cuddling times, lots of diapers and burpings, and mom and dad promising to take a nap themselves, always tomorrow.  In hindsight things didn’t unfurl the way they were planned, but all the planning helped things unfurl a little easier.  Now, we’ve got a new book to read: What to Expect in the First Year.

In keeping with the handmade theme, it was only natural to browse Etsy for some of the other decorations, and we settled on three prints by GalerieAnais.  The prints came as 8″ x 10″ prints, unframed, so I thought this would be another chance to put a personal touch in by framing and matting them in my studio.  When we painted the nursery, we didn’t yet know the gender of the baby, so we chose a blue/green wall color.  Since learning we would be having a girl, I’ve been trying to sneak some pink into the decorations.  Because of this, I thought the prints would look great with a white frame, warm white outer mat, and pink inner mat.  Since I’m used to framing and matting my own artwork, I didn’t think the double mat would give me too much trouble.  After spending the better part of a Saturday afternoon destroying multiple mats, I thought I’d write a post about some tips from what I’d learned.

Cutting double mats actually isn’t difficult as long as you don’t cut corners (no pun intended!):

1. Step 1: Cut new outer edges on your top mat to ensure they are square.
2. Step 2: Actually use the stops on your mat cutter to set the bevel cut distance.  This will ensure everything’s parallel and at a set distance.
3. Step 4: Cut the outside dimensions of the inner mat a little smaller than the top mat (about 1/2″ smaller on each side).  This will ensure the only edges used for measuring and squaring will be the top mat’s.
4. Step 5: Stick the bottom mat to the top mat using double-sided tape (with the cutout still in place) .
5. Step 6: Increase your mat cutter stops by the inner border thickness, plop your taped mat in place, and cut the bevels for the inner mat.  Ta-da! The taped together cutouts should fall out.  Everything will be perfectly aligned, centered, and at uniform thickness.

So, you can probably guess that I did the opposite of almost every step the first two attempts, before doing it the right way.  The main two places I went awry were assuming my staring materials were square, and not using my mat cutter stops (instead, I drew lines which ended up being non-parallel).  When you only have a 1/4″ inner border, even a small degree of non-squareness will result in a visually noticeable thin border at one end of the cut which fattens up at the other.  Anyway, thought I’d share my experience – maybe it will save someone else a little frustration when cutting double mats!

Here’s the final piece, framed and matted, on the wall in the nursery (the artwork in the picture is by GalerieAnais on Etsy):

In the Red Room

The Red Room, Revisited

One of the main differences between the two pieces is color intensity.  In the earlier work, I used the red of the paper with some of the darker red and purple colors (terra cotta, black grape) and grayed lavender for the whites.  In the newer piece, I used a fuller range of colors, with complements set side by side.  For example, the reds contain: terra cotta, burnt ochre, parma violet, lime peel, mineral orange, poppy red, and dioxazine purple hue.  Another difference is that last year I was working with Neocolors quiet a bit, and liked the soft edges you could achieve with them.  For the contest, you could only use Prismacolor pencils, but I was still able to create some soft edges only using pencils.  I tried to soften details in shadows, while tightly rendering items in bright light.  A few detail shots:

As an aside, I’ll register the standard artist disclaimer that the scan is quite dark and doesn’t show all of the colors in the shadows.  Maybe someday I’ll figure out the right scan settings to get a good reproduction!

Incidently, these are the last red room drawings because we deconstructed the red room earlier this year, painting the walls blue and installing a dark laminate floor as we converted it into a nursery.  Maybe I’ll have a new series, “In the Blue Room”?