art

Recipe: Fermented Beets

Ingredients

• 3 or 4 beets
• 2 tsp. sea salt
• water

Wash the beets as best you can and cut off the ends (the part with the leaves and the part that looks like a tail). Cut each beet in half once and slice as thin as you can. Place the beets in a glass jar with a wide top. Add sea salt. Add enough water to cover the beets. Place a small jar on top of the beets to push them down into the brine. The beets need to be submerged in water. Cover the jar with a thin cloth and hold the cloth in place with a rubber band. Wait about two weeks. Fermented beets! In the heat of the summer, you may only have to wait two days instead of two weeks. If you are fermenting for the first time, you should check it every few days to see how the flavor changes. Really, you should do that whenever you ferment, but in reality you might just move on to other things. If you feel your beets are done fermenting, store them in the refrigerator.

You can even drink the liquid – I believe it is called beet kvass. I mix mine with a bit of seltzer.

See also: Three Beet Recipes

If I am organized enough, I might make these fermented beets two weeks before Pesach (Passover).

Tall House Illustration in Highland Park, NJ

I worked on this tall house illustration back in December, and I’m presenting it to you today with a little secret. Shh, it’s not quite official and may be going slowly, but this house illustration and the house illustration I posted in late December will be part of a new “mural” painting that will appear on my leoraw.com home page. I came up with the idea about two years ago to redo my home page completely and give it a “Highland Park, NJ” look – to me, that meant the old houses of Highland Park. And some trees. An old-fashioned suburban look perhaps. I started working on the actual “mural” or banner earlier this week – it needs a third house, so that is on the list to be done.

My next step will be either cloud or tree illustrations – which should it be? Clouds or trees, anyone?

Watercolor: Nuts, Raisins, Seeds

I painted this scene of nuts, raisins and sunflowers seeds for the food exercise in One Watercolor a Day. I’m not convinced of the scale I chose – perhaps since I made the nuts as big as I did, the sunflower seeds should be bit bigger? But no point to criticizing one’s own work – here it is for you to view. In the Facebook group for One Watercolor a Day, someone painted a lobster. It was quite a painting – lively and colorful. As I keep kosher, I would not have considered lobster for a food study, but that’s the sort of range one gets with these exercises. I also did a watercolor food study of beets – perhaps I will post that one closer to Pesach (Passover) and tell you how to make fermented beets, one of my favorite foods.

My son bought a new printer, an Epson XP-310 (or I bought it for him). I used the scanner for this painting, and I was quite pleased with the results – no more excess gray. I may buy a standalone scanner so I will have a larger scanner (the Epson XP-310 is quite small). When I do, it most probably will be an Epson.

The next watercolor exercise I plan to try is to paint some toys. I have a doll in mind to add to my still life. What other toys should I add? We still do have plenty of toys in this house, even if my children are no longer little.

Review with Landscape Watercolor

On My Blog

• Jewish Photo Blogger Carnival 2014 – JPiX
• Book Review: Out of the Depths

If you are observant of details of this blog, you may notice that I added a subscribe box with a teacup watercolor to the right sidebar. “Be My Guest” is the current motto. I plan to write a post about subscription boxes on my Websites for Small Biz blog.

Elsewhere in the Blogosphere

• Thank you to Naomi Firestone-Teeter of the Jewish Book Council for hosting the February Jewish Book Carnival and including my review of Rabbi Lau’s book.
• Visit Laura’s blog to see Angelina Ballerina Hamantaschen.

Fanciful Fish Watercolor

Here is a detail of the fanciful fish watercolor that I posted last week on Google+:

I decided a good way to use Google+ is when I am having a busy day, but I need a creative break, I quickly post a detail from a painting that I later plan for a whole post on my blog. I also sometimes post photos on Google+.

I am up late writing this post (people who know me well know I am usually an early to bed, early to rise type) because I am waiting for my son to come home from a trip. He went to visit my other son at college. He said he had a great time. He missed the first train he planned to take (a good experience in travel not always going perfectly), and my husband is out now picking him up.

I did a watercolor landscape last week that I based loosely on the photograph at the bottom of this Meron post. I also have lots of photos of robins – they seem to have invaded my neighbor’s backyard (and the gutters of my roof as well). So maybe a post on robins tomorrow – we will see. Thank you for visiting!

Red Admiral Butterfly Watercolor

This watercolor is inspired by an exercise in the book One Watercolor a Day by Veronica Lawlor in which you are supposed to paint a design, such as a butterfly, using masking fluid. After drawing your design in pencil on watercolor paper, you paint the masking fluid on the white paper first, then let it draw. Once it is draw (takes about fifteen minutes), you can paint on top of it and around it. When your paint dries, you can then carefully peel off the masking fluid (I used an eraser). You will now see the bright white of the paper. That’s the best way to get white in a watercolor painting: let the paper show through. I used masking fluid where you see veins of the leaves, white dots on the butterfly, and also for the orange areas. I painted in the orange after I peeled off the masking fluid.

I may try this exercise again with a different sort of design. Maybe I’ll look one up in a book – a castle might kind of interesting for example, or a dragon. Someone did a simple paintbrush with a variety of colors and got beautiful results. I originally thought of painting a bird, but it didn’t seem to lend itself well to a masking fluid project. I want something with different parts and pieces that can be separated with the white lines I create with the masking fluid.

Thank you to Michelle of Rambling Woods who helped me identify those red admiral butterflies last May. If you want to see what else I’ve been inspired to paint from nature, here is a red cardinal watercolor painting.

On a completely different note than a red admiral butterfly watercolor painting, here is a photograph of my daughter and my husband at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (I’m posting this so she can use it for a project in school, where the teacher said they can only use photos from Google Images (?!x!?)):

My favorite part of the Metropolitan Museum is the American Wing. If you have been there, what is your favorite part? Do you have a favorite in another art museum?

Blog Assessment and Watercolor Flowers

Sometimes you have been elsewhere than the blogosphere, and you want to convey some of what you have learned and seen, but you don’t always have a set tale or a method or a how-to or some other funky way of setting up the oh, so awesome post. So some of the places I have been: 1) skiing in Pennsylvania with my sons 2) strolling through Central Park in the cold snow with my husband and daughter 3) viewing the Chagall exhibit at the Jewish Museum 4) creating watercolor exercises like the wet on dry Gerber daisy flower above for the FB group One Watercolor a Day and 5) working away for various clients, including one project for anthropologists that started last June and may finally be close to becoming two new websites. I’m not going to say more about 5), because there is still more to be done, but maybe I can talk a bit about the other “subjects.”

On the topic of blogs, what is this blog about? I want to continue to share artwork; this blog can help propel me forward with creative ideas both for my traditional fine art and for illustration work that might be for client work. I would like to continue to share in Nature Notes, though I only participate when I have been photographing nature, and that has been slim pickings lately. Sometimes I talk about Highland Park – I’ve done Hurricane Sandy and some recent power outages (there were more tonight; friends on the South Side are not having fun). I used to do more recipes – my thinking in the future is maybe I will focus on teaching creative cooking. For example, how does one create a good soup? a tasty salad? Years ago I wanted to blog about how to get one’s children to eat healthy food. I still struggle with that, but my children probably do eat more vegetables than the average American, although only if placed directly in front of them in a manner that is appealing. I will sometimes post book reviews, but those take a lot of my energy and time, so expect those sparingly. There are Jewish topics, often of a creative nature like a piyut (liturgy poem), that I love to explore. In the past, I’ve interviewed artists and writers – maybe I’ll have the opportunity to more interviews. And with all of these topics, I love getting your feedback. If you share my enthusiasm for any of these topics, would love to hear so in a comment.

Getting back to my recent adventures, here is a favorite ski slope scene:

I wasn’t allowed to photograph the Tsfat synagogue painted by Chagall that I saw at the Jewish Museum, but I do want to say that my daughter was excited that she had been in that very synagogue. The painting had a more uplifting tone than the one of the Vilna synagogue right next to it – that synagogue, the one in Vilna, was destroyed by the Nazis in World War II.

So who else is assessing their blogs? Susan showed the Little Engine Train that Could as her blog in a podcast, and Jeri decided to put up a survey to assess her blog. Creative approaches!

For this blog post, I’ve said enough. Will have to save more conveying in a future post! To finish off, here is the wet-on-wet version of the Gerber daisy flower I painted:

Watercolors and Blackouts

I joined a wonderful online Facebook group related to the book One Watercolor a Day by Veronica Lawlor. You share the exercises you do from the book in a closed group. At the right is the first exercise, sometimes known as Day 1. You were supposed to experiment with different colors and marks on a page, keeping a set palette with each watercolor. I did a lot of what is called wet on wet – you apply water, then a color, then another color – it’s not easy to control, but one sometimes gets lovely results.

So I was wondering when am I going to fit in doing a watercolor a day? Or even one watercolor a week? This past Sunday I learned if you have sunlight but no power, you can paint and paint and paint. At about noon on Saturday we (and thousands of other Edison and Highland Park residents) lost power (there was a damaging fire at a substation in Edison, New Jersey). We did not get out power back until 4 pm on Sunday (others got power back at varying times). It was a totally unexpected blackout. Those who had bought generators after miserable Hurricane Sandy were happy(satisfied?) to use them.

I learned (again) how much we depend on technology and power. Indeed, I had a pile of work I needed to do, but it all had to wait. Happy to have a little space and time to paint with watercolors.

There is also a Facebook group for the book One Drawing a Day (see my review called One Drawing Per Week). I’ll try that one later – one can only do so much.

What would you do if you had no power?

Umbrellas Watercolor

You can see the original sketch for this painting and a previous watercolor of Raritan Avenue here. I actually rephotographed that painting and posted a new version.

The brighter less opaque colors in the watercolor on this page are done in gouache. I posted a detail of this painting last week on Google+. Go ahead and Plus One my watercolor Google+ posting, if you like.

House Illustrations and Illustrator Notes

I am continuing my work on house illustrations. Last week I showed you a sketch I had done of a Highland Park house. Above is my Illustrator version of an illustration of this home. I originally made all the windows black, and then I decided to switch the windows above to a blue gradient, so it looks like a sky reflection. The illustration is made of a collection of shapes placed in many layers in Illustrator.

One of the features of a good flat design illustration is eliminating details and only depicting what is most important to view. This process of what to include and what to leave out is not an easy one.

My long term plan is to depict at least three homes in this manner. Here is another house illustration – I sketched the above drawing by hand using pencil and then a ink pen (then I scanned it into the computer). If you know Highland Park, I welcome you to walk around and look at the homes to see if you can find these. But I won’t identify them directly.

I also plan to do some flat design bushes and trees as elements in between the homes. The lamppost in the top illustration makes a fine detail for this purpose as well. I’ve been collecting various illustrations in Pinterest so I can refer to those illustrations for ideas.

This morning I was playing around with the Live Trace tool in Illustrator, and I created the above line art drawing from the original sketch.

This process of creating a suburban street scene with houses and trees is taking longer than I anticipated.