A Needlepoint Collaboration

I've always had a thing for the corner of Aubusson tapestries! Maybe it's because they remind me of old map cartouches. Anyway, when my mother suggested making a needlepoint pillow in my choice of design, I jumped at the offer, and I instantly had an idea.

I thought it would be fun to design a pillow that looked as though it were made from a tapestry remnant! Aubusson style was one inspiration; the work of William Morris was another. Below is a corner of Morris' Angeli Laudantes tapestry, woven in 1894.

William Morris Textiles  |  Linda Parry  |  Viking, 1983

At the time of the project, I had a delightful Rex rabbit, and he was a most satisfying pet. I decided to incorporate him into the needlepoint. Though they're barely discernible in the photo below, he had three spots on his right side. Wouldn't it be fun to represent your pet romping through medieval underbrush?

I painted a design on illustration board, which served as a color guide for my mother. I then had the painting transferred to needlepoint canvas at a copier center. Some copier centers don't want to take that responsibility, in part because the design has to register squarely with the lines of the canvas. The center I went to did a perfect job, and the resulting canvas looked like it came from a commercial kit.

And here's my mother's work of art. You can imagine what a wonderful surprise this was on Christmas Day! As you can see, I incorporated the date and my mother's initials into the design.

One final note of interest. My mother was in her 80s when she made this, and the retina had detached in one of her eyes. This was all stitched with the use of one good eye.

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Saturday in Winter Park, Florida

This past Saturday, friends and I took a day trip to Winter Park, which is near Orlando, Florida. Winter Park is a lovely town, filled with parks and plantings.

Our first stop was the Morse Museum, which includes 250 art and architectural details from Laurelton Hall, Louis Comfort Tiffany's Long Island estate. My favorite part of the (permanent) exhibit was the recreation of the Daffodil Terrace. It features the large daffodil capitals above, made from concrete and glass. The daffodils were originally cast glass, but Tiffany wasn't satisfied with the look. So he revised the capitals and made them more natural by having each individual flower petal hand blown.

Park Avenue is the main street, filled with high-end shops and restaurants of every sort. We enjoyed the skirt hanging above, made from rolls of gift wrap.

Park Avenue is a busy street, filled with shoppers and tourists every day of the week. Look down a side street, though, and you'll see a quiet scene that could be European.

My favorite shop was painted with these Victorian motifs.

In the image below, the lamp is bronze, but the base behind it is trompe l'oeil.

We ended the day by visiting the Albin Polasek Museum and Sculpture Gardens. Albin Polasek (1879-1965) came to the United States from what is now the Czech Republic. He was the head of the sculpture department at the Art Institute of Chicago for 30 years, and a member of the National Academy of Design. He retired to a lovely house of his own design in Winter Park, and left it as a museum. The grounds wind down to the lake you see in this photo.

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My Food Section Illustration

When I started working for the St. Petersburg Times, it was long enough ago that clip art was not pervasive, and I would actually create illustrations, as well as design ads. This illustration in acrylics was the cover for a multi-page tabloid of readers' favorite recipes.

I achieved an interesting texture by painting on a matte board that was pebbled to look like burlap. As you can see in the detail, I applied the acrylic paint thinly, like a watercolor, allowing the surface texture of the board to show through.

The title of the section was printed over the tan square at the top.

When I choose colors for a painting — any painting — I tend to think in terms of edible colors! I want a buttery yellow, a tomato red, or a crisp green. So I suppose painting food comes naturally.

Bon appetit!

Architecture 101, Anchor Building Blocks

A favorite possession of mine is an early 20th century set of Anchor Building Blocks. It comes in a wooden box with a very richly decorated lithograph cover.

Otto and Gustav Lilienthal originated Anchor Blocks in the late 1800s. They had the idea of making building blocks that were actually stone-like, and fabricated them from quartz sand, chalk and linseed oil. The colors of red, blue and cream were meant to approximate brick, slate and limestone. Friedrich A. Richter bought the rights to the product in 1880 and sold the sets under his name by 1895. From 1880 until his death in 1910, 40,000 sets of Richter's Anchor Stone Building Sets were sold.

Here's what remains of the bottom side of the wooden lid. While the packaging evokes 16th or 17th century German decoration, the accompanying booklet is in the Art Nouveau style.

The interior pages are delightfully illustrated with dozens of construction plans, from simple to highly elaborate. Budding architects could supplement their sets, and some sets were sold with thousands of pieces!

The back of the booklet advertises another Richter product, Meteor. Aspiring graphic designers could create images and patterns with colored marbles.

Anchor Blocks were produced through World War II as "stone," but under East German production, they were downgraded to plastic. In 1979, devotees of Anchor Blocks formed the Club of Anchor Friends. In 1995, with the help of the club, Dr. Georg Plenge restored the Anchor company under the name Anker Steinbaukasten GmbH. Today, authentic Anchor Blocks are sold at the KaDeWe department store in Berlin.

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Extra-Terrestrial Hiding at Friend's House!

I regularly visit a friend who listens to an older Philips radio. Every time I've passed that radio, I've been a little disconcerted, like not being able to place a familiar face. But now I know! Those extra-terrestrials come up with the cleverest disguises!

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 Happy April Fools!

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Maxfield Parrish Reworks a Painting

The Millpond  |  photo by Robin L. Perry

Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) was an American illustrator known for his paintings of vibrant, lustrous colors, usually incorporating a beautiful blue that was named after him — Parrish blue. He worked by glazing, which means that he built up layers of oil color separated by layers of varnish. If you ever see a Maxfield Parrish painting in person, you'll be struck by its luminosity and truly jeweled tones.

International Paper Pocket Pal

If you have any involvement with printing, you also know that images are separated into four plates of color — yellow, magenta, cyan and black, and then printed in that same order.

While Parrish did not apply glazes in that color order, this is nonetheless very much the way he approached building up the colors of his paintings.

October  |  photo by Herbert P. Vose

Above is a painting discovered unfinished at the time of Maxfield Parrish's death (he was in the process of reworking it). It shows how he glazed by first using a white or neutral background and the predominant color of an element, usually blue. He would then build upon this first stage by adding additional colors and therefore depth. We can see that the foreground tree started out the same way as the blue background one, and that a non-opaque layer of magenta was added to the shadow, forming a dark, rich purple.

Parrish's method of working also shows that his primary interest was light and shadow, and in that area, he was particularly a master.

For those who are interested in glazing techniques, the definitive book on Maxfield Parrish is by Coy Ludwig, who explains in great detail Parrish's methods of working.

Maxfield Parrish  |  Coy Ludwig  |  Watson Guptill  |  1973

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Thumbnails, Sketches and Doodles

Today my topic is thumbnails, sketches and doodles — how they're different, and what purposes they serve.

As the name implies, the thumbnail is a drawing in a very small rectangle, usually 1-3 inches in measurement. Making a thumbnail is a visual way to sort out and solidify ideas or layouts that are still in a rough planning stage. The thumbnails above are by my father, who enjoyed painting winter landscapes. One can see that he was positioning trees and considering including a house in the background. In the upper thumbnail, his attention focused on the foreground, where light and shadows would define massive roots. A very simple drawing, and yet lots of ideas swirling around.

Again, a thumbnail by my father, who was obviously enjoying a cup of coffee! Here the thumbnail serves the purpose of being a reminder. It's a visual memo for painting a moon landing by first making a three-dimensional model. In this case, the thumbnail isn't about layout, it's about retaining a fleeting thought that might be developed later.

I do such thumbnails all the time, like this one on a sticky note. Stick figures are okay because the sole purpose here is to simply jog the memory. Many artists carry sketch books that they use not only for recording what they see, but also as a catalog of ideas.

This is a most remarkable series of thumbnails. I salvaged this sheet from my first employer, Wayne Dale, who was both an adept businessman and a good graphic designer. He was responsible for designing Wanamaker gift catalogs in the 1970s, and I learned a lot from him. In this series of small thumbnails, Mr. Dale planned the catalog size, cover design, colors, number of pages, and the designs for each back-to-school spread. This is thumbnails at their best!

Sketches are bigger than thumbnails, and whether they are rough or comp (comprehensive), they're more refined. When dealing with a client, one might show thumbnails (but only in an initial, more casual conversation), 5 or 6 rough sketches, and 1 or 2 comps. I divide jobs into levels of presentation or completion and bill at each stage. The sketches above were by my father, who was planning his own Japanese garden.

And here is that garden realized. You can see from how closely the photo resembles the sketch, that the sketch was much more advanced than a thumbnail.

And finally, we come to doodles. Doodles are unconscious drawings, a way of zoning out and mining the subconscious. I made these doodles on a napkin one evening while I was dining alone and waiting for my meal. I have no idea what I was thinking because I was not in a conscious state. And yet our subconscious is a tremendous repository of all our observations, and a treasure trove for new projects. In this case, through doodling, I observed that the classic diagram for a box becomes two stacked Xs and a diamond, perhaps a future logo design.

One interesting thing about doodling is that studies have shown that people who doodle during speeches, meetings or classes actually retain information better. For an article about that, go here.

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