New project for 2012

So much good came of this year-long project. A year ago I could barely stutter the words, "I'm an artist." Today, I own that title comfortably. I completed a years worth of photographs, as well as two large mosaic commissions, and started on a third. So there's no way I'm giving up this productive daily art habit! 

Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. I invite you to join me on my newest project, a year of sketching with some photography and mosaics to keep things lively.  http://thesketchbookconcern.wordpress.com/

365: The End

 

My husband built this fort with the kids while I worked last weekend. Pretty nifty use of the excess bamboo in our yard.

And with that, we've reached the anniversary of this project and so we're done. Or are we...? Nah, I can't stop! Too much good has come of this. Here's a sneak peek of my 2012 project, due to start in another week or so.

364: Blight

This house has been on my list of ideas for this project for a long time. I read an article about it in the local paper not too long before I started the project, and I was not entirely surprised to learn that this was once a house of some import.

 

This Historic Richmond blog post features an image of the building before 1950. An even earlier image can be found in this article from Greater Jackson Ward News. Beautiful, no?

For those of you not familiar with the area, this house is located in Jackson Ward, an important African-American neighborhood during the first part of the 20th century, known as the "Harlem of the South." This particular house is located at an entry point into the neighborhood.

 

This is the house next door. Like the house featured in this earlier post, it's hard to believe the surrounding neighborhood is filled with beautiful, well-kept homes.

363: Draft

362: Another afternoon at the playground

361: Lessons

This started as an attempt to capture the lighted window in the early morning near-darkness and ended with tricking myself into switching to fully manual mode, something that I have avoided like the devil even as I push myself harder at learning the technical side of shooting with an SLR. I didn't realize I had flipped past Aperture into Manual, but it was a happy accident. Had I left the camera in Programmed Auto or even Aperture or Shutter mode, this attempt would have ended in frustration that the vision in my head was impossible to achieve. 

Later, I took the kids roller skating for the first time. They amazed me with how well they did, though my son, first-born perfectionist that he is, was frustrated at his lack of expertise. As a fellow perfectionist, I wish I had thought to research camera settings for photographing fast skaters in a dark skating rink ahead of time. At least I was able to capture a few images of this wonderfully outrageous arcade game. 

360: Star light