I’m not sure if you remember, but awhile back, I did a post on a painting that I am working on for one of my friends. With moving and updating my website, I really didn’t have a lot of time to work on it. Now though, I have all the time in the world! I actually spent most of my weekend on it. It’s going well. I have almost everything blocked in. The humidity has not been my friend though, and the paint is taking longer to dry than what it should, but it’s been fun to see it progress.

I have to apologize for the close up picture. I had planned on posting a full picture, but then my husband alerted my friend to my blog, and there is a possibility that she may visit and see her painting before it’s ready. I want it to be a surprise, so I’ll have to post the progress after she’s seen it. (Good thing I didn’t post this earlier, huh?)

Last Friday, my friend from work and I took a Mystery Art Class through the Eagan Parks and Rec. I was really excited because I had never taken this class before, and the description sounded fun! We would show up at the Eagan Art House for a night of creating art, wine, and light refreshments. How could that not be great?!

It was fun, but it was nothing like what I expected. I thought we would paint, draw, create pottery, do a mosaic or something like that, where we would end up with a finished product to show off to our friends and family. And maybe even be exposed to some art medium I’d never used before.

Instead we played a game. It was a mash up between Apples to Apples and Pictionary. This is how the mash up worked. The instructor pulled out a green card that had an adjective on it. The participants (that was the group I was in 🙂 ) were given seven red cards that had a noun on them. We had to pick the noun that we thought best described the adjective that the instructor had chosen. Then we had to draw our adjective. We were given anywhere from 1 to 10 minutes to draw our cards. I think most of us were a bit panicked that we wouldn’t be able to finish in time, so we all drew really fast and didn’t get more than 5 minutes after our initial 10 minute time limit. But 5 minutes was more than enough time to get a general idea across.

I thought it was a very inventive idea, and it made Apples to Apples more fun for me, since I’m really not a big fan of that game. I think I would have liked it even more if I were playing with people that I knew, instead of a room full of strangers. I had some cards that would have been funny to me and my friends, but to people who don’t know me and don’t know that I like to joke around, I could have offended someone. Not that I’ll probably ever see any of these people again, but I don’t like to offend people unless I’m trying to. And it’s pretty rare that I ever try to.

I got stuck with some pretty difficult cards the first round. I had Steve Martin, Celine Dion, and Cher. Luckily, nobody had to guess who it was that I had drawn!

So even though it was not what I had expected, I did have fun, and I’m glad that I went. But I don’t know that I’ll be going back again.

I recently finished a fun project at work. For our newsletter, we were putting a segment in there about promotional items. Since we don’t have ideal lighting conditions or nice cameras at work, I had to redraw the promotional items in Illustrator. It was fun, but tedious. And I won’t lie, I really enjoyed it!

For all of the different pieces, I had to go about drawing them in a different way. For the shirt, I used the gradient mesh tool, the water bottles were just transparencies and blocks of color, and the rest of the items were a combination of the gradient mesh tool, gradients, and transparencies.

I’m most proud of the reflector. I had no idea how I was going to make something look textured like that and not fake. After spending a long time studying the patterns, I came up with a pattern that looked realistic. Fun!

I hope everyone enjoyed their new year celebrations! I’m looking forward to all the exciting things this year will bring.

First, I should talk about the drawing above. For the holidays, my amazing husband got me a Sensu. If you don’t know what that is, let me tell you. It’s a paintbrush/stylus that you can use on your iPad. (Here’s their website: http://www.sensubrush.com.) I’ve been using the APP Procreate to play around with it, and so far, I love it! This is probably my first sketch that I have done that isn’t just a bunch of scribbles trying to figure out how things work. But the scribbles are even fun to create. I am looking forward to using it more!

I also have to let you know that there will be a delay in my painting that I have been working on. (The link to the original post is here: https://melonielavely.com/melonie-lavelys-blog/2012/11/25/new-project.html) We are in the process of trying to sell our house, so many things have been relocated to make the house more showing-friendly. That included my large canvas. I’m not sure when I will be able to get back to it, but I’ll post more as soon as I can.

On a different note, last month was my 10 year anniversary at Creative Graphics! Can you believe it? I have been working at the same company for a decade. (I still can’t believe it.) So much has changed between the time I started there and now…the industry…the company…and me. Sometimes at work, I come across files that I had created from back when I started, and I have to scold my younger self. But after that, I have to pat my older self on the back, because I’ve come such a long way.