Accordian face!

Now that you know how to fold accordion book. Here is a simple use:

accordion fold 4 panels

book closed

book open

Accordion Book

An accordion book is an easy book form once you practice a bit. Here's a folding method that works with any strip of paper to produce evenly size pages. You can probably google it and get more elegantly drawn instructions. I am including photos and my attempt at doing origami type illustrations.

81/2 x11 piece of paper cut in half lengthwise then glued together

fold in half

cut edge joins folded edge

both sides

opened up view

cut edge meets folded edge again

both sides

reverse the fold

join the mountains on the 2 larger panels

Ready to open up and draw!

Melted Crayons!

Remember that melted wax form a few days ago? With a candle and a blunt knife I made some weird birds. The colors in the sheets of wax seemed feather like. I heated the knife in the candle and used it to cut through the wax. I used the hot wax from the candle as glue. As you see I am just making this up. The wax broke, I dropped a whole bird I made and it fell apart!  I learned something about what wax melted into a thin sheet can do and not do. It was really fun.

Exploded Square

This is a simple cut paper exercise that I like to do. you need scissors, two pieces of paper of different colors. I like to choose really different colors (opposite or complimentary) One piece needs to be quite a bit larger than the other, the smaller piece needs to be a square.
steps:

1 Cut out pieces from each side, any shape
2 Arrange them as if you had flipped them out of the original paper
3 Glue all pieces

(I didn't glue them down )

Here's what mine looked like this time:

Crayons

I tell the children in my preschool class that when I was a child there were no magic markers! We used crayons first, as our dry, go- to drawing medium. Now that I have my studio and its decades later, there are so many options of things to draw with! I have been given very generous donations of crayons! I have thousands!
Today I got some out to play with. (and learned- use lots of wax paper and fewer crayons and don't forget about them in the oven. Maybe 5 minutes? Watch them!!)

I put them in a pan with wax paper underneath

I put them in a pan at 250 degrees and then forgot about them

when cool the mass looked very brown from the top but...

Add but when I flipped the wax stuck to the paper over there was color

I peeled off the paper and have colorful pieces!

Sky

This morning running across the top of Robbins Farm I had a great view of the sunrise. I started thinking about colors gradually blending into each other like they do in so many natural places- a plant stem, a leaf, the sky, the skin of a frog or the fur of a cat.
On a clear day the sky is a reliable inspiration for this. I didn't capture it with my colored pencils but the the picture of Robbins Farm when there was snow a few years ago does! How delicate is the transition from blue to orange at the horizon.

Here's what I mean! Robbins Farm a winter when there was snow. 

Everything Looks Different From Another Perspective!

Drawing is about seeing. Drawing helps you see and seeing helps you draw. I love the exercise of taking simple object and drawing it from different angles. This is a lifetime exercise for artists really not an idea of the day!
The perfect story to accompany this exercise is the Blind Men and the Elephant, redone as the Seven Blind Mice. It is a book that should be in the syllabus of first year philosophy classes but speaks to all ages!

coffee cup