It's sort of amazing to think about what it's like to be a new baby.  Imagine taking your first breath of air.  Feeling the wind for the first time.  Your first trip to the beach.  Learning how to use your arms and legs; being surprised to find that if you want, they can put you in motion (first lessons in physics, as one new mama I know describes it).  It stands to reason that folks like to create a little something to commemorate these teeny new people's arrival in the world.  I've had the good fortune to be asked to mark the coming of two new babies recently.  

The first was for a baby shower -- a guessing game about when the baby would come.  Each of the banners hanging in the forest-world I dreamt up has a date, with space below for the guests to write in their names.  So it's a little fun for the party, a record of who was there, and a little art to frame for the baby's wall (it was designed to go with the colors of the baby's room).

The second project is a series of three cards commissioned as thank-you notes by another new baby's parents.  Here's a photo of the first sketches, which I'll refine for the final artwork.  This baby was born just after the firefly season started this year, so we used that as the theme.  They will also be available in my on-line shop as individual cards and card sets.  They will be blank inside, so you'll be able to use them for all sorts of commemorations, or just to send a snail-mail hello to your dear friend. 

The sunlight is inconstant.  The clouds come and go.  The breeze moves the leaves of the tree outside the window.  The angle of the sun above the horizon shifts as the earth spins ever farther past high summer.  That distant fireball wanders southward, then west, as the morning turns to afternoon, and the afternoon fades into evening. Between the first sketched lines at quarter-past-nine and my morning snack at half-past ten, the shadows have already transformed the tomatoes.  The color is different, the whole scene less sharp, more mellow, more muted.  Still life is not still.  

One of the unexpected and beautiful lessons of my first few weeks learning to be a working artist is that nature is not inclined to accommodate the punch-card and the office clock; it prefers that you time your work days with the sun and the clouds, and the life-cycles of the plants.  The basil shifts color from deep green to bright-green-yellow over the course of a week of drawing. Tomatoes are perishable - nature to the rescue as you dither about which of the splendid array of shapes, colors, patterns, and sizes you've brought home from your farmers marketing to draw.  (Eating is a rather enjoyable method of editing, it seems...)  So you must, standing in the magical swirl of forces far bigger than yourself - forces that will not pause for you to draw their picture - take up your pencil and your artist's license, and represent only some small kernel of the truth of the world.  How humbling, and how freeing.

One of my first products will be a calendar called Market Season, which will share a year of my adventures at our wonderful local farmers market, plus a little about my strategies for making delicious food in that is simple, healthy, and manageable in the busyness of everyday life.  I have settled on the basic design, and am now playing with format, text, and drawing technique.  I am experimenting with loose drawings that use a combination of graphite and colored pencil.  You can see one of these little tests in the picture above right; the one below it is a sketch of the calendar cover, featuring some lovely leeks on my wooden cutting board.