Creativity Warriors

It's me, Hannah. I have returned! And I have art.

This here was a sort of an off-the-wall idea. I was supposed to be sleeping, actually, when I sketched it, but I didn't expect the idea to stick and was just planning to outline it briefly. At around 11:00 pm. But it turned out well, yes?

The subjects here are based on Trinity and I (the one on the left being Trinity, on the right being me). The hairstyles are ours, as well as the fashion choice - Trinity specifically requested the left outfit. It came up because I was considering Trinity and I taking pictures for our other blog, A Quill In Her Quiver. I was hoping the pictures would reflect our personalities as well as our interests. But what I've really done the most of over the past few months is draw or do other artsy stuff instead of writing, so I've sort of been considering Trinity as the writey one (she's better at it anyway) and me as the artisty one (frankly, I'm the one who's better at that). So that's what I was thinking of when I made this picture.

See, what we're doing here is fending of the Bordum. The best way to do that is with creativity and imagination. Unfortunately, the powers of creativity only work at full strength when you get trapped, and that's where we are, with our backs against the wall - or back to back, that is. So Trinity and I whipped out our fancy vintage pen and palette and paintbrush (sable-bristle paintbrush, 'cause that's the best kind, so I've heard) and blasted the Bordum to bits with our Colorferno and Wordbullets (Trinity says hers look more deadly).

So we are the Creativity Warriors.

And yes, we destroyed the Bordum utterly, burned down their cities, and salted the earth.

In case you're wondering, Trinity's Wordbullets do spell out real sentences, which read:

• Error. The computer flashed.
• "Yeah, Mr. Incredible, you're the best." (a paraphrase from The Incredibles)
• That's the thing about Jim, you never know what he's about to do.
• I'm a better liar than I should be.
• The robot's metal treads bumpity-bumped across the rough gravel.
• I had never worn a crown before.
• Once upon a time 
• All was well. (Harry Potter)
• Lightning crackled overhead.
• "Fascinating," he said, cocking an eyebrow,
• A ranger practices until he never gets it wrong. (Ranger's Apprentice)
• Little Bo Peep had lost her sheep
• At the stroke of twelve, she'd said. I had just assumed she was being melodramatic. Old ladies were like that sometimes.
• "Stay away from me!"
• The princess was the most beautiful in the land.
• Look, I didn't want to be a demigod. (Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief)
• "I bet you don't even know what you're talking about."
• "Why won't you trust me?"

And my Colorferno does not spell anything, it just looks cool.

This was just a sketch I photographed and messed with on Photoshop. The drawing itself is largely unedited, although I had to use the color replacement tool with white to take the orange cast off the photo, and I employed the burn tool for the shadows.

The Wordbullets are dozens of layers of text, some slightly warped, and the Colorferno is a bunch of smudged "paint". 

To God be the Glory,

Hannah

Dental Floss

Good day to ya'll and sundry! I hope you have been very well. I have been very busy. Spent a lot of this afternoon shopping for Mother's Day and a lot of yesterday afternoon at the dentist (there are so many of us in our family that we do all of our appointments on the same day to save time running back and forth between home and town... we were there from 8:20 AM to just after 12:00 PM).
I have not been on for quite some time, due to a big project that I thought would take a lot less time than it has. I've just finished it (I think), and barely in time, because I need it tomorrow. But that will be for later, sometime very soon.
I had to put something or other up here, and didn't know what it would be until last night. Hee hee hee....

Okey-dokey. For those of you who don't know me, I'm a pretty jokey person. (See this board on Pinterest.) I'm not totally over the top with April Fools gags, but I like to mess with people a little bit.

For example, last night (the evening of Dentist Appointment Day), Trinity came up to me. She had one of our new sample containers of dental floss.

Except she had taken a Sharpie marker to the thing, so it looked like this:

She showed it to me, then put it up in my face and said, "MINE." Very clearly and bluntly, cause, doncha know, I won't remember any other way she says it. Then she left to go watch the Avengers with the rest of the family in the living room.

It wasn't long before I was giggling maniacally inside my head.

About five minutes later....

 Trinity comes into the bathroom to a carefully prepared scene.
There's silence for a moment as I rush to follow her into our room. I didn't see it all, but I'm pretty sure her face went:

WHOOOOO DIIIIID THIIISSSS?!?!?!

And she just sort of stared at the whole scene, all like:

EVIL PERSON

 Y U COPY ME

Meanwhile, I'm sure I had an expression much like this:

A moment later, Trinity must have looked over at the mirror or something, because I watched her, and her face went:

She looked over at me: 

"Did you do that?"

Then, of course, my sister Emily had to follow up with this:

So, those were the escapades of our dental floss pranks. That's it for today.... I'll be putting something else up pretty soon.

To God be the glory,

Hannah

Easter Project 2013

'Ello, 'ello, 'ello, it's 'Annah h'again.

It's been spectacular today. So relaxing.
Today is a celebrated day for the children in this family. Why? It's not anyone's birthday or anything. I didn't know until Sarah told me last night.  All she did was ask: "What's tomorrow?"
So I answered "Tuesday" like normal people do.

The normalness did not last long, as she kept on asking: "And what else?"

My very confused and desperate list included -

- The 2nd
- Tuesday the 2nd
- The second day of the month
- The third day of the week
- The first Tuesday of the week (seriously?)
- The day after April 1st
- The day after April Fools'
- The day after the Weasley Twins' birthday
- The day before the last-quarter moon
- A week before next Tuesday

"WHAT IS IT?!?!"
"It's the day of A Thousand Names."
"Did you just make that up."
"I didn't just make it up, I made it up, like, a minute ago. Also, it's a rest day tomorrow."

Now if you don't know what a rest day is, I'll tell you. We're home-schooled, the lot of us, and have a home business and live in the country, so we often have a lot of work to do. Not too much get-up-early-exercise-that-mind-until-late-afternoon-like-public-schoolers stuff, more physical, get-up, get-dressed, clean-the-kitchen, fold-the-laundry, stack-wood, move-plants, make-the-lunch, put-your-brothers-down-for-a-nap-so-we-can-get-stuff-done work. Our schedule isn't REAL tight, but sometimes, like this week, it's pretty full. We had Easter at our house this year, with, what was it... two... two... eight... twelve... five... four... around thirty-three people.
First, when we got up in the morning, at seven, to get all fancied up before we left, went out and had our coffee cake for breakfast, like we do for almost every special event. Then we got to open our Easter baskets (yup, we still do that, even though we've never done the Easter bunny), then we rushed to get ready for church. We had to drop by a friends' house first so they could follow our car (they were visiting our church for Easter), and we still managed to make it to the church almost on time. After church we had to speed home to meet our grandparents and cousins, who had already let themselves in.
That was only the warm-up. THEN we had fun. Fun that includes hauling a round of wood about two feet in diameter six feet in the air with chains, tow straps, and some creative T-stake work, all to make a big round target for us to THROW TOMAHAWKS AT.
No joke. We did the same thing for Thanksgiving. So far no one is dead. Except for the target, which we bedecked with an unclaimed trench coat and a milk-jug full of water for a head. That was fun.

That wasn't even the Easter egg hunt. That's the real challenge. The little kids' hunts are all the same. Not so with the older kids'.

Okay, this is how it works. Since the first time we've started splitting the hunts into older kids and younger kids, our parents and aunts and uncles have made it their mission to destroy us all. Their motto is, "If you still want to hunt eggs, that's fine, but we're not going to make it easy for you."
Even my seventeen-year-old sister is still at it, but the hunt has been getting harder every year. Let me show you what I mean.

Little kids:
The eggs are hidden across the yard, usually in pretty easy places. "Hard" for them means there's an egg above eye level. Then the kids get to go find them. The end.

As for the older kids. Ah ha ha ha. I have to separate this into sections. I'm trying to describe this, and it just sounds unreal. Our family is awesome.

Older Kids, prior to 2010: For awhile the eggs were hidden quite creatively. Once when we were on a church egg hunt, one got stuck in the hollow of a tree. I have no idea what happened to it ultimately. Around 2009, it got a little harder. The older kids' group was split into younger-older kids and older-older kids, and the older-older kids had to give the younger-older kids a head start. Torturous.
 Prior to 2010, there wasn't really anything special done to the egg-hunters, but from around that time to this, the eggs are hidden EVERYWHERE. Under a pile of mulch, on the roof, up in a tree, inside of the front porch light, up the gutters, in the adults' pockets. This is no joke. These are where the eggs are found. If you follow a random adult around without them noticing, they'll just meander around the yard, dropping eggs in places we've already checked.
Older Kids, 2010: Three-Legged-Race: The adults began to get more creative. According to the rules, the kids are randomly put in pairs, and have one of their legs tied to the other person's. Then it's just "Now get the eggs before anyone else does!" That year was quite interesting.
Older Kids, 2011: Marco Polo. There was bad weather that Easter, so for a while we all thought that we couldn't have an Easter egg hunt, or that we would only hunt eggs inside. The second part was true, but the parents stayed true to malicious form. The eggs were hidden in our aunt and uncle's cluttered garage The kids were randomly put in pairs. One person has a blindfold, the other one doesn't. The person who can see can't touch any eggs or touch their partner. The blindfolded person is the only one who can pick up eggs. And no, they weren't making it easy for us. Eggs were hidden from floor to ceiling and inside the bases of foosball tables. Eventually we had to take our blindfolds off to search for the last few eggs that none of us seemed to be able to find.
Older Kids, 2012: Relay Race. By now we knew something evil was coming, we just didn't know what. The adults went outside and spread the eggs around, then brought us outside to tell us the rules. You can only put your bag/basket in one place. You can choose the place, but once you put it down, it stays there. And you can only put one egg in their basket at a time. And there's over a hundred eggs scattered everywhere. So in other words, you have to run back and forth about fifty times trying to get your bag full. Up- and down- hill on tilled clay. Toward the end there was only one important egg left, and it was buried under a mound of dirt. Originally it had been buried somewhere near the surface, but when someone dropped a hint about an egg being buried there, everyone was up to their kidneys in dirt, tossing it this way and that way until the camoflauge-colored egg was completely buried. Eventually my uncle bull-dozed the whole pile with our Kubota, and my older sister (Trinity) got it.
Older kids, 2013: Disco Era. Present day, just as tough. Here's what they did to us. After the typical little kids' hunt, which we helped organize, we all had to wait till it was dark. Meanwhile, the parents put light sticks inside large eggs, sprinkled smaller eggs with lightstick juice, spread the eggs across the yard, placed decoy light sticks, then set us all loose. Then the adults walked around amongst us, shining flashlights in our faces to ruin our night vision.

Oh, and if that is not enough. Years ago the adults had the idea to raise the stakes. Monetarily. As in, they hid eggs full of money. Back in 2012, the "important" egg that my sister got, that was a money egg, which is why we were all so desperate for it. Usually the money eggs are enormous, partly transparent ones, but sometimes they'll put it in normal-sized eggs, just to shake things up more. 

Yes, that our Easter. I forgot to mention that between the tomahawk- and knife-throwing and the Easter egg hunts the majority of the kids went running around in our woods gathering ticks, playing tag, and dangerously reinacting The Hobbit in that Sarah and Darby climbed a tall familiar-looking evergreen tree with my younger sister and I snapping at their ankles. We also informed my bewildered cousin that his new name was Azog.

Oh, yes, I forgot what I was saying so long ago. When I go off on rabbit trails I really go off on rabbit trails. Today being a rest day was so special because the day after Easter, when we were all exhausted from aforementioned strenuous exercises, we had to go into town to do work for most of the day. Because of all that, Mama proclaimed today as a day of rest. No extra work besides the typical obligatory chores, and we could sleep in, which meant I was in bed until 9:30, and also that I have plenty of time to do a post. So that's how the opening sentences come full circle to this point. This point, which is also a good place to post something about my actual art subject for today. Sorry, I just like to talk a lot.

Easter Project 2013

The decoration of an egg. Voila to you all. This is a work of art to be marveled at, for those who dare to take upon the quest of squeezing the yolk of a chicken egg through holes the size of a pinholes and have doubtless wasted breath till they were red in the face, I salute you.

By the way, if you want to get a yolk out of an egg, both ends need a hole. Probably at least one the diameter of a pencil eraser. Then your family will cheer as you expel the yolk from the egg, but no, no one will eat it, not after it's been sitting at room temperature for a whole day. 

This was inspired by an almost-tutorial on Pinterest. (Pinterest takes up so much of life, these days, no?) 

Whoever did the original did it much better than I did, but I imagine they do it as a job. I took a few creative liberties, which were almost necessary, 'cause they don't actually tell you how to do it. That's what I usually do. I don't know when I've ever followed a tutorial exactly - I normally change it up at least a bit to make it my own.

I don't have any pictures of the process itself, since the almost-tutorial is so handy, and probably more effecient and sense-making than mine would be. But if you want to embark on such a endeavor, I can give you a few bits of kind-of-experienced information.

1. Rechargeable-battery-powered dremels take a long time to fully charge.

2. If you are using a dremel, there will be eggdust. Like sawdust, but made of egg shell.

3. The yolk will not obligingly drip out of pinhead-sized holes during the night. Don't bother trying.

4. Probably better not try to suck the egg out. Not from personal experience, but my parents and older sister, both very skeptical, warned that it was not a good idea.

5. It's pretty difficult to sand tacky paint. I don't know if the person who made the original used a different kind of paint, but just-dried fabric paint is close to unsandable. Try sanding Jell-O or something, and you'll get the idea. Not dry stuff won't flake away. It will uncooperatively crumble/squash.

6. Don't leave the egg down low! In a house of toddlers, this should be a given. Eggs are delicate and break. I kept mine inside of a bowl most of the time, except when I painted it with 3D fabric paint. At that point I turned the bowl over, set the egg carefully and firmly in a wad of poster putty so that I would have even access to the outside edge without the egg rolling over and messing up the paint, and shouted "Don't touch it!" at anyone who got too close. It's a miracle mine didn't break, in a house full of children under four feet tall.

Also, the advice that I gave earlier about having to make a hole on both ends. I haven't experimented over much with it, but the hole-on-both-ends thing is tried and true. Best option for now.

Oh, and:

7. Try to check your tools before you start the project. Don't pour your paint and then go looking for a sponge brush, which you may or may not have. I did not have one, and wish I did. I think the white paint job would have turned out more smoothly with a sponge brush instead of a bristle brush. (Those brushes probably have special artisty names. I have no idea what they are. One has a sponge on the end. One has bristles on the end. Why complicate things?)

So I hope this was interesting. Have you noticed I like starting paragraphs with "Oh", "So", "Okay", and "Anyway"? I also like lists. And I try to make dramatic/creative/memorable entrances. Keep that in mind, as I will continue to try to show myself up. Except on the oh-so-okay-anyway thing. Another habit to break, along with procrastination. I'll work on that later.

Any thoughts? Comments? Smart remarks? (That was the spiel from my dad's radio show a few years ago). Go ahead and comment, here or there, in a house, with a mouse, in a box, with a fox...

And Happy Easter, from both of us! Jesus Christ is risen!

Great cheesepuffs, that was a lengthy post.

To God be the glory,
Hannah

New Sort Of Snowman

It's Hannah, again, as it has been for the last every post ever.

So, I missed the last few days with my posts. Do you wonder where Sarah is? Cause this blog is a sister thing. Well, I'm trying to convince her to do something, though she is positive she has nothing to talk about ever, except, "This is a picture. You can see what it looks like. Well, that's it, then."

This is a NEW sort of post! Again. I'm just a trendsetting rebel, aren't I. This is art, but it's nothing I've ever done before, and it's certainly nothing I could fit on a sheet of paper. This was new, but if I do say so myself, I am an adaptable sort of person.

Prepare for pictures.

So, Thursday. I think it was Thursday. No, Friday. Whatever. Two days ago, Sunday. Four days ago Tuesday. So four days ago.

Friday was a snow day. A big snow day. With perfect snow.

Do you know what perfect snow is? I shall tell you. Perfect snow is when the three inches of fluffy - yes, VERY fluffy, lovely snow - can be thrown in the air and sprinkle back down on you like glitter (glitter?), crunches together into hard balls of deadly weaponry, poofs when you kick it, packs down to sled on, sticks together for snowmen, and melts away in a couple days with little to no slush. That is perfect snow. Well, that is perfect snow according to hard factual description. I'm not much of an eloquent snow-describer.

Well, we had perfect snow. All of my siblings who are capable of speech apparently agree, because they all went to go play outside. We made a sled-slide on our stairs, and igloo on our deck, snow angels out in the field, snowmen in the yard, and snow ball fights everywhere.

As for the snowman. Heh, heh, heh.

My precious.

It was supposed to turn out as a normal snowman, I swear. Who does snow sculptures in real life, really? Do you sculpt snow like you do with clay? It's not nearly that flexible and forgiving. So how does one do a snow sculpture?

I'll tell you. If you're me, you use a Pepto-Bismol-pink pocket knife like this one.

It's wonderful. Razor-sharp and totally awesome. Every practical teenage country girl needs a pocket knife. And unlike some people think, it's not just for bad guy intimidation. It's very useful: to cut string, plastic bags, zip-ties... as long as the wielder is responsible, the knife can be put to good use. Like for carving snow sculptures!

I began with the delusion that this was to be a typical snowman.

So I began rolling a ball. Harder than it looks, but easier than it has been in my earlier experience. What you have to do is pack a normal sized snowball. Just put it on the ground and begin packing snow around it. Soon it will get to the rolling size. If you live in a place with lots of dry weeds underneath the snow (as opposed to... a desert?), you will probably get a lot of dirt and weeds stuck in your wonderful ball of snow. You have to either pull these out, or cover them up with more snow. If you're planning to carve a lot, you should probably pull them out, I think. Resurfacing weeds were a big problem for me.



If you want the ground to look perfect and lovely after you roll the snowball over it, good luck. Also, it seems using a sled won't work.

Hmm. Well, anyway, after you roll your snowball for the base: if you're like me and just decide to start snow sculpting because you had the genius idea to cut some snow off the base with your pocketknife and got really excited when it just sliced off easier than bread... ahem, if you have decided to do a sculpture, then you roll your snowball into the middle of a lot of accessible snow. Then start piling it on, and don't forget to pack it in if you don't want it to just fall off.

The thing is, though, if it's cold enough to keep the snow from melting, it's gonna be COLD. But if you keep moving around picking up snow, you might work up a bit of a sweat. But I had to work on this in two different intervals, 'cause my hands were getting all tingling and alternately numb and painful, and Sarah was practically begging me to come inside before I died of hypothermia. I packed the snow first and carved it a little, then finished carving it the second time. I don't have any pictures of the carving process itself, so we'll skip straight to the finished product.



TA-DA!



In making this, I was planning to base it on Lucy from the Chronicles of Narnia. I was in fact, planning to make her standing up as if gazing at the lampost. But as I walked away to warm up inside for the first time, her back looked like she was sitting on a rock or something, so who am I to mess with semi-perfection? In any case, my nickname for the sculpture is Dear Heart, Aslan's pet name for Lucy Pevensie.

Yeah, it's not great. It's my first snow sculpture, and her face, I know, is too protruding. I didn't have another chance to work on it much more. After two more photo shoots with my parents' phones so they could post some pictures on Facebook (during which I added a nose to the girl's face), we had to go into town for the night. By the time we came back, the poor girl was decapitated, and two days later she looked like this:

 
Oh well. That's what snow does. And I'm pretty much bored of snow now.

So! What say you? Feedback is... very welcome. I love comments a lot.

Last thing: most of the pictures were courtesy of my sister Trinity, and she actually has a photography blog, www.trinitygraphix.blogspot.com.

That's it then!


To God be the glory,
Hannah

Once Upon A Time...

It is Hannah. That is, the elder of the bloggers. This is Sarah (my sister)'s first time blogging, so I thought I'd start it off.

Hi, welcome to Sister Sketches, the blog of a thousand reject names, including Sandwich Art, No Musketeers, and Mustache Sisters. This is where Sarah and I will be exhibiting our sketches, sculptures, paintings, and perhaps music and videos. Basically, this is a personal deviantart thing, all to ourselves with no outside... well, Sarah says "junk", but I was gonna say something dramatic that shows off my vocabulary skills. Like "unhampered desecrating interference". But junk works too.

As a matter of fact, right here - hi - is a promise not to put anything undoubtedly foul on here. Like nudity or bad words or such. That's just not even fun to draw. I can say from this moment that you will probably see, oh, fantasy, medieval, manga, dragons, elves, werewolves (or just wolves), lots of geeky stuff, movie or book cover art, and geeky stuff. Maybe tutorials if someone's interested. Whatever we're going to put on here will be original, even if it's based on someone else's work.

So anyway. For the first unveiling, I'm going to... unveil.... something. Something wonderful!

This is actually, yes, an original piece, I think from last year. (I'm very... happy with it. I was gonna say proud, but, you know, Pride cometh before destruction, and I don't want this loverly thing destroyed.)

Manga Warrior 

This was based on Trinity. Eh, was, is. There was a time... recentlyish, that Trinity was looking at a manga book that we got from the library. And on a whim thing (which is real grammatical) she said that if I made a manga picture of her with a sword, she'd put it as her profile picture everywhere.

So it began.

That sounds really dramatic, but actually it wasn't. I was sitting in bed when I started sketching it while Trinity posed with her sword, Elven Protector.

I don't know how many days I worked on the actual sketch, but I finished it while in the car on the way to Springfield, Missouri, to shop at Sam's Club. We don't have a Sam's Club or CostCo or anything bigger than a Walmart down where we live. And with ten kids in our family (actually, I think it was nine at the time) we prefer to buy things in bulk.

And as I recall, the most elegant detail of this picture is that I put the finishing touches on it as we were going through Branson, right outside a lovely, refined nature reserve,  just as we saw Natalie Portman come out of Silver Dollar City. She was pregnant at the time, but she still stopped to talk to us, and she autographed all of our T-shirts. My mom even saw the inside of her limo.

No. Actually, I finished it outside a gas station bathroom while crammed between a window and a baby carseat.

But the other one sounds better. 

So, anyways, this was the first of my pictures that was colored in Photoshop. It makes it looks good, but it's SOOO time-consuming. To put the color in properly, one must first change the picture to black-and-white to get rid of all impurities in photo hue, then make the background and all teeny spaces between the lines completely white, get rid of the smudges that made the picture look realistic in the first place, fill in all incomplete lines, remove all of the grain, sprinkle holy water on the computer monitor, fast seven days, and climb Mount Everest. 

Finally I added the shading, with that multi-purpose little tool we call the Burn Tool, and I was done. I revealed it to much applause! Trinity gushed over it, and did indeed keep it as her profile picture on Gmail and her cover photo on Facebook for around a week. Lovely promotion. This picture remains as one of my favorites, since it took so long to make, but with fantastic results.

So how was this for a first post? I try. The next one will probably be Sarah's, and feature one of her beautiful drawings... we'll try to switch off turns. So, Hannah signing out... or signing off? Roger Wilco, ten-four.