There Be Dragons

Dragons are my favorite subject to paint or draw but I don't have a whole lot of them.

I take my time on my dragons and I have a hard time creating them.

This is from a sketch pad of practicing my dragons.  The lessons are from a book about dragonart

written by an artist known as neonDragon.  Very cool dragons, but got a strong Magna look to it.

But it did help me in figuring out the horns, the book showed how the skull  of a typical dragon looks like and how the horns set in.  That was one of my problems, making the horns realistic enough.  The next part was the wings and the limbs.  

Smokee the Dragon

This piece was done way before I even found that dragon art book.  The horns are a bit weak for me personally but many people I showed to on Kaboodle loved it and I decided to make it into a card

since I can't sell the original print, the edges of the Bristol drawing paper got really torn up but the picture itself stayed intact.  I also made a photo print and that came out well.  The above link takes you to the link for the card, I think it makes a great Gothic Birthday card.

This was originally a class assignment for drawing three at the community college I was going to.

The drawing teacher was a real cool guy but he said not to use the charcoal reversal drawing to do dragons.

He hated dragons, thought it was overdone.

Well I could not help but do a dragon in charcoal reversal, just my dragon was more subtle.

I got an A on it and he really REALLY liked how I did it.

I had one student how I got away with it.

I think I understood what he was tired of

which was the commercial designs of the dragons you see on posters and t shirts.

I grew up with my dad's Dragonriders of Pern books all around the house.

The dragons are a bit different from what is seen on t shirts, especially the newest book jacket artwork.

After working though that Dragon Art book I got a very good painting done of a dragon.

I don't see any Dragons

I really love how the wings turned out.  Some people had trouble seeing the dragon at first.  Yeah, the guy is a traveler and he was walking though a valley that is full of dragons.  He doesn't see any, because they are green and blend in with the hills.

There is a bit of a story to this work.  The guy is something of a hedge wizard, knows some small magics but can't always get the results he wanted, think of a more incompetent wizard like Schmendrick from the Last Unicorn.  He does more slight of hand.  The thing is though he has the potential for greater magic.

The dragon he stumbles on is a mage dragon, he can do magic.  

I don't remember too many stories of dragons with magic, maybe I'm not reading the right stuff.

Oh I remember Puff the magic Dragon, children's fantasy, and there is the PBS series Dragon Tales, but that's more recent.  I grew up watching the 80's Dragonslayer, the beast flew and had fire but no magic.

Pete's Dragon turned invisible.

A dragon series I read only one book of was of a race of dragon's that can turn into humans and stay in that disguise and live in the modern world.

Let's not forget Draco though, from Dragonheart, that is my inspiration for the above painting.

My husband has got a cool Magna show uh Lodos War or something like that.  Kind of like D&D with it's characters, got the hero, mage, a religious healer, a thief, a pretty and sassy elf girl and a gungh ho dwarf.  But it has a story line that is more complex and the character's are not flat..best piece of work I wish American's should take a lesson from.  Hate movies with weak story lines, Reign of Fire comes to mind.  Looked like a cool dragon movie but I fell asleep through it!

I want to see a dragon that is a more complex creature, not just a beast this fierce hunting intelligence.  Draco was a good start, but I want more, like a complex society of dragons.

OHHHH I forgot about this book series by Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton

uh the Elvenbane books, it has a society of  mage dragons.

Man where has my mind been!

Still, I haven't seen too much after that.

Or else I have been so busy raising my little 'dragonlings' that I have not kept up with the books coming out.

Example and Co-learning

One of the great benefits of Home Schooling is being flexible in how to approach the learning.  I love to read others way of learning and pick up on neat projects.  One of my favorites now is the lapbook, you can buy them as kits but we save money by making our own and we get all our learning materials from the library.  I had to get my daughter's attention to them.  Just talking about it was a start but she didn't go into doing it on her own.

She was sitting watching Avatar the last airbender (series) on our computer in our bedroom.  I brought in on the bed all our cooking books from the library and one of the file folders to use as a lap book and started making pockets.  She got interested in what I was doing and watched.  I made pockets for the lap books to put our recipe cards in, they were labeled snacks, meals, cookies and cakes.  I wrote in pencil but I had her trace it in ink.  Spelling and writing is her weak point and this helps her to focus.  And I started cutting out pictures from a catalog that had to do with cooking, she started pointing out other pictures she wanted for the lap book and I'd cut them out for her.  It sounds like I am doing a lot for a nine year old but really when she watches and observes for a while what someone else is doing then she will do it on her own.  Some people can just get the picture of what do do by spoken directions,  Ariel has to watch for awhile, I was the same way but I was a lot more shy about doing stuff on my own (except for art) I had to watch a great deal how someone does it and once I see how it is done then I can do it.

She is really into cooking now so that is our focus, that cooking lap book until she switches to a new topic which is why I love the lap book idea, you save it and can add more to the subject later on, like we are going to do one on pioneers and we read Sarah Plain and Tall, watched the movie, made corn fritters, she didn't like those very well  because she thought they would be like the ones she had at a Chinese restaurant.

On some of our recipe cards I wrote out some were so simple I didn't need to write how to make it, instead I drew a picture,  I had her color it but then she started doing her own pictures on the ones I had written directions on, she found space to scratch in a doodle.  She has always been a frustrated artist, I am an artist and she keeps comparing her work to mine, I kept telling her that I did not always paint like I do now and I had to show her works I kept when I was a teen and one collection I did when I was very young that I could never throw out.  She didn't start getting the idea till I showed her my very young works and compared it to the other works, and at that point I also told her don't compare yourself to someone else, compare your own works, see your own progression.  Be INSPIRED by others like for me it's Monet, Da Vinci and the modern day gifted artist Akiana  I paint the way I paint.  Each artist has their own way of painting.

We will probably do a lap book on artists as well.  I'm waiting for her cue, when she has the interest, I bring out the supplies for the lap books.  She has trouble organizing things on her own, at least when it comes to projects and writing, she can organize objects, but the organization of information and ideas are hard, especially for someone who's spelling is not there yet.  I am planning on spelling lapbooks starting with easy ones for her to work with our five year old who is picking up on short words and already knows her letters and sounds.  Having Ariel teach what she does know will help her in cementing her own knowledge and we can build on that.  I am surprised to find out she likes crosswords now.  She didn't before a few years ago, but now she does so that's another opportunity to work on writing words without being mundane repetition.
Constantly changing and growing, my mom called me up and said Ariel road her bike to the local grocery store to get chips, she's staying over at my parents and Ariel wanted her homemade guacamole but there were no chips, she said she would go to the store for them.  She did,  she got help across the busy main street, instructed what to do she was able to do it all by herself, first time she did that.  Yeah thinking about that scared me but she is nine and she does need to be given the chance to do that once in awhile.
It's a part of her learning too, doing things on her own.

Spooky Stories

Man, just got off netflix watching Animal Planet's Haunted, about animals reacting to haunted places.  A gal on Etsy is taking up people's haunted encounters on her blog.

I work at a library that is supposed to be haunted.  Last year our new director wanted to do an investigation because some strange things were going on, but it's only when there are few people around.

For starters this is in Independence Kansas, and there are a lot of haunted places in this town.  We have the William Inge home (he was a playwright) about a block and a half away from the library.  That place is really haunted but it seems to pick on some people while others are left alone.  It is a place where playwrights who come for the William Inge festival come to stay.  Some have seen the lady in the black dress, which is Inge's Mother, In the play The Dark at the top of the Stairs it strongly hints at something that went wrong in the family and people call it Inge's most autobiographical work.

The original building of the library was built by money from Andrew Carnagie, the man who was a steel magnant and wanted to build libraries.  We had a large new and more modern wing added and renovated sections of the old library.  Sections of this library are old and there is an old staircase that goes up to the third floor of the library that is the Children's section,  when it was renovated a wall was built up where it was a large opened doorway and two fire exits are up there but because of the changes no one goes up there.  I used to go up those stairs to put books up and hated it, the stairs are super creaky but something about those stairs gave me the willies.

We acquired a library cat one winter, she was wedged through the front doors somehow and was found in the entryway one morning.  I don't know, maybe someone read the book Dewey the library cat and got the idea of shoving her in.

This cat had reacted a couple of times to something that wasn't there, and it was when the library director was alone in the library.  She has also seen a man in a white suit walk towards the back steps on the second floor and we were just closed, she told someone a man was coming down those stairs, but he was never seen.
Once our library acquisitions officer thought she saw our director walking but realized she was NOT wearing the same outfit she just saw her in earlier.  This was on a Monday and we were closed but me her and the director were working there to catch up on inter library loans.

We did have the Joplin Paranormal Researchers come in one night and some of us (just us women workers actually) planned to stay up and watch horror movies at the directors house while we wait for the results,  we watched the Exorcist, the UNcut version.  She had more but that was the only thing we watched.

When we got the call it was pretty late, they told us it's the ghost of William Inge
NOW I was a bit skeptic on that.  Why is he here if it is him?  He committed suicide in his garage, running his car in CALIFORNIA.
We do have all his books and plays kept here.  He probably came to this library a lot, but the JPR people got a picture of an orb (the only one took after they asked permission to take a pic of him) at the hand railing at those back steps that go from the second floor to the ground floor. That was where the apperation was seen.  According to my husband, who has done work at the Inge festival in town,  Inge often wore a white suit.  He was also a man that didn't seek out people often.

This month they are giving a presentation about their research here about our library ghost.
The thing I want to know is did they do research about the area where the new library is built on, there was an old house there, I remember a NO SMOKING sign in the front door.  Usually means an older person on oxygen lives there.  It was torn down to make room for our big new addition.

The researches also said there was a residual haunted, probably of someone who used to work in the Children's section, again that would be something to read into.  This spirit did not talk to anybody or stop from walking according to the one gal that was following it.  It's basically a memory being played back over and over and not something to communicate with.

Our director is convinced it's a nice ghost because one day they lost this super tiny pin screw that goes into a glassed in message board in our entry way.  They tried looking for it every where in the entry way and just out of it within the library.  The next day the pin was right there in front of the doors in the library.  Our director found it.

There are a lot of spooky places in Independence, a local did a book on it and we have two copies at the library and it's called Ghosts of Southeast Kansas.

I used to work as a janitor for awhile and I didn't experience anything being there that early, though I still did not want to go up those old stairs.  When I went back to just being a page and started coming in on Monday when we were closed to work on library loans and put more books up that's when it felt more creepy.  I never saw anything though I swear I thought I heard something and it wasn't the cat and it wasn't the pidgeons that roost near the windows, it was like something was there but wasn't, those who are skeptics would say I was just spooked by my own imaginations, others who have experienced things know what I am talking about.  I drove by the Inge house and realized it wasn't that far of a walk from the library to there so I thought Inge might have come here a bit.

I love to watch shows about people who end up buying a home and it's haunted, I noticed some trends in these stories

1.  It's a great deal, great price,  find out WHY before buying if it has a history of a murder, hauntings, it was a freakin MORGUE please just PASS!

2. Owners want to sell right away at any price  again same thing as above, ask WHY if they decline or seem nervous just pass, it could be that the foundation is rotted but even if you are a professional house flipper you can't fix a haunted house.

3  If you have a young child 'chatting' to someone in the corner and you don't see anything and you have a child that does NOT normally do this, time to check the next house.

4  You might want to pass on anything that has weird stains that will NOT go away

5  If you happen to have an animal with you and they refuse to go in, listen to it, or if they do go in then start chasing something not there, get out.

6  if you happen to be blessed with that sensitivity that something is wrong or 'heavy' about the place, trust it, ditto with children or teens that sense something wrong.

7 oh yeah if you hear a rumor the place's basement was used for satanic rites, don't laugh it off, stay away from the place.

Soooo anyone with spooky encounters they have had or had someone else tell them?  Share them here.