Mummies, mummies everywhere!

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I decided to participate in Art in the City, a community event this weekend and I lent some of my work to show in the display. Unfortunately Peter, not his real name, is quite the incompetent. He asked me for student works at the beginning of a set instead of at the beginning of last March when they had accumulated a selection of their work to choose from. I left him with 3 pristine frames I had bought especially for the event telling him the fixtures were still in the boxes. This is what he came up with.

I am so offended at this display of my work. Plexiglass? Really? and what are you exhibiting it for giants? I mean the display casing itself already needs all the help it can get. Why the heck are the paintings perched all the way up there and on top off each other to boot? The frames are also all scratched up and when I told Peter, he told me that that is how he got them. I swear it took me everything not to make a scene, the Adrenalin was pumping. Anyway, I woke up under the weather and this did nothing not help to start the day. It’s times like these that I think: you know what? Maybe it’s OK that art is elitist, better than throwing pearls to the swine.

If you know me at all, I am not one to get easily knocked down. After a pretty good cartoon class with the kids covering the line of action, I got started drawing one of the Fayum mummy portraits which date between 100 BC to around 300 AC, the Imperial Roman era. The drawing took me about 30 minutes and was in preparation for my Painting and Drawing class earlier tonight.

There she is, the Egyptian female citizen in all her no veil glory. It appears that the Egyptian women of the time were valued as fully fledged citizens which was extremely rare during antiquity. My students got to see the green under painting but when the saw it with the warm flesh tone on top, they were all asking me: so the first layer was green right?
I just love those big eyes.

I particularly like the way Lindsay painted the mouth, it has a beautiful shape and conveys depth.

I helped quite a bit to shade this one. It’s hard to get rid of the hard lines in watercolor, especially at first. However with portrait you must do your best to blend the complexion just as you would blend a sky which can’t be patchy. The thing is, you can only blend so much before the paint starts to lift off the paper.

This was entirely my drawing but the artist chose really cool colors for it!

This one is feelin’ like a boss, you can tell.

When I get disrespected I think about you guys and what your support means to me. We just can’t let any of it get to us. That’s what it means to be a team player. When your team sucks, you gotta suck it up and when your team is amazing, you enjoy every moment of it!