Thinking of Istanbul

I did this little watercolor after looking through my friend's photos of her trip to Istanbul last summer.  Now that Nick and I are planning to travel there ourselves, I remembered about the drawing and decided it to share it with you.

City Skyline

A New Beginning and A New Obsession

Ever since our Utah trip, I have been fascinated by all the faces you can find staring down at you from the rocks. Now I have decided that I will try to paint them. With no marathon to train for this coming winter, I am setting a different kind of goal for myself--to start and finish an art project that I will presumptiously call "People In The Rocks." I will be working from photographs I took of the faces I have seen during our trip.

The above photo has probably the most expressive face, and thus this is the first photo I have been working from.

The second one has a better composition, but the first one is more tragic, which inevitably means, there will be more variations.

Aside from this project, I have also decided to try a new (for me) art form, and in the process have become mildly obsessed with it. I am trying to learn to make prints using lino block printing technique. The concept is very easy--you cut out your design from a linolium block, roll some paint on it, and print it on paper. However, I am in day 6 of printing, and still having issues.

Here are prints from my first block. The design is based on the same photo above.