Pits!

Landscape and narrative seemed like fitting elements for a two-page spread dealing with visual flow. Since I did most of my writing for this week's entries under an oak tree at Lake of Isles, I went ahead and sketched a little version of that scene, taking some text from the writing I did. Sketchy graphite, ink, and marker.

Feet

With this entry I kind of lost the thread of what I was doing aesthetically and stylistically, but it's part of the "raw sketch" series of entries intended to help me continue to loosen up with my visual journal. It turned out kind of dumb and I probably didn't put enough thought into it. But the text and subject matter came from the writing element of my process this week.

Two free entries

These spreads are the first two entries I've created in pursuing what I laid out in my proposal, inspired by some of the work in this week's readings. Observational sketches of my crazy environment during this crazy time of packing, house-buying, and pregnancy!

How he feels about it

The other challenge I received was to create a journal entry about how my husband feels about all of this. I really struggled here, because I know how he feels -- happy, excited, nervous, a little scared -- but I didn't know how to represent these things. It occurred to me to have Ben create the entry himself, but that just didn't seem like the right solution somehow. What I ended up creating is a sketch of something that I think encapsulates how happy, excited, and involved he is. It's just a graphite sketch of him reading the old Winnie-the-Pooh stories to me (and the baby), something he's been doing each night. Those stories are so wonderful, funny, and un-Disney, with awesome illustrations by Ernest Shepard. And our baby can now has functional ears, so she can hear her dad reading to her -- and me laughing at the funny turns of phrase in these stories. I love the part where we learn that Pooh once lived in the forest under the name of Sanders.

Family

This is a sketch for a painting I'd like to do. It takes me about two weeks to finish an illustration of this size with acrylic, so I just created the sketch this week. I think the composition is almost there, although I want to play with the framing and the white space on the left, and I'm mostly happy with the characters. Some of the positions of the characters will be tweaked.

The footprints in the snow (on the left) are there to make it clear that they're a family and they came from the same house.