Hip Deep in Midsummer Night's Dream

I have been creating a proposal for our Shakespearean Theatre Group to do A Midsummer Night's Dream next spring. It has been a very educational process, as I am learning a lot about scheduling and planning for that large an endeavor. However the most fun part so far has been starting to do some production drawings of the different characters from the play.

Here are a few. I sketched them out on paper and then scanned them and painted them in photoshop. I put the drawing on a layer and changed the layer mode to Multiply, and then I could create another layer underneath to paint in the color, and montage some textures for fabric.

I have also started working on the costumes for the Amherst Early Music Workshop that I am going to this summer. They are doing Purcell's Diocletian, which has just about every fntastic Purcell song in it. It should be fun because I get to make Roman clothing for it. Here is a draping test that I did for a Tunica. Sorry for the blurry picture, my iphone had stuff on the lense. Anyway it looks like it going to be a very creative summer.

San Diego Pictures

I managed to get a few fun pictures in San Diego. Although I realized that I didn't actually remember to take many pictures of the people. When I am with people I enjoy their company so much that I never remember the camera.

My friends Steve and Angelina are the people I went out to visit, and these are their children Elizabeth and Samuel. They are two incredibly sweet kids and it was really fun to get to play with them for several days. Samuel is two and I believe Elizabeth is 5 now. The second photo is from Steve and Angelina's Facebook Page, and it shows a bit of the wonderful spirit of Samuel and Elizabeth.

Here is a Photo of Steve and Angelina's house out in the Suburbs of San Diego past the Miramar base. It is really a lovely area but you drive through 20 minutes of nothing after you get out of San Diego to get there. I was taking these pictures very early in the morning as the sun rose so they are very misty. All the sun rises while I was there came up through a deep fog that hung on the hill and slowly burned it off.

Here is the sun rising over their street.

The first morning I got a chance to walk around and see their neighborhood. The gardens were amazing and so I got my camera and was able to take some fun pictures. They were a wonderful mix of traditional flowers and tropical plants and every one was obviously well loved. The roses just blew me away. This white rose was considerably taller than I was. It was almost tree sized.

This was my favorite rose that I saw. The picture doesn't convey the depth and complexity of the color. It was a riot of subtle pale reds, red oranges and hits of gold.

These were my other favorites. Their lovely scent just filled the whole yard and they were surrounded by prostrate rosemary in a really nice combination.

I also saw a lot of fun things with flowers in unusual shapes. Plants seemed to grow much larger there than here. I saw geraniums that were waist high. Here are a couple of pictures of plumbago and lantana trimmed into flowering bushes. The orange lantana was just fantastic.

 

In addition to the more traditional flowers there were a lot of succulents. There were entire yards where the grass was succulent pants like iceplants. I didn't know the name of this one but I thought it's tiny purple flowers were just lovely.

On the other end of the sale were some really giant succulent plants that gave a fun sculptural effect in the gardens.

And I wish I know what this plant was. It was a small mounding bush form and had the most wonderful scent like a cross between jasmine and gardenia. You could smell it all the way down the street.

These pictures are from the 2007 workshop, courtesy of Jim and they show a bit of the lovely state park we were in. I was having so much fun I kept forgetting the camera. I went walking around this pond and tried to go the hill the first morning but my shoes were unequal to the terrain so I gave up halfway up.

And this is a picture that I took os the view on the road up the mountain. The view was lovely but the road itself was a twisty carsickness inducing nightmare for me.

And last but not least, here is a sunset from Steve and Angelina's back yard on the last evening. What a stunning view.

 

Hopefully some other people will have more pictures of the workshop in progress and I'll be able to repost those eventually. What an inspiring trip.

Watching the Sun Rise in San Diego

Sadly I left my iphone at a grocery store yesterday in the flurry of activity we had trying to get ready for the music workshop so I can't post my San Diego pictures just yet. I'll just have to try and draw you one with my words.

This morning I got a chance to walk up and find the top of one of the hills near my friends' house and watch the sun rise and color come back to the world. The landscape is so different from Austin. The hills are very rounded and covered only with scrub brush, where in Austin they would be much more jagged and covered with live oaks, sumac, and small trees. The soil is very red from high iron content and the rocks look mostly like red and yellowish sandstone and black metamorphic. The scrub is mostly a combination of a yellow wildflower which looks a bit like a large sized baby's breath, some small dark green juniper looking bushes, and an upright growing gray-green bush that resembles rosemary. The tree lines mostly follow rivers and creeks through the valleys, or cluster around the housing developments and are a mixture of tall pines and deciduous with palm trees near the houses. It has been very misty the last two mornings and so the sun rise has been a very slow lifting of the grey and clarifying of the landscape. The light has been very subtle most of the day without a lot of contrast until the height of the day. I love it. I can see why artists might love living here.

I also saw three bunnies and a bob white quail from my hilltop perch, and heard an amazing bird concerto. Hopefully I can retrieve my phone and get a few real pictures before I have to come back home.

In San Diego

Hey, I'm in San Diego for the weekend visiting my friends Steve and
Angelina for the Palomar Music Festival.

San Diego is really beautiful. The weather is in the low 70's and
everything is blooming. The different textures and colors of plants
are fascinating. Lots of succulents and palms mixed with roses,
lilies, iris and all kinds of other flowers.

I hope to find a wireless connection and send some photos. We drove
over the bay to Coronado island yesterday and saw the fancy Hotel del
Coronado where I got a small cup of plain mediocre coffee that cost
almost $3.75. It really was gorgeous though, and we walked straight
out to the beach in the back.

I'm not sure of the plan for today, but I know it will be an adventure.

Sent from Jen's iPhone

Leather Masks up for Auction

The Leather masks went up for auction on ebay two days ago. The link is here. Unfortunately I don't think there is enough publicity that people are really going to our website enough, and there is not a direct link to the website so I don't know if they will get any bids on them at all. 

It is kind of depressing actually, because I thought I had several buyers set up that would benefit the group, and it looks like they have kind of fallen through. 

I find one of the hardest things about being an artist and musician is that everyone loves your work until it comes to trying to sell it. sigh... Oh well, I believe we will be taken care of and that everything will work out.