PJ's Bees

In a previous post I talked about having to know how to draw to be a good artist in any medium. Learning to draw teaches us to see. A lot of good design is in the detail. And drawing helps us see and record that detail.

PJ, my son of many years!, has a birthday every year on September 3rd. It is always hard to find a little something to give him. This year about ten days before his birthday he called to tell me about the bees in his attic. He and his wife Lavona bought the house that Mike and I owned almost eight years ago. It is a pretty house with lots of space for a growing family. So PJ, his name is Peter Justin by the way, called me to let me know what was going on with the house. It seems that a woodpecker had been bothering them by pecking on the northeast corner of the house quite assiduously in the mornings. He had done several things to keep the bird away with no luck. The northeast corner of the house is the highest corner of the house being two stories up. He climbed up there to take a lock and found a nest of bees had moved in. So he crawled down and called a pest control company. The pest control people came out and found a huge hive with many honeycombs in the attic. The poor woodpecker just wanted his breakfast.

So PJ sent me several photos of the removal of the honeycombs and the queen.

I was inspired to draw him a picture of bees for his birthday. that you can see below. The picture is about 8" X 10" done in colored pencil.

PJ's Bees

the drawing

I showed the picture to my friend Rita Curry-Pittman who among other things is an applique quilter. She really liked the picture and wanted to do an applique quilt of it. So I scanned the picture and sent her a copy. Then I thought that I could do an embroidery of the same subject. So I started a perforated paper design loosely based on the original drawing. It was this embroidery I took to national seminar to work on because my classes were not actual embroidery classes. This is the finished embroidery.

PJ's Bees

the embroidery, 8" X 8",perforated paper, silk/wool threads

Then I decided to do a sampler on perforated paper with bees and honeycomb in it. I started it yesterday. This is a scan of it this morning.

PJ's Bees Sampler (in progress)

9" X 6", on painted perforated paper, silk/wool threads

In an earlier blog I also talked about artist's doing bodies of work. The perforated paper embroidery, PJ's Bees, is the fourth in my B.o.W. of perforated paper flowers. The bee sampler is part of that body of work, but is also part of a body I have of perforated paper samplers. It is very satisfying for me to have all these interconnections between my works.

Learning to draw has helped me very much is being able to do this kind of thing. I highly recommend it.