Life
Katherine Delaunay
Memories of Dan

I’ve kind of been avoiding writing this stuff down. On one hand, I want to always remember Dan and how amazing he was, but on the other, writing it down forces me to sit with it. To remember all the good things, the sad things, and the things I can’t do anything about any more. As vibrant as my memories of Dan are, as admirable his passion, dedication, and talent were, he is gone and the future will give me no new memories with him. 

Memories of Dan
Katherine Delaunay
Seeking Sustainable Change

We’re creeping up on 2 years since I broke my leg. It’s a little frightening to think about how much time has passed and how quickly it feels like it went by. Even though the bone was mended well enough for me to walk without crutches or a boot in about 4 months, the rest of the year felt lost to pain and physical therapy. The past two years have been a series of ups and downs, but they’ve helped me define and refocus on what makes me happy.

Life
Katherine Delaunay
Saying Goodbye to an Old Friend

I’ve come to the moment that every pet owner avoids thinking about. I avoided it so hard that I developed a mythology in my head that my cat was some kind of vampire who would live forever because he always looked so damn young and healthy. But over the past month or so, my cat Midnight has been telling us that he’s ready to go. 

Saying Goodbye to an Old Friend
Katherine Delaunay
Reaching out
Katherine Delaunay
Kaizen

I really like the word "Kaizen". It is a Japanese word that means "Good Change" or "Change for the Better" and represents the idea of continuous change to improve all functions of an organization. It is a popular business philosophy that helps increase productivity using increased awareness and action informed by that awareness. The idea is that when changes (great or small) are made over time they can result in great improvements on productivity. While this is most often used as a business strategy, it's easy to apply this idea to one's personal life. It's been an helpful tool for me because I can easily become overwhelmed when I try to change too many things at once. This weekend, my Kaizen focus was cleaning and organizing my studio/office. 

Kaizen

Scratchboard

Scratchboard: The Peacock

Okay, I'm going to be a little lazy and just copy paste a post I wrote for another blog detailing this latest project that I finished. But to Preface it I'll explain what it's for. A few weeks ago my friends Mike and Megan decided that we missed art classes so we started meeting at a cafe in St. Paul once a week to devote an evening to doodle, sketch, experiment and get the creative juices flowing a bit. The first night we challenged each other to do something we don't usually do. I was told to do a landscape with pastels, Mike was told to do a landscape with inks (red, teal and black only) and Megan got to do a self portrait with charcoal. Thus, the assignments were born, we immediately began writing down as many ideas as we could think of, themes, mediums, locations, subjects, anything that could be mixed and matched as we saw fit. We had a great time and came up with assignments that could last us well through the summer. This endeavor also got a name, we're calling it Art Pandemonium. Last week we created a wordpress blog in order to keep track of our work and our thoughts on it. This post is about our second assignment, I'm hoping to scan and write about the first assignment tonight or tomorrow. But for now... here's the scratchboard assignment: Two weeks ago we chose scratchboard as our assignment and I think we were all a little nervous yet still excited to try a medium that was rumored to be completely unforgiving. I was inspired by a woman that works at The Wildcat Sanctuary where I volunteer every other saturday. Trista Campbell is a very talented artist and an incredibly wonderful woman, she works tirelessly for the cats at the sanctuary!

Lately I've been thinking about peacocks a lot, partially because of a performance that I have coming up that I might end up incorporating their feathers into my costume. While bumming around flickr, looking for ideas. I came across this image by dee_r and instantly knew it was perfect.

My process involved changing the image to black and white and making sure the levels were just right on photoshop, gridding off the image and creating a sketch on regular paper, tracing the image and then finally using transfer paper to get the image onto the scratchboard. Then the real work began...scratchboard is definitely a labor of love, but it felt like a medium that was well suited to my line quality (read: "I can't draw a straight line to save my life!").

I learned a lot about  line work, cross-hatching and how to treat foreground, middleground and background with this assignment. I think next time I do scratchboard I will be using a picture of my cat Midnight Moon and do a portrait of him. He is the Prince of Darkness after all and deserves his own personal portrait artist to catch him an all his glory...or at least he thinks so...

The PeacockFor my first scratchboard, I'm exceedingly happy with the results. I owe it all to wonderful inspiration and a very talented photographer.