Jennifer Zalewski Studio

Well it’s been an exciting week for Little Miss Lela Mae. First of all… she experienced her first snow! At least, I’m assuming its her first snow. She came from a rural shelter in coastal South Carolina so… well… I’m assuming they never get anything substantial. Not that our first dusting was anything great and all, but… well… she went absolutely BALLISTIC. I wish I had thought to press the video button instead of just taking pics!  She did everything… zoomies, passing fly-by Gator Mouths at poor Jack, leaps in the air, snow-rolling, etc etc. Silly Girl.

And in other news…

DUM DUM DUM.

We got her Doggy DNA results!!

(Part 1- Who’s Your Daddy?)

So according to the Wisdom Panel Insights test, one side of Lela (I’m calling it her “sire” side, since it’s on that side of the chart) was half Chow Chow, half Beagle. Her dam side was 3 generations of hopelessly mixed heintz 57s. From that, they were able to pull out traces of several breeds (hold on to your hats, this is a roller coaster):

• Border Terrier (yeah, I can see it)
• Cane Corso (a mastiff???)
• Weimeraner (well, they are a BYB breed so maybe)
• BEDLINGTON TERRIER (the ones that look like lambs. Yeah. LOL!)
• SUSSEX SPANIEL (happens to be one of the rarest breeds recognized by the AKC. What the…?!?!?!).

I got a great 5-6 page DNA report, including a certificate, which was pretty swanky. All in all, I’m totally thrilled with the results. For $49, it was the most interesting thing I did all month!!

• The Chow part: Absolutely. She has that Chowy look about her. She has their straight stifles and hocks to a T. The solid purple tongue. She can be pretty aloof and is cautious with new dogs. Not a barker.
• The Beagle: When I CAN get her going, she bays like a beagle. She has the worst ADD I’ve ever seen. No focus- constantly in hunting mode. Is cheerful, flirty, loves people. Is beagle-sized.
• The trace breeds on her dam’s side: Meh, not so sure about those. I can see MAYBE some border terrier- her size, love of hunting.  I’m thinking though 3 generations of mixes–probably her Mom looked like the archtype pariah dog–which–interestingly- is what the Carolina Dog actually is (unfortunately they are not in the Wisdom Panel’s DNA database so they wouldn’t have turned up as a trace breed. Maybe because they aren’t a breed per say, but a genotype?). A feral pariah dog of the United States. Our own Dingo.

So if we have to come up with a DESIGNER DOG breed name for Lela, we might call her a “Bow Bow.”  Or, “Cheagleina Dog”. Or “Caro-Bow Bow”.

Jack, however, would still call her “A Royal Pain in the Ass.”

I hope everyone had a nice weekend!

I’m really excited… this is my third “serious” monotype and definitely my favorite so far!

“Goosed”

11 x 14

Monotype

Lela –and her new goose stuffy- were my models for this one.  Surprisingly the sketch was super easy and poured out of my pencil within an hour. And I liked it (!!). Usually I struggle for a week or so (at least) over my first drawings but this one just came out exactly the way I wanted it.

(Lela was a bit concerned that I snatched away Goose for a little close-up work. She has thirty other stuffies laying around but LORD HAVE MERCY Goose was the one she wanted. Goose and only Goose). In the pic above, you can see the drawing taped under my large plexiglass plate. The paper is hinged with blue tape just above it. And there is Lela… giving me the skunk eye, lol.

“Don’t borrow him again, ‘kay?”

First order of business was working on the background. I actually used brayers to roll on layers of a nice grass green, covering the whole drawing. Then I used a paper towel to wipe the green away from Lela and Goose’s forms and Q-tips to add some lines and texture.

I had my paper (Seth Cole… it comes in a pad in the sketchbook section of the local art store. I LOVE this stuff. It’s not as thin as “eastern” paper, but not as heavy as “western” paper like Stonehenge… a great in-between)… I had the paper hinged on the top of the plexiglass plate. Once I was done working the green ink, I swung the paper over and onto the green, then used my trusty marble rolling pin to press the ink from the plate to the paper.

Wall-ah!

Next comes Lela. I use paintbrushes this time to block in her form. It was fun… her muscular gams, knobby elbows and little feet. So different than Jack’s physique!

Really happy with how drop 2 came out. Lela still needed a bit more, but she was coming along!

Third drop was an umber (very proud… I mixed it myself!!) for the goose.

After looking for this awhile, I decided to bring the umber more into Lela’s body too. Not a lot… just a few touches. Then I decided to try to mix a black for the rest of the goose and some final touches. I HAVE a black, but I didn’t want it so harsh… so I tried to mix. LOL. I ended up with a dark greenish-black:

To be honest, I was disappointed at first but the more I studied it, the more I liked that it was more green than black. I think black-black would have been way, way too much.

Here’s a photo (sorry for the blue cast to the paper… need to scan it for better results). I decided to call it “Goosed”.  I’m thinking to enter it in an upcoming art show, if I can muster up the nerve to enter.

Final stage… clean-up. Ugh! Monotypes are sooo messy. I didn’t take any photos of that anyway so no worries, won’t bore you with that.  But how about… the messy workspace?

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays of the year. You know why?

1- Pumpkin Pie

2- Tofurkey Feast

3- More Pumpkin Pie

4- BLACK FRIDAY SHOPPING!

I was SUPER excited to find an aisle of really great dog toys at Big Lots on Black Friday. Big Lots can be a crapshoot, you know? A lot of times you only find the cruddy canvas stuff, but on Black Friday… YAY! They had some really great toys, including the “AKC” Wildlife line which I’ve always wanted to buy but didn’t want to shell out $11+ for. But $3? $5? Heck yeah! Even though Jack and Lela deserve a lot of coal  in their stockings this year,* I couldn’t resist. I also couldn’t resist waiting for Christmas to dole them out, so I decided to introduce a set of toys each weekend through Advent. Fun!   This weekend… Canadian Goose and Santa Possum!

*Victims of Jack and Lela’s Reign of Terror in the past 3 weeks:  Umbrella. Snow brush. Mortgage Bill. Recycling bin. 3 sticks of butter. My slippers. The Aloe Plant. 1 Bottle of Silverpoint Ground. The Pennysaver. 2 dog beds. Seat belt. Carpet in the back of the Scion. Sunday newspaper. Aluminum water bottle. MY SANITY.

It is a beautiful day here. I look forward to eating lots of Tofurkey, mashed potatoes and … my favorite… PUMPKIN PIE. I could eat anything pumpkin flavored. Yum. Drool. Then… napping. The best.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

Hi folks! Two pieces just added to My Etsy Store… Jack’s Dream (I posted this one on the blog a few weeks ago) and a new Graphite Drawing on Gessobord I’m calling “Ol’ Boy”. I did this a few days ago. It was supposed to be a Silverpoint, but the feel of Graphite on the roughness of the Gessbord surface was wayyyyyy too tempting. Will definitely be using more!

Jennifer Zalewski Studio- Etsy Store

“Catch of the Day”

11 x 14  Monotype

Akua Intaglio ink on Seth Cole paper

My newest monotype! I used brayers on the plexiglass for the first time  which pretty fun–led to the “roll” marks in the grass and sky.

More pics from the process:

My drawing taped under the plexiglass and hinged paper across the top. Jack is inspecting.

First colors painted on the plate, the paper flipped over onto the ink, and my marble rolling pin used to press the wet ink from plate to paper. The ghost is in the background. It came out REALLY light.

Second “run”… Pink tongue, Red toy! Sorry for the pinky tinge to the paper… bad lighting.

Next run was Jack’s brindling. Here it is painted on the plate. I used Pthalo Green and Crimson Red again to get a nice purplish-brown…

Here it is printed onto the paper.  There’s almost NO ink left on the plate!

4th run of colors…the green grass. I wasn’t happy with the way this came out at ALL. Hmmm.

Pondered what to do at this point. I tried to paint & drop another layer of green, but didn’t like that either. I decided to put the green and blue on the plate using a brayer, and print that way. I really liked the brayer (i.e. roller) marks! Will definitely utilize this technique more in future monotypes. Final:

I really miss this toy!!! I think it was called a “Squirrel Log” and we got it in the sale bin at Petsmart. It lasted a relatively long time (2 months or so) until Jack, for some reason, took a shining to ripping the plastic log into pieces and EATING them. So unfortunately, for the sake of his intestines, we had to toss it in the garbage. If anyone sees this toy around… please let me know!! I am dying to get another one (or 2, or 3)…

(Funny… I realized when making this monotype that the Squirrel Log had a striped tail… wouldn’t that make it a Raccoon Log? LOL!)

So excited!! Lela’s WISDOM PANEL INSIGHTS “doggy DNA” test arrived in the mail Friday. I know these tests *can* have laughable results but for $49 and a money-back guarantee, I was willing to take the chance. Apparently every single dog breed has its own unique DNA and by collecting a sample of spit from your mongrel’s mouth, you can send it to the lab for analysis and find out what breeds make up the mix. Wisdom Panel has 185 breeds in it’s database and seemed to be the most reputable of the brands I researched.

I decided to make a movie tonight out of the DNA collection. I have never made a YouTube movie before (with myself in it) but it was kind of fun.  Needless to say, Lela was NOT happy about “giving a sample up” and Jackie Boy kept presenting his ass to me, to be scratched. WTF Jack, you’re on camera! LOL!

Lela came to me as a German Shepherd/Lab mix. She has a black tongue and distinct look that makes me 99% certain that there is Shar Pei or Chow in there though… plus she’s only 40lbs which would make for VERY small GSD and Lab, right?  We get approached a lot about her and people have all sorts of guesses:

• Pit Bull Mix
• Akita Mix
• Chow/Pit Mix
• Shiba Inu Mix (someone once swore she was a purebred Shiba, LOL)
• Chow/Lab
• Terrier/Shar Pei/Lab/Boxer
• Carolina Dog Mix
• Carolina Dog/Jack Russell

I do have to tell one story though. It’s so funny that I had Jack’s physical therapist in stiches over it. About 8 weeks ago I was getting the dogs out of the car at a local state park, and there were 3 people kind of hanging around in the parking lot. They seemed nice and were chuckling as I hauled Jack’s ramp out and had him get out of the car via ramp. Anyway, one of the guys in the group was very excited when Lela came out. “Wow,” he said. “Those dogs are so rare, you never see them around!”

“Jack?” I asked. “He’s a retired racing ground.”

“No, the other one,” he said. “The Rhodesian Ridgeback. I used to have one. Man, you don’t SEE those dogs around here, wow!”

Now… okay. People are always guessing Lela’s breed but never… NEVER… has she been mistaken for a 90 lb., African Lion-hunting Rhodesian Ridgeback. Never. It was all I could do to keep from laughing in his face. I pretended an air of curiosity and intrigue though, asking, “Really? Rhodesian Ridgeback? You think?”

The guy was adamant. “Absolutely. She’s absolutely a Ridgeback.”

“But she has no…Ridge.” I pointed at her back.

The guy shook his head. “No no, they’re there.  Do the hairs stand up on her neck, and back, when she’s scared or mad at something–?”

“Um..Yeahhhhhh…”

“That’s the ridge!” The guy said proudly.

Lord have mercy, I was laughing for weeks at that one.

Anyway, Lela’s DNA -laden swabs (oops, I dropped one on the floor) are going back to the lab tomorrow and we should get results in about 3 weeks. I am going to be on the edge of my seat waiting for those results!! Stay tuned…

I’ve been having a lot of fun delving back into Monotypes lately. Previously, I was experimenting only with subtractive monotypes but after getting 2 great DVDs the past year (SAFER PRINTMAKING WITH AKUA WATER-BASED INKS and PAINTERLY PRINTMAKING WITH MONOTYPES) I decided to try additives. It’s been…messy… but so fun! I find I’m able to be as expressive and energetic in this technique as I’ve wanted to be for years but couldn’t achieve in other mediums (media?).

I decided to take one of my wrinkly Jack & Caterpillar lithographs from a couple weeks ago and use it for my first additive monotype. I taped it under a piece of plexiglass and hinged a piece of paper across the top.

I first decided to paint Jack’s base coat–using the taped lithograph (underneath the plexi plate) as my guide….

That hinged paper across the top? I flipped it over the wet ink and used a marble rolling pin to press the wet ink onto the paper. I do have a couple printing presses here but unfortunately their beds were too small for my plexiglass!!

The marble rolling pin is from a local restaurant supply company and only cost about $12! It’s a wonderful, cheap alternative to a press.  A tip I learned from one of the monotype DVDs… use a low table so that you can lean all your weight onto the rolling pin, giving you a better transfer. I used a coffee table that’s been storing my CDs. Worked great!

Here it is (sorry for the poor color… it gets dark soooo early now! By the time I get home, feed and walk the dogs and get started working… it’s black outside and I have wicked poor lighting in the studio. Must fix.)…

As you can see, there’s still ink left on the plate so I put another piece of paper on the plexiglass and burnish it with the pin again. This gives me one more image, much fainter, that is called a “ghost print.” Here’s the first pull and the ghost pull side by side…

Now I just start adding more colors to the plexi plate. I suppose I could have painted all the colors at once but I felt more “in control” doing a few at a time. First order of business was Jack’s brindling. Eek. Why did I get a brindle dog again, they are so hard to draw and paint LOL!!!!! And sadly, my Akua Ink set didn’t include any browns besides ochre (which I used as Jack’s base color). I’m a HORRIBLE color mixer, so this led to some anxiety. I decided to try mixing Pthalo Green with Crimson Red, in hopes of making a dark brown of some sort to use for Jack’s stripes. It worked… kind of. It was a dark brown with a purple tint, which I guess is not a bad thing.  I wasn’t trying to make an uber-detailed piece anyway.

More painting the plate, bits at a time. I use paper towels and Q-tips to add interesting textures into the ink.

Making monotypes is MESSY. Really messy!!!! This is one of the last stages (the grass).

Here’s the final pull… the monotype with the much lighter ghost image…

The final monotype!! It just needs to be signed, and then it’s ready to roll.

The model(s)… and yes, Jack soundly defeated poor Caterpillar!!! With Lela’s assistance, the poor bug is now in tatters across the house.  It’s always kind of a bummer to, you know, spend $15 on a stuffed toy that lasts, oh…. 4 days. LOL.

This month a new urban “parkway” opened up… the Onondaga Creekwalk extending from downtown, through the northside, way up to Onondaga Lake. It is VERY exciting to have this sort of thing happen here, in the center of the ‘Cuse! It’s kind of gritty here, and you never hear much good stuff about the city. All the cool people have fled into the suburbs where crime is low and (presumably) they don’t randomly have McDonalds cups, chicken bones, and dirty baby diapers thrown in their front yard. (I’m also assuming they don’t hear random gunshots occurring at 10 pm on their blocks either, sigh, I mean really WTH).  It’s rust belt, it’s past-it’s-prime, it’s an old Erie Canal city that has seen WAY better days. But it seems things are changing.  It’s so nice the city investing in such an awesome civic project like the Creekwalk! Hooray!

With the nice Indian Summer we’ve been having, the pups and I decided to leash up and go hiking after church today. Here are some pics from our morning:

It was a wonderful walk. The actual Creekwalk starts in Armory Square, but because of Jack’s muscle injury, we decided to shave a few blocks off and park near Clinton Square, which was much closer to The Inner Harbor (our destination).

The city did a great job with signage, especially the parts that branched away from the water’s edge and into downtown. Of course I’ve driven through here a million times but… walking. Nice. Got to get up-close-and-personal with the buildings. Saw a lot of people enjoying the new walk. Stopped and had a great discussion with an elderly woman about The NiMo Man. Stopped to talk to lots of other Dog People. It was so nice!

At one point I was trying to get the dogs to “SIT” and “STAY” so I could take a picture, but they were giving me hell. A couple came along and offered to take a photo of us all together. Awwww. I am the only one who looks happy , oh well (LOL, wait until they get their “photo with Santa” next month, I can’t wait to see Lela’s expression of horror rofl).

More photos from our walk. If you’re in the ‘Cuse I highly recommend you explore the Creekwalk! It’s clean, beautiful, and very dog-friendly. I noticed there is a trailhead at Wallace Street, with an old (non-functioning) fire-station that has about 10 parking spots. You can also start at Armory Square, which apparently has a new statue commemorating the Creekwalk (“Walter the ‘Lock’ -Ness Monster”). The walk goes all the way to Onondaga Lake, and apparently is going to be extended south to Kirk Park and then to Nedrow. YAY!!!

Map of the Creekwalk.