Creatures of Sea and Shore: Seascapes, Part V

Pelicans 3, photo by J.J.

Probably nothing increases the interest of a seascape design more than adding the image of a live sea creature to it. This may be something small like the seagull and fish I showed you in my tongue-in-cheek picture called "Seafood Surprise". It may even be as elementary as a few seabirds, each indicated by a vaguely V-shaped line. On the other hand, the animal may dominate the design, using the sea simply as background. Think of a hump-backed whale rising out of the water. In this issue, we will be featuring marine life in needle arts, art prints, and photographs, beginning with this photograph by J.J.  While these pelicans do not live in the sea, they certainly depend upon it for their survival. Their species has been sustaining itself this way for a very long time and their bodies have been modified to do so in the most efficient manner.

Tropical fish needlepoint by Annake

Fish, of course are the elemental sea creatures and come in a seemingly endless variety of shapes and colors.  The fish that live around coral reefs are especially colorful. Some, like seahorses and sea dragons, are so surprising and unlikely-looking that they seem to have been designed by Walt Disney! Others are so well camouflaged that you hardly notice them at all. If you would rather portray living animals than true seascapes, you can't go wrong with fish. They can carry a composition by themselves, with just a watery background to set the stage.

Colorful fish design for upcoming needle arts projects

Many fish are sleek and streamlined. These inspire me to do stylized and even semi-abstract designs.  This one made me think of doing a project in reverse applique because of its black over-all shape and vivid areas of color. I still intend to use the design in that way, but decided to sketch it on canvas and do it in continental stitch first. Sometime later I will cut the outline out of black felt and applique the colored areas from the back (a technique called reverse applique) vivid scraps of silk and satin. Then I will applique the whole construction onto a watery-looking fabric and frame it or make it into a pillow or wall hanging. Use these links to see a pair of these finished fish designs. [Links to the fighting fish and goldfish] We will show both styles of needlework in future posts.

Photo by J.J.

Fish are not easy to photograph in the water, but J.J. was patient and  "caught" this one lurking just under the surface.  It would be relatively easy to add one like it to either a saltwater scene or a lake shore composition.

It is easy to be interested in — and even concerned about — animals like dolphins and cuddly sea otters, but J.D. was adamant that I include some of the creatures who are far less like us, but just as interesting and beautiful in their own ways.  J.J. was able to creep up behind this little fellow while his stalked eyes were looking the other way.  Just look at the intricate construction of his body and the delicacy of his coloring. Isn't he wonderful?

Crab photo by J.J.

Sea turtle print by Annake

Here is a sketch of a sea turtle that I made long ago in the tropics and which we have made into a print. Sadly, all sea turtles are endangered now. I always thought of this one as a male, swimming through a bed of kelp and sea grass.
From the day they hatch, the males spend their entire lives at sea. The mature females travel huge distances and undergo great physical struggles to return to the beaches where they hatched and lay their eggs.

J.J. found this shy little octopus hiding in a very shallow tide pool, waiting patiently for the next tide. They can remain out of water for a surprisingly long time and even travel over land for short distances. They are very intelligent and can solve puzzles. As anyone who has tried to keep one in an aquarium can tell you, they are "escape artists" who make Harry Houdini look like an amateur!

Octopus photo by J.J.

Sea Otter

Now let's look at some of those warm-blooded sea mammals that we respond to more readily. Here are three who spend most of their time in the ocean, but come on shore occasionally to rest or to deliver and care for their babies. Who doesn't like a cuddly-looking sea otter?

Galapagos Sea Lions

This is a mother sea lion with her pup. You can tell that they are not seals because they have small external ears, while seals do not.  I wanted to use this print to make a point about horizons. When a horizon is very low, as this one is, it makes any figure in front of it — whether person, animal, or rock — look larger and more imposing. In this picture, the sea, while important to the setting, can be very simple and understated. The sea lions have very streamlined bodies and are a good choice if you are just starting to draw animals for your compositions.  Or you can easily cut out their shapes from a photograph if you prefer.

Walrus

All right, so he was grumpy and probably didn't want to pose for his portrait. Not even animals in zoos or wildlife sanctuaries always enjoy close attention from we strange two-legged creatures who want to sketch or photograph them.  Fortunately a good long lens allows one to get a good image without getting too close to the grumpy ones. I think he shows a lot of character, impressive teeth (the Inuit call walruses "tooth-walkers" because they use their tusks to haul themselves out of the water and up steep slopes), and a really great mustache!

We hope you have enjoyed this post as much as we three enjoyed putting it together for you.

This is the last article in the Seascape series, at least for now. We may ‘re-visit’ it from time to time. Look for an article on Skyscapes sometime in May.

J.D., J.J., and

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Our New Print Series: Some FAQs

Barred owl print by Annake

Hi — J.D., Annake’s Garden Gnome here. Annake is feverishly working away on at least three upcoming posts, planning for something special on the coming Earth Day, and grinding away on the final chapters of the first of several e-books we hope to publish later this year. She’s asked me to step in here to give explanations of the whys, hows, and wherefores of what we are doing with the series of prints we have been rolling out for sale. The first draft of this post was much longer than what we try to hold these posts to, so I’ve pared it down to a fairly spare set of FAQ’s.



Why are you suddenly putting all this emphasis on prints?

A number of trends and circumstances came together over the winter: an enthusiastic reception for Annake’s drawings at the late art and crafts shows last year and to their use as gifts over the holidays; a change in emphasis for Annake’s Garden, moving toward a more gallery-oriented business model; Annake’s quest for more and better studio space, and the need to cull decades worth of old notes, projects, clippings and unidentified STUFF out of the way to make room for current projects; the need to upgrade my graphics editing capabilities to meet the increasing technical requirements involved in various projects we’ve taken on; and, last but not least, a very long/cold/wet/gray winter and early spring which limited a lot of activities we usually engage in.

Why are all the prints black and white? Annake’s needlework is so colorful, I was hoping for prints that were, too…

Scan of a watercolor by Annake, not ready for printing yet

They are in the works. Our plan is to keep things as simple as possible to begin with — and color reproduction opens a whole new can of worms, so we are going to introduce color to our line slowly and carefully. Differences between types and brands of color printers, the difference between what you see on your computer monitor and what comes out of the printer, even the differences between the way different screens render colors make getting consistent quality a REALLY complicated job.

Annake is hand-tinting some new drawings for our Earth Day post. I’m going to do my best to get good electronic reproductions of those into the shop as soon as possible. Look for a few of my photos, and maybe some of J.J.’s, to show up there in the next few weeks. A lot more color is on the way, but it’s coming on baby steps.

Most of those ‘black and white’ prints we are offering are actually in gray scale, which might make a difference if your printer insists on sucking the color ink cartridges to make grays the way our HP does. I told you it was complicated.  Speaking of the complexity of doing things in color, look for Annake’s first post in her new series on using color in needle arts (and other arts) in May.

Leopard print in gray scale (left) and true black & white. We prefer the detail in gray scale.

Why so many animals, with just a few prints of people, no landscapes, no still lifes…?

A lot of the reason is just timing — it’s Spring, all the animals are coming out of hibernation, new babies are being born, new life is on peoples' minds — it’s part of our culture this time of year, and reflected in our holidays:   Easter, Arbor Day, even the relatively new addition of Earth Day. We’re just reflecting the calendar. Also, Annake is wrapping up her series of posts on landscapes and seascapes — and those final posts happened to include animals as focal points.  Plus, we have long planned something special for Earth Day (April 22), and endangered animals seems an important issue to address for that post.

One of J.J.'s many critter photos

Annake really likes doing animals (she WAS a biology major in college, after all); and my sister, J.J., who has her own addiction to cute furry things, keeps feeding the flames with torrents of emailed photos she has taken; even I have been know to take photos of animals (when I can get them to sit still long enough) so we have lots of raw materials for new posts and projects. It just makes sense to take the editing process for these a few steps further to produce something suitable for sale.

Ferret (print of pen-&-ink sketch)

Finally, we already had a lot of nearly camera-ready material to work from. Annake does a lot of preliminary sketching and plotting before she begins major needle arts projects like her “Close Encounter” series or the American wildlife set she has done (and plans more of) on canvas.  She returns to the theme of endangered species often in a number of media. Many of those preliminary drawings don't make the cut for technical reasons like the size, orientation, or materials of the final project. It’s a lot less expensive in materials and time to sort out the problems on paper than fix them halfway through a major needlework piece. If you follow this blog, you have already seen the genesis of the wolf, which became a needlepoint piece last fall, and the black-maned lion, a piece done several years ago that we revised the original plan for and made into a print. The grizzly was a sketch that didn’t quite fit for the bear-and-bumblebee piece we showed you in progress. The ferret to the left was a first sketch for the “Close Encounters” quickpoint we showed in earlier days of this blog. That needlework was one of our first sales on Etsy.

While it sometimes requires Annake to do quite a bit of extra work to make one of these drawings suitable for printing (the lion, for instance, took several days of modifications before she was satisfied with it), it 's still a lot less time and material intensive than creating a new needle artwork. We’ll be adding all the genres you mentioned above (and others) as the seasons move along — but the animals will keep coming back.

Why are you only offering one size of print? Other places online have prints of the same pictures in a variety of sizes…

Same print in three frame sizes

This is our first venture into selling print-your-own, downloadable files — we assume there are going to be bugs and glitches, so we are trying to keep things as simple as possible until we are sure the system works the way it is supposed to. Adding more choice of sizes is our first priority after that. The files we are offering will print on 8.5 x 11 inch (U.S. standard document size) paper, so they can easily be trimmed to fit any 8 x 10 inch (U.S.) picture frame, should fit most off-the-shelf commercial mattes for 11 x 14 inch frames, and will even print on A5 (UK standard) paper with a minimum of fiddling — just center the print all around. That is a pretty wide variety of choices to start with.

Why are you using .pdf files? I was expecting JPEGs or some other graphic file format…

Basically, the same answer:  to keep things as simple and predictable as possible while we iron out the wrinkles in the process. PDFs (Portable Document Files) are specifically designed to produce identical results across all platforms, regardless of operating system, hardware differences, or bandwidths; nearly everyone, everywhere has or has access to free PDF reader software; so these files will print the way they are suppose to on just about any home printer and can be handled by any commercial print shop anywhere in the world.

Boy, there sure is a difference between the styles of some of these prints… were they really done by the same artist?

Originally done as needlepoint pattern

Yes, they really were: if it has Annake’s signature, it is her original work. Please remember that these were done 1) for a wide variety of purposes: what is appropriate for planning a big needlepoint project is very different from what is useful for teaching a class of 10 year-olds; 2) made over a very broad stretch of time; and, 3) done in a variety of media. Although these versions are all for printing on digital printers, the originals were sometimes in pencil,  marker, charcoal, or pen — often on just whatever was handy at that particular time and place.

Originally done as a demonstration for elementary students, pencil versus  pen & ink

Does this mean Annake is going to stop doing needlework to concentrate on these prints?

A new needlepoint, still unframed

Oh, Good Heavens, NO! While some of these drawings were made specifically to turn into prints (mostly to fill out sets and series — Annake prefers to do things in sets), most of them are byproducts of other projects: preliminary sketches, additional illustrations to make a point in articles, examples done for teaching purposes, and sometimes just for fun. Turning them into products to sell is pretty much my responsibility while Annake pursues her next endeavors.





I hope this set of FAQs answers most of your questions about what we are doing, and why — and that you’ll take advantage of this new opportunity to own some of Annake’s original artwork, quickly and inexpensively.

J.D., Annake’s Garden Gnome, sitting in for...

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A Little Eye Candy: Our 6th Anniversary Issue*

"Hard Winter", photo by J.J.

Greetings, readers old and new. We are currently winding up our 6th year of this blog, and gearing up for Year Number 7. J.D. has a lot to show you and tell you, so I will turn this post over to him. I’ll be back to introduce some of the topics you can expect to see in the coming months.

Hello, all;  J.D.,  Annake’s Garden Gnome here.
 
First, a special welcome to last year’s new visitors from Andorra, Bangladesh, Cote d’Ivoire, El Salvador, the Republic of Georgia, and Mozambique. We have now had visitors from at least 121 of the 197 countries recognized by the UN.  I say at least, because Google Analytics classifies a growing segment of our visitors as ‘Not Set’,  so any of you who has never seen your country mentioned — blame Google!
 
Last year’s most popular new posts were the five parts of our series on ‘Landscapes in the Needle Arts’, followed by the post ‘Back to Blackwork’, and (surprisingly) our periodic Question & Answer posts. I don’t know whether we are doing a better job of promoting those posts, or more of our readers have figured out that they are full of juicy bits of new information;  we’re just glad to see them getting more attention. And, since many of you first come to this blog searching for material in our archived past posts, I’ll note that cumulative visits since we launched are still highest for tutorials on various bargello topics, blackwork embroidery, Holbein and Assisi embroidery, and cross-stitch; but last year, Swedish weaving and the posts on optical illusions started to catch up.

Now available for download in our Etsy shop

And now, a major addition to our Etsy shop: by the time you read this, the first downloadable prints of some of Annake’s work will be available for you to buy, for a very reasonable price. We’ve shown a few of these in recent past posts — remember the wolf and bear prints? These and many more will be in our Etsy store. Initially, what will be available is going to be limited in size and scope; but, as we figure more of this process out, you can expect to see many more subjects, colors, and sizes that you can download immediately and print at home, or take to a print shop to have your own high quality example of Annake’s work. This includes our international readers — no hassles with expensive shipping, customs forms, or currency exchanges:  just download from the Internet!

So — why this, now? Doesn’t Annake mostly do needle artwork? Where is all this coming from?

Well, the prints are being offered as a result of a number of converging headaches, needs, and trends, which I will tell you all about in a much longer post later this spring. For now, a quick example:

Black-maned lion needlepoint

Remember this black-maned lion needlepoint (we showed it, still unframed, in this post)? Annake came across her original sketch while digging through files looking for something else. (We do a LOT of that!) 

Damaged original working sketch

You can see that it was in pretty rough shape, so I said, “Let me scan it into the computer; I can clean it up, and then you’ll have it when you need it, and we can print it out in any size you want.” So I did — the result is below.

Edited scan of lion sketch

Annake said, “Hmmmm… print me a copy, I’ll put in some shading to indicate what I had in mind for stitching, then you can scan that in for future reference.” So she did — and by the time I had scanned and cleaned it up, it looked pretty darned good. We decided to sign it, put it into a high-quality print file, and — you can see the result above at the beginning of this section.  And, you can now download and print your own.

Look for lots more prints to come over the next several months… as well as printable downloads of some of my photos, and some of J.J.’s — all in our revamped Etsy shop.

Back to you, Annake...

Here are some of the topics you can look for this year:

• Our next issue will feature a new reverse applique with step-by-step photographs and a pattern to download.
• Then watch for Seascapes IV and V and at least one issue on skyscapes.
• I’m going to revisit Folk Embroidery and feature several new “families” of stitches.
• There will be a new series on color, starting this spring. I think you will get some new ideas from it that will be fun.
• Expect features on collage and scratchboard plus more optical illusions.
• There will be new bargello patterns for 4-way and all-over designs, plus new “diaper” patterns for Spanish blackwork, Russian redwork, and Scandinavian whitework.
• I’ve been looking at landscapes again from a new perspective that I want to share with you.

Photos from some future posts...

Don’t forget out Question and Answer issues where I try to answer your questions and provide additional information.

I’m really looking forward to starting the next year of blog posts with you.

Take care of yourselves. Stay safe, come back often.

* If you're wondering about the title of this post, candy is a traditional 6th anniversary gift.

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