Switch-o Change-o

It's time for a change. Blogger has been great for the years that I've been here, but lately I've been wanting to have a little more control over how my work is displayed.

Over the winter I started looking into Wordpress, and have felt pretty excited about the options it offers. I love the ability to completely customize the display of the blog, and designing my new one gave me the chance to stretch my HTML coding muscles in preparation for an upcoming web-design project.

I’ll still keep this blog up, especially so that I can keep up with the news of my lovely friends, but will no longer be posting anything new here. Thanks so much to everyone who has been following my work over here - I hope you enjoy the new look! You can check out my new space over at www.ashleybenham.com/blog.

Doodle Birds

Set of weird little birds doodled today - started with a chicken, and before I knew it I had a flock!

Maple Syruping

*edited to include a new and improved scan*
Recent personal piece to accompany an episode of the "News from Lake Wobegon" by Garrison Keillor. This was from the episode on March 28, 2009, in which the most beautiful girl at the high school receives too much male attention after deciding to go to prom alone.

Give it a listen sometime on iTunes. Mr. Keillor is pretty much a radio genius, and every week he shares funny or thoughtful or bizarre stories about a fictional town whose inhabitants he knows so intimately that their tales have great continuity over many years. What's probably most amazing is that his stories are, for the most part, spontaneously generated.

Hoot!

A little quick one to be a partner for the moth piece I did a little while back (lower down on this blog). For some reason I really like this - working on it was very satisfying, and I felt like I wanted to create an entire story book just like this.


Lost in the Woods II

Self-Portrait Sunday

What's a girl to do to jazz up a regular old self-portrait? Get her dad's old aviator glasses, that's what.



Getting somewhere with the looseness now. Used the limited palette that I discovered in the Sargent copy (6 colors instead of my regular twenty-something. It's really refreshing). The experiments will continue.

Time for an update! I've been running around like mad over the past month, traveling between New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and my little central valley home-town. It's all been worth it, and the visit to New York was particularly fantastic! I got to rediscover how wonderful it is to wander through The Met, and got to discover for the first time the amazingness that is The Strand bookstore; I returned to California with a suitcase that was five large books heavier than it was on the way to NY.

Now that I'm back home and (hopefully) settled in for a little while, I can finally get back to work. Lately I've been working on getting back on the "Piece a day" wagon. In the fall I managed to get into a groove for a few weeks of doing one personal piece a day, however, I fell out of it at some point while being my dog's hospice nurse. It's taken me a while to get back into doing these personal experiments, but now is the time to start again. Here are a few quick sketches/doodles/paintings.


This was a very quick sketch. Lately I've loved drawing with blue ballpoint pen. The feeling that a generic blue Bic gives while sliding onto the page is surprisingly fantastic! I used it for the under-drawing in this little painting, and it bled out into an interesting turquoise. It's something that I'll definitely try again!


I've also been trying to loosen up a little bit with the watercolors, and this painting was part of that effort. Somewhere in the middle of it everything tightened down again, but still, it's a start.


Lastly, I've been taking a good look at how I use my paints in general. At the suggestion of a friend, I've decided to do some master studies to see how other artists used watercolor. Somehow I managed to get through art school doing many master studies of oil paintings, but never a watercolor. This is a study of Sargent's "Reclining Figure". The colors are a touch different from those of the original, but they match the colors and value of the print I was working from, so... mission accomplished, I suppose. Overall, I'm pleased with it, and as with every master study I've done, I learned a lot. There will be more to come soon!

One fast, one slow.

Yesterday I finished up work on a new personal piece. I've been wanting to do something illustrative for the book Little Women ever since I first read it. Those who know me well know that this is my absolute favorite book - I love its industrious, home-grown feeling, and I somehow find pieces of myself tucked into each of the characters of the four sisters. The events chronicled in this wonderful book seem modern and pertinent, despite having taken place in the 1860's, and as a former East Coast resident myself, reading it brings me home.

Each of the characters is so dear to me, and so I'm starting out on a series of four paintings - one for each of the girls. In these paintings I want to capture more of a "storybook" feeling, and to really focus on showing a figure in an environment. This first one is Jo, hard at work in her "scribbling suit."



And the sketch:



Next March girl coming soon; maybe Amy?

Also, a few days ago I decided to try my hand at doing a full portrait in one hour (or so). It was a challenge, and something to gear up my painting hand for work on the above piece. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the doctor who thankfully had too few patients, was my subject, primarily on account of his fantastic mustache and lofty attitude in the photo reference I had. Thank you for Mr. Holmes, Mr. Doyle.